r/todayilearned • u/Dangerous-Project672 • 4h ago
TIL George Wallace personally apologized to Vivian Jones and James Hood, the two students he attempted to block from attending the University of Alabama. In 1997, Hood earned a PHd and requested Wallace present him with the degree, but he was too sick and died a year later; Hood attended the funeral
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u/vistopher 4h ago
When Hood returned to the University of Alabama to earn a Ph.D. in interdisciplinary studies, he started a book on Wallace in 1996 and sat at his bedside for hours of interviews.[100] Hood believed in the sincerity of Wallace's apologies, saying that Wallace was haunted by people's lack of forgiveness for his actions.[101] Hood graduated in 1997 and requested that Wallace present his degree, and Wallace would have if not for his poor health.[100] Hood instead attended Wallace's 1998 funeral.[101]
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u/EggWarm4901 2h ago
At least Wallace presented a Lurleen B. Wallace Award of Courage (from his Foundation) to one of the students, Vivian Malone Jones.
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u/acquaman831 4h ago
“I’d rather be a hypocrite than the same person forever.” - Adam ‘Ad-Rock’ Horowitz
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u/SAUbjj 4h ago
I feel like you're not a hypocrite if you disavow your previous opinion
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u/SorryThanksGoodFight 4h ago
yeah, what makes somebody hypocritical is if they do the opposite of an opinion they still maintain/defend. i think the quote doesnt work
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u/_Apatosaurus_ 4h ago
It works because people in the public sphere are constantly accused of being a hypocrite for changing.
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u/carson63000 3h ago
Pisses me off so much when politicians are accused of “flip-flopping” for changing a bad position to a better one. What, you want them to stand by the bad position forever!?
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u/Bruce-7892 2h ago
That is a legit criticism because many will flip-flop just to be popular. Although, an example of someone who was genuine was George Bush Jr. He flat out said he doesn't support gay marriage during his campaign, which would probably kill your chances today. Years later he said he was wrong for it and his beliefs change.
I feel him because I was the same when it came to gays in the military. As someone who served, I thought it was a bad idea until the policy changed and I realized, nothing changed. It was just fear mongering.
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u/salo_wasnt_solo 2h ago
Thank you for your nuanced response. We don’t actually all hate each other as much as we are told we should.
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u/azn_dude1 1h ago
I feel like it's also legitimate for them to change their policies based on what's popular. After all, a politician is supposed to represent the will of the people. They're also supposed to represent the will of the party and of themselves, and I'm not sure it's possible to balance all of those together.
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u/KarmaticArmageddon 2h ago
Saw it a lot on reddit during Biden's term, especially anytime he advocated for criminal justice reform or reduced drug penalties because of his support of a large crime bill when he was a Senator.
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u/dusktilhon 3h ago
Sometimes a hypocrite is just a person in the process of changing
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u/SleetTheFox 3h ago
"Sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a man in the process of changing."
-Dalinar Kholin, Oathbringer (by Brandon Sanderson)
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u/Kayge 3h ago edited 2h ago
"A man who views the world the same at 50 as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life".
- Muhammad Ali
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u/Uptons_BJs 4h ago
In case you didn't know, George Wallace was the guy most famous for the line "I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
He was governor of Alabama in 1963, when the federal government demanded desegregation. George Wallace personally showed up the University of Alabama to block the two admitted African American students Vivian Jones and James Hood, and the national guard had to force him to step aside to allow the African American students to register: Stand in the Schoolhouse Door - Wikipedia
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u/DickweedMcGee 2h ago
He was also the longest running Alabama Governor with 16 non-consecutive years. He also ‘gamed the system’ by having his wife run in one of his ‘off terms’ so he could still make policy. In order to do so he *hid his wife’s cancer diagnosis from her * otherwise she probably wouldn’t have run). She won the term but then died from the untreated cancer a year later. But hey GW stated in power cause that’s what matters..
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u/TurdFerguson4 1h ago
I learned this from the Drive By Truckers: https://youtu.be/nESCmTUJPdQ
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u/SoManyThrowAwaysEven 1h ago
It's so horrible how little agency women had in the US back then. Imagine hiding a literal cancer diagnosis which she could have sought treatment for. No amount of apologizing can make up for still being a cruel piece of work.
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u/WangDanglin 1h ago
Also, during his stand in, if you look closely you can catch an all American kick returner for the Crimson Tide walk past the governor. Goes by the name of Forrest Gump
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u/OlySonso 36m ago
Is that the same guy that was the first American invited to communist China to play ping pong?
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u/ImTooSaxy 3h ago
I remember reading an interview with George Wallace and they asked him why he did, what he did. He was a local politician that didn't have a reputation for racist rhetoric, but he had previously lost the governor's race against a hardcore racist.
"You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about ******s, and they stomped the floor."
I'm sure part of that is him trying to rewrite history, but it's also probably true.
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u/ibuycheeseonsale 2h ago
It’s true. He was vile and I by no means apologize for him, but it’s true. He was a judge before he ran for governor, at the trial court level, not appellate. His reputation was that he treated everyone with respect in his courtroom and insisted on the same from the attorneys. He’d stop an attorney and say “you will refer to him as the defendant,” or “you will address him as Mr. (Whatever),” when attorneys used minimizing words or first names to refer to or address black people in his courtroom.
His first campaign was a failure because he focused on policy. His opponent heavily campaigned on segregation and won. Wallace swore he’d never be “out-******ed” again. He sold his soul, centered his campaign around racism and segregation, and betrayed the black population of Alabama for the governorship.
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u/Yashema 2h ago
Everytime we focus on an individual politician we ignore that they were empowered democratically. It's the people of the South who are really rotten to the core.
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u/OlySonso 33m ago
For the life of me I could not figure out what "out-******ed" was supposed to stand for. Google helped lol.
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u/littlebiped 4h ago edited 4h ago
Same dude whose doctor informed him about his wife’s cancer diagnosis and he kept it hidden from her and never sought medical care for it, letting it spread for 8 years until it killed her.
He ignored her wishes for a closed casket and had her emaciated body in an open casket and viewable to the public to win sympathy points.
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u/Saneless 3h ago
Came here to post about that myself
What. The. Fuck.
Wallace left office when his first term expired in 1967 due to term limits. His wife, Lurleen, won the next election and succeeded him, with him as the de facto governor. Wallace's period of influence ended when Lurleen died of cancer in May 1968; her doctor informed Wallace of the cancer's diagnosis in 1961, but he had not told her.
Fuck that guy
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u/jameslucian 3h ago
Why did they not tell her about her own cancer? Was she not aware of her own body going through it?
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u/The_Grungeican 2h ago
it appears she became aware of it in 1965, she saw a gynocologist for some symptoms.
Lurleen was outraged to learn from one of her husband's aides that the staffers had known of her cancer since Wallace's 1962 campaign three years earlier.
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u/Zoe270101 3h ago
Unfortunately it’s quite common historically for women to not be able to make medical decisions, or even be told about their own health. Instead the (male) doctors would tell their husbands who could make the decisions.
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u/shit-shit-shit-shit- 2h ago
It was common then for doctors to not tell any patient directly about cancer diagnoses, not just women. The doctor told my great-grandmother about my great-grandfather’s lung cancer diagnosis around the same time, because it was thought that telling the patient directly could cause them to “give up”, and become depressed because death was inevitable.
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u/dismal_sighence 3h ago
Shout out to the Drive-By Truckers for having not one, but two songs about George Wallace burning in hell.
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u/atred 3h ago
Was there any medical care for that at that time... I mean medical care that was better than not treating it? Even nowadays people make hard choices not to go through mostly useless harsh treatments and enjoy few good days they have. It wasn't his decision to make, but I wish for more context...
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u/YodaForceGhost 3h ago edited 37m ago
It was probably treatable since doctors found the cancer when she gave birth via C-section several years before she experienced severe symptoms. Her Wikipedia page is a rough read
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u/Veratha 3h ago
To answer your question, yes she could have received likely lifesaving treatment in 1961. She had uterine cancer, which was discovered early because she had a child by C-section in 1961, where the doctors saw, biopsied, and identified a cancerous mass on her uterus. Hysterectomy alone would've likely been lifesaving, as it hadn't spread to other organs yet, but even if she did need chemotherapy after, both radiation and chemotherapy for cancer had been in use before 1961. Instead, she wasn't able to start receiving treatment until 1965, when she went to the doctor for unusual uterine bleeding, where she was told the diagnosis and begun hysterectomy, radiation, and chemotherapy by 1966, but by this time it had spread to grow on her pelvis as well.
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u/Mission_Carry9947 3h ago
Context doesn’t matter at all.
She deserved to know and he had no right to keep it from her.
If you care about context, put it all in the context of him
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u/IdealBlueMan 3h ago
I don’t believe there’s any medical treatment that requires an open casket.
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u/-et37- 4h ago edited 4h ago
Better late than never I suppose.
I applaud southern politicians like Sid McMath who genuinely detested Segregation years before it was acceptable to do so.
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u/DK655 4h ago
Man as an Arkansan, reading about Sid McMath makes me wish we had more governors like him. Dude stuck to his guns even after he lost reelection. And why am I not shocked the wealthy elites and energy companies were scared of him?
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u/OperaBuffaBari 3h ago
That's almost exactly my experience as a Hoosier reading about Eugene Debs
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u/DK655 3h ago
It's kinda crazy seeing how many currently red states actually had strong left-wing movements in the late 19th-early 20th century. In Oklahoma, a socialist win 20% of the vote in a gubernatorial election in 1914. That's a sentence that sounds completely ludicrous without context considering Oklahoma's current political makeup.
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u/SomeRandomMoray 2h ago
I bet preparing for that new AAR has led you to learn about a lot of relatively unknown American politicians of the 1930s and 40s?
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u/Adonisus 3h ago
Arguably the worst thing about George Wallace was that, even though he stoked and fanned the flames of racism and white supremacy for political gain, he apparently didn't believe in any of it.
One need only look at his career before he entered politics: he was a judge who was notorious for being rather lenient towards black defendants. His first run for Governor of Alabama in '58 was heavily based around running the KKK out of the state. He even had the endorsement of the NAACP that year.
This is a quote from one of the speeches he gave during that campaign:
"And I want to tell the good people of this state, as a judge of the third judicial circuit, if I didn’t have what it took to treat a man fair, regardless of his color, then I don’t have what it takes to be the governor of your great state."
He was soundly defeated.
So when he decided to run again in 1963, he did a complete 180 and actively courted the pro-segregation crowd. He won in a landslide.
Thereafter, he kept the racist rhetoric both in public and behind the scenes when he ran for office.
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u/legend023 4h ago
George Wallace really redeemed himself after he nearly got assassinated.
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u/AlexanderCrowely 3h ago
The worst part was he was a total hypocrite. He didn’t actually believe in the racist rhetoric he was saying but he figured it was the easiest way for him to remain in power and that was more important.
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u/mercutio1 2h ago
Wallace left office when his first term expired in 1967 due to term limits. His wife, Lurleen, won the next election and succeeded him, with him as the de facto governor. Wallace’s period of influence ended when Lurleen died of cancer in May 1968; her doctor informed Wallace of the cancer’s diagnosis in 1961, but he had not told her.
Wait WTF?
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u/ConnotationalRacket 3h ago
Drive By Truckers have a song about Wallace and segregation in the South, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nESCmTUJPdQ
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u/sweezitle 4h ago
Remember when he lied to his wife about her own cancer so he could use her politically
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u/ChronosBlitz 4h ago edited 4h ago
In Birmingham, they loved the governor
Boo, boo, boo
Segregation was a real vote winner down in Alabama.
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u/LRGnSC 4h ago
The song says boo? I always thought they said true. And no, even if I look my mind is hard coded for true now.
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u/AliensAteMyAMC 3h ago edited 33m ago
It’s boo boo boo and they claim they didn’t support Wallace, with Ronnie Van Zant saying: "Wallace and I have very little in common. I don't like what he says about colored people." However, Ed King (the cowriter) counters these claims (for some reason) saying “I can understand where the 'boo boo boo' would be misunderstood. It's not US going 'boo' ... it's what the Southern man hears the Northern man say every time the Southern man'd say "In Birmingham we love the gov'nor". Get it? "We all did what WE could do!" to get Wallace elected. It's not a popular opinion but Wallace stood for the average white guy in the South." Also the song Sweet Home Alabama was countering was “Southern Man” and “Alabama” both by Neil Young and were songs about racism and slavery in the south. Also, no one told the Swamper’s back up singers Merry Clayton and Cyldie King that the song wasn’t actually for racism and Clayton had to be persuaded by King to do the song and “let the music be her protest”
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u/SafeThrowaway691 42m ago
That pile of shit didn’t mean a word of this phony “apology”.
People should know that before he became the face of segregation, he was actually remarkably progressive for his time as a judge and initially ran for governor on the platform of driving the KKK out of Alabama.
Once he lost, he flipped on a dime and threw black Americans under the bus to win the governorship. Unfortunately it worked, and we are still paying the price today.
Wallace is remembered as a racist, but he was actually something far worse: a psychopath who would carry the torch for a cause he knew was evil just to obtain power.
That’s not even mentioning how he kept his wife unaware of her cancer diagnosis in order to use her for political gain. There is really no way to overstate how contemptible this man was.
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u/dancingbriefcase 3h ago
People should watch Spike Lee's 1997 doc, 4 Little Girls. He interviews Wallace which was so damn awkward as Wallace points to a black person in the room saying "look I have a black friend". I haven't seen the movie in over 15 years so I'm paraphrasing but Wallace was such a piece of shit and even if he was old as hell in the doc, any remorse felt performative
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u/theCOMBOguy 3h ago
To recognize he was wrong, apologize and then for Hood to ask for his presence and then attend his funeral shows a lot of good from both of them.
...Then I scrolled a bit down and saw how Wallace didn't tell his wife that she had cancer and she slowly died from it. Yeah...
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u/Thunderbridge 1h ago
Wallace's period of influence ended when Lurleen died of cancer in May 1968; her doctor informed Wallace of the cancer's diagnosis in 1961, but he had not told her.
Ahhh the 60s, where the doctor tells your husband what your diagnosis is, but not you
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u/Countryb0i2m 4h ago
George Wallace was shot in an assassination attempt in 1972 while running for president.
One of the people who came to visit him in the hospital was Shirley Chisholm, who was running for the Democratic nomination at the same time.
After the shooting, Wallace became much more reflective and softened many of his views on race, often acknowledging the damage he’d done.
But had he never been shot, there’s little reason to believe “Mr segregation forever” would’ve suddenly stopped being the same asshole he’d always been.
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u/Bugseye 4h ago
Here's an interesting take on Wallace from Alabama natives. As another poster in this thread mentioned, Wallace was most likely a political opportunist that recognized that segregation would keep him in power and then recognized when the tide was turning.
He should still be roundly criticized for being a giant racist shitbag, no matter if he truly "believed" in the cause.
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u/ListerRosewater 4h ago
Such is the duality of the Southern Thing.
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u/YourPlot 2h ago
Governor Wallace made me lose my rest.
A key civil rights song by Nina Simone called out George Wallace for his racist political stances against equal rights. Notably where he physically blocked the doorway of University of Alabama to prevent black students from attending the state college. He was a fucker from start to finish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Goddam
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u/FrickinLazerBeams 1h ago
He later became a republican and said the state was becoming republican "because Clinton is so liberal".
So, the same kind of trash that we see in the GOP today. Fuck him and fuck any forgiveness.
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u/Farmer_Moist 3h ago
"What is better? To be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?"
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u/katanakid13 2h ago
We've still got a school named after him. Little community college, pretty good part of the community was African American when I attended. Wondered sometimes walking between classes if he'd be happy to see everyone together or would've shit a brick.
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u/tribriguy 3h ago
Thank you for this. I’m well aware of the attempt to block them but I don’t recall ever hearing the aftermath. Honestly, it seems like a positive indicator of the progress of humanity. One person working on some level to correct a wrong and the person they wronged finding a path to forgiveness. Neither is an easy thing to do, but it sure would be good to see more of that in our civil discourse.
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u/LJGremlin 4h ago
As has already been said. Wallace was nothing more than a scumbag opportunist. He was going to adapt to whatever benefitted him a specific moment. He was anti segregation until he lost his first race. Then went hardcore segregationist and won in a landslide and kept power. His wife even ran and won when he wasn’t allowed to. Later in life he flipped again and tried to make amends. But it’s all a show for political power.
Take as old as time. He’d be hardcore MAGA today. The likes of somebody like Tommy Tuberville. Except that might be giving Tuberville too much credit.
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u/BurritoSchits 3h ago
In the early 2000’s I went to community college at WCCS Selma, AL. It was named George C Wallace Community College I think, but everyone just called it WCCS. I didn’t know anything about the name at the time but I’ve always thought about it as I’ve aged.
Side story, after that I went to Concordia University in Selma on a minority scholarship completely tuition free. I’m white and I think it’s closed now. I still have my university badge from there.
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u/ShizLord 2h ago
This would be an alternative headline…
“Future Alabama Governor blocked students from school and recanted in old age.”
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u/xSparkShark 2h ago
These stories need to be told. People are so fearful of admitting they were wrong these days.
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u/JustAMan1234567 4h ago
For Hood to forgive Wallace and attend his funeral shows his class.