George Wallace

George Wallace (Aug. 25, 1919 – 1998) was born in Clio, Alabama. Wallace came to national prominence in 1963 when he kept a campaign pledge to stand "in the schoolhouse door" to block integration of Alabama public schools. On June 11, 1963, he barred the path of two black students attempting to register at the University of Alabama. The governor was flanked by armed state troopers. He defied federal Justice Department orders to admit the students James A. Hood and Vivian J. Malone.

President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and ordered some units to the university campus. Wallace stood aside, and the black students were allowed to register for classes.

In September 1963, Wallace ordered state police to Huntsville, Mobile, Tuskegee and Birmingham to prevent public schools from opening, following a federal court order to integrate Alabama schools. Following civil disturbances resulting in at least one death, President Kennedy again nationalized the Guard and saw the schools integrated.

On March 7, 1965, during a voter registration campaign, state troopers with dogs, whips and tear gas tangled with blacks who were marching from Selma to Montgomery. The violence mobilized enough support to enable President Johnson to win passage of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Wallace was elected governor the first time in 1962. For the next 15 years he made a political career as a man who opposed the advancement of rights for blacks, as well as the powers of the federal government.

In 1968, he ran for president on his own in a campaign in which he vilified blacks, students and people who called for an end to the war in Vietnam. He carried five Southern states and won 46 electoral votes.

Forbidden by law to run for re-election as governor in 1966, he saw his first wife, Lurleen, elected governor in his stead. She died in office, of cancer, two years later. In 1970, he defeated her successor and won a second four-year term as governor.

In 1972, he returned to the Democratic Party. As the most forceful national opponent of "forced busing" for school integration, he galvanized supporters. But his campaign effectively ended in Laurel, when he was shot by Arthur Bremer. He spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down.

In 1974, with state law changed, he was elected governor a third time. In 1979 he stepped down as governor, but in 1982, he ran for governor a fourth time. In a watershed moment, he admitted that he had been wrong about "race" all along. Subsequently, he carried all 10 of the state's counties with a majority black population, nine of them by a better than two-to-one margin. He retired four years later, an increasingly remote and physically tormented man.

"We thought [segregation] was in the best interests of all concerned. We were mistaken," he told a black group in 1982. "The Old South is gone," but "the New South is still opposed to government regulation of our lives."