George Wallace, 1919-1998

If George Wallace was not a racist but just a politician playing one for votes, it was an extraordinarily convincing performance. The pugnacious former Alabama governor and presidential candidate put his stamp on an era with six words — “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” — and whether they were a declaration of states’ rights, as he later asserted, or of something more poisonous, the slogan did its job well. No one ever forgot what George C. Wallace stood for.

When Wallace died Sunday, 79 years from his row-crop childhood in southeastern Alabama, all traces of that warrior were gone. He had been punctured by an assassin’s bullet in 1972, and as he carried on all those years, wheelchair-bound, and battled a host of health complications, did the hatred seep out of him? It seemed to. Six years ago, Wallace spoke of the “20 years of pain” that the bullet had brought him — he had recanted his segregation stance and imagined himself a populist all along, and wanted history to imagine him that way too.

But in a democracy, the legacy of a politician is inescapable, and quantifiable: What he stands for, multiplied by how many stand with him, and by that count of course Wallace had no hope of ever erasing 1968 from his rsum. That he learned his virulence, as a politician often does, from having failed as a moderate (after losing the 1958 gubernatorial election to a hard-liner, Wallace was said to have vowed never to get “out-segged” again) is no excuse for having given Alabama’s racial Luddites a hero.

By the 1968 race, Wallace was an icon who had stared down the blacks on national television, right at the schoolhouse doors. Running as an independent and urging voters to “send ’em a message,” he won five southern states and 46 electoral votes, and in 1972 he was an early leader in the Democratic presidential primaries when the bullet hit his spine in Laurel, Maryland. “I felt no shots, but I felt myself falling,” Wallace recalled later. “I attempted to move my legs and I knew immediately I was paralyzed.” Wallace carried both Maryland and Michigan the very next day.

The last go-round was in 1982. Wallace had lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976 and in 1979 left the Alabama governor’s mansion vowing to quit, but three years later and on his third marriage, Wallace returned to Alabama politics and began courting black votes on what was essentially a “we were mistaken” platform. He won again, and pledged “justice and mercy” in the inaugural.

George Wallace’s own combustible confluence of man and politician was captured in the oh-so-careful words with which the southern prominents remembered him Monday. Jimmy Carter recalled his “willingness to question and ultimately to change long-held views.” Alabama’s current governor, the deep-fried Fob James, couldn’t muster much more than “Governor Wallace has shown tremendous courage for many years in living an active life despite his pain and injury.” Congressman John Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia, stuck with “one of the most colorful politicians of our time.” Wallace was certainly that; the TNT movie about his life won three Emmys the night he died. But George Corley Wallace, penitent, might have been proudest of the eulogy offered by Vivian Malone Jones, one of two students who got by Wallace and into the University of Alabama in 1963. “He said he felt it was wrong, what he had done,” she said. “I’ve forgiven him a long time ago.”