what if your dad was one of the most famous segregationists in history?

[Tactical Peek]

The Broken Road of Peggy Wallace Kennedy

All white Southerners live with the sins of their fathers. But what if your dad was one of the most famous segregationists in history? Veteran Alabama journalist Frye Gaillard visits the daughter of George Wallace.

[snip]

Then came 1972. On May 15, running for president yet again, Wallace was shot at a campaign rally in Maryland. The bullet pierced his spine. Peggy, who was then in college, flew to Maryland and rushed to Holy Cross Hospital, where he had undergone life-saving surgery. There was an eerie unreality about the scene.

In the coming hours, other visitors would make their way to his bedside. One of them was Ethel Kennedy, who, four years earlier, had lost her husband to an assassin. She said Robert Kennedy would want her to be there. The visit surprised and moved Peggy, but the most astonishing well-wisher of all was a woman who was also running for president. Shirley Chisholm was a fierce trailblazer, the first woman to seek the presidential nomination of a major party, and the first black woman elected to Congress. Among the ranks of her followers was a former Black Panther named Barbara Lee, who now represents California in Congress. Lee warned Chisholm sternly, “Don’t you go visit that racist.”

Chisholm brushed the warning aside.

During her short time in Congress, besides her militant pursuit of equality, Chisholm had established a counter-reputation for reaching across the aisle, and working with people very different from herself. She collaborated with Sen. Bob Dole, a Kansas Republican, to create the still-standing nutrition program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Because of white allies, Chisholm said, “poor babies have milk and poor children have food.” But now, her spirit of generosity was being pushed to new and untested limits. George Wallace stood for things she found repugnant. And yet, he was also a human being. As Wallace lay badly wounded in a hospital bed, unable to move the lower parts of his body, Chisolm reached out.

“She and daddy talked real low,” remembers Peggy. “They prayed together. Daddy asked her, ’What are your people going to say about you being here?’ She told him it didn’t matter: ‘I would not want this to happen to anyone.’ Daddy’s face changed. There was just something that came over him. I think a seed was planted that day.”




https://bittersoutherner.com/the-broken-road-of-peggy-wallace-kennedy

[tblue37]

1. K&R for visibility. nt

[Skittles]

2. some things never change

"His campaign slogan, Stand Up for America, really meant, she admits, “stand up for white Southerners,” or the white working class in the North and Midwest"

SUA is now MAGA

[blm]

5. ✔️

[Sherman A1]

3. K&R

[steventh]

4. It's a beautiful and informative article. Thank you for posting the exerpt.

I'm always hoping things will improve in the long run. That's a hope I share with Peggy Wallace Kennedy. As the author of the article, veteran Alabama journalist Frye Gaillard, wrote,

She knows the dread many feel – a fear that maybe the last 50 years have produced a perfect storm of division from which it will be hard for the country to heal. And on the issue she cares about most, the racial justice her father once opposed, she has seen the threat to hard-earned progress. Still, she holds on to hope. She believes it is possible for decency to triumph. She has seen it before. This is the lesson she learned with her father, even as she understood what it cost.

[Turbineguy]

6. It's the night

that makes the sunrise wondrous.

[Hoyt]

7. Good article. I was afraid it was another one of those George Wallace "saw the errors of

his ways" in his final years, so all should be forgiven. That's one of those southern myths like the confederate flag is a symbol of heritage (rather than what it is -- a symbol of hatred).

[Tactical Peek]

8. Kick.