“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”
The words were spoken by George Wallace at his inauguration as Alabama’s governor on January 14, 1963. They were “vehement” and “mean-spirited,” wrote a Montgomery, Alabama, reporter.
Having lived through the Wallace era, and, as a young Birmingham newspaper reporter covering him and his exploitation of the race issue to advance his political interests, it was distressing to read recently of college students announcing they wanted roommates of their race only.
They did not experience the world their grandparents and great-grandparents endured.
They never felt the fury of a hot southern afternoon when Trailways and Greyhound buses rolled in bearing bloodied “freedom riders.” The contemporary students and their sycophantic professors never were forced to the back of the bus or sent to inferior schools in segregated systems farcically claiming “separate but equal.” They never received a call warning that the Klan was on the way to their homes. They never knew the era when “Yankees” driving through the Deep South with car tags identifying their home states attached large Confederate flags to the hoods of their vehicles, hoping they would be banners of protection.
The resegregationists weren’t at the University of Alabama when George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door. They didn’t live through that hellish day when the shattered bodies of four little girls were removed from the smoking ruin of their Sunday School room at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a primary Birmingham venue for civil rights rallies. The contemporary resegregationists didn’t know what it was like to be blasted by a torrent from a firehose or be snarled at by a vicious attack dog.
The young liberals of the twentieth century sometimes shed their own blood to end racial division, while the leftists of the twenty-first century try to divide us once more. They like to be termed “progressive,” but their demand for racial separation is one of the most regressive movements of our time.
The white liberals on the race issue in the segregation era were sometimes conservatives on other matters, like national defense and economics. They were Democrats who supported Kennedy and Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson in their efforts to stem global communist expansion. Those “liberal-conservatives” were also with Republican Richard Nixon when, in 1970, he led in the broadest school desegregation ever.
My first assignment in Nixon’s White House was to help organize state and local citizens’ advisory committees to prepare for the opening of their newly desegregated schools that September. Those groups included heads of the NAACP, school officials, business and church leaders, local politicians, and even former Klan members. Their mission was to encourage people to “Keep Your Cool … Support Your School.”
The people, white as well as black, who resisted segregation were inspired by the heroic message of Dr. Martin Luther King. The contemporary resegregationists seek to implement the Marxist strategy of divide and conquer. Racial unity in America stands in the way of their great progressivist march.
How shocking and ironic that the rallying cry of segregationist George Wallace is now being sounded by the left. The culture is indeed being turned upside down.
George Wallace, ultimately, was turned rightside-up.
John Lewis, an Alabama black man who would later become a Georgia Congressman, heard George Wallace’s words on January 14, 1963. “My governor, this elected official, was saying, you are not welcome, you are not welcome.”
SOURCE: The Christian Post – Wallace Henley
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