Search This Blog

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

The Stand in the Statehouse Door - George Wallace

He kinda looks like Edward G. Robinson
On this date fifty years ago, George Wallace stood on the steps of the University of Alabama to deny entrance to black students. Wallace's motto was "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." He was the poster boy of racism in America.

It's less well known that Wallace became a born again Christian and renounced his belief in segregation, admitting that he was wrong. He apologized to civil rights leaders and appointed several black persons to his administration during his second stint as governor in the eighties.

I am in no way endorsing what Wallace did and said in the sixties. But to any who doubt the phrase, "With God all things are possible," George Wallace, the most unlikely segregationist in American history, is evidence of it. In 1963, there was not a person on this planet that believed George Wallace
could, or would, change.

Or look at it this way: if you took God out of the equation, is there any rational way to explain Wallace's change? Movies are about character transformation: the protagonist's journey. Would Walalce's transformation have happened without God?

1 comment: