The attack marked a turning point in the life of America’s most notorious segregationist, a man who had sent armed state troopers to attack civil rights marchers and ordered police to close down the state’s public schools rather than submit to federally ordered integration. “It sounds terrible to say, but it was almost a relief when it happened. “You knew it was probably going to happen at some point, but you pray every day that it doesn’t,” says Wallace’s daughter Peggy Wallace Kennedy, who was 22 years old at the time of the shooting. Shocked onlookers crowded around as reporters began relaying news of the assassination attempt across the nation. Two men seized the shooter, a fame-seeking loner from Milwaukee named Arthur Bremer. His second wife, Cornelia, threw herself over his bloody body. The governor grabbed his stomach and fell to the ground. He fired up the crowd by railing against busing and the elite, continuing his long-standing tactic of stirring up fears among “forgotten” white Americans.Īs Wallace shook hands with attendees after the speech, gunshots rang out, and screams filled the parking lot. The governor of Alabama and an ardent segregationist, George Wallace was in Laurel, Maryland, campaigning to become the Democratic nominee for president. once called the “most dangerous racist in America” stepped up to the podium at a suburban Washington, D.C. On May 15, 1972, the man Martin Luther King Jr.
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