Daughter of segregationist forges path to tolerance

(CBS News) MONTGOMERY, Ala. - Back in 1965, Bill Plante covered the civil rights movement for CBS News. Now Bill has brought a new story that has roots in that era -- about a father's legacy of racial hatred, and a daughter's personal march toward redemption.

"Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," Alabama Governor George Wallace once said at his inauguration in 1963.

Wallace personified racist defiance of civil rights. Six months later, he blocked the doors of the University of Alabama to prevent integration.

Watch CBS News correspondent Bill Plante's 1965 interview with Martin Luther King, Jr. below:

His daughter Peggy was 13 at the time.

"The problems and the challenges that came with being the daughter of the governor who stood in the schoolhouse door to block two African Americans from going to school was very, very difficult," she said now.

On whether she thought her father's earlier positions were wrong when she was young, Peggy Wallace said: "My mother kept us very, very sheltered. So there were a lot of things we didn't know about. And so we weren't able to think about them or have an opinion."

Peggy Wallace married and raised two sons in Alabama, rarely speaking about her father -- until she watched America elect its first black president.

Watch more of Bill Plante's interview with Peggy Kennedy Wallace below:

"All of a sudden I just found my voice and I said, 'I need to do something with this voice,'" she said.

She decided she would start on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a place where 48 years ago this week, her father ordered police to brutally attack civil rights marchers. It became known as "Bloody Sunday."

Congressman John Lewis was badly beaten that day in 1965. But for the last five years to mark the anniversary, Peggy Wallace Kennedy has walked with Lewis across the Pettus Bridge.

"I told him, 'I've crossed many bridges in my life, and I'll cross many, many more. But the most important bridge I'll ever cross in my life is the one I crossed with you,' in 2009," she said.

Peggy Kennedy Wallace is now writing a book about the impact of her father's politics on his family and speaking to students and others about her personal journey.

"I received a lot of criticism, a lot of hurtful criticism," she said. "But I just moved on, and I just would like for my children to not remember where my father stood, but where I am standing now."

Now seeking a legacy of tolerance and inclusion to replace the bigotry that was her inheritance.