Funeral Services For George Wallace

The body of George Wallace, who once vowed "segregation forever" but won an unprecedented fourth term as Alabama governor with the help of black voters, will lie in state in the rotunda of the Alabama Capitol for 24 hours starting Tuesday.

Wednesday afternoon, Wallace's body will be taken in a procession to Montgomery's First United Methodist Church.

Wallace died Sunday night. He was 79.

Evangelist Billy Graham's son, the Reverend Franklin Graham, will deliver the eulogy.

Wallace was a political legend in a region long accustomed to fiery oratory, and dominated the state for the better part of two decades.

He made a "stand in the schoolhouse door" in an effort to block the admission of black students to a state university. He married three times, and put one wife in the governor's office. He made four runs at the presidency, including a 1972 bid that was aborted by a would-be assassin.

During the 1960s, as the South reeled from church bombings and civil rights clashes, Wallace loomed across the region as a symbol of racial oppression.

But after being crippled by gunshots and confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, Wallace no longer was the jut-jawed, fist-shaking figure who threatened to "shake the eye teeth" of the nation's political establishment.

By the end of his career, the shrewd firebrand segregationist had mellowed into a populist who pledged to help poor people of all colors. His election to a fourth term in 1982 was built on a coalition including the black votes he once scorned, and he was courted by liberal members of his party.

Crippled by the assassination attempt, Wallace spent the last years of his life besieged by pain and needing frequent medical attention. Doctors said he also suffered from Parkinson's disease, affecting his ability to talk.

He got about in 1994 to campaign for his son, State Treasurer George Wallace Jr., who was running for lieutenant governor. But his son lost, ending the family's hold on elective office in the state.

Wallace was born Aug. 25, 1919, in the rural row crop country of southeastern Alabama. His father was a farmer and county commissioner, his mother a county health worker.

The short, dark-eyed farmboy was a scrappy Golden Gloves boxer. He earned his law degree from the University of Alabama, and served in World War II as a flight engineer on B-29 bombing missions.

After the war, he served as an assistant state attorney general, then ran successfully for the Alabama House of Representative in 1946 and established a law practice in Barbour County.

Even as a youth Wallace had a driving ambition for high public office, and when he won election as a circuit judge in 1952, giving up his legislative seat, he used his court post to become known as "the fightin' judge" and launch his first race for governor in 1958.

He lost that race to John Patterson, who had taken a harder linthan Wallace in support of racial segregation, and Wallace reportedly said after the loss that he would never be "out-segged" again.

As a judge, Wallace often tangled with an old law school classmate, U.S. District Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr., a towering figure for civil rights advocates, over desegregation and prison reform.

He ran again for governor, and on Jan. 14, 1963, as bands decked in Rebel uniforms played "Dixie," Wallace took the oath of office beneath the white-domed Capitol where Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as president of the Confederacy.

"Let us rise to the call of the freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South ...," Wallace told the crowd.

"In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny. And I say ... segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever...."

In a matter of months he made his celebrated "stand in the schoolhouse door," a vain bid to block the entrance of two blacks to the University of Alabama. And by the spring of 1964, he was carrying his personal brand of Deep South politics into the presidential arena.

Wallace ran in a few Democratic primaries, challenging President Lyndon Johnson. He pulled significant protest votes but hardly stopped the Johnson steamroller.

Still, Wallace savored that taste of presidential politics and wanted more. Back home in Montgomery, however, he faced a new dilemma. He was blocked by Alabama law from succeeding himself in the 1966 election. So instead of dropping out of the spotlight for four years, he ran his wife, Lurleen, in his place.

It was a daring move, and she won overwhelmingly, a new mandate for Wallace's politics and a new springboard toward the White House race of 1968.

Mrs. Wallace died of cancer in the spring of 1968. Wallace already was campaigning, and after a period of seclusion following her death he emerged as a third-party independent candidate with retired Gen. Curtis LeMay as his running mate.

Wallace carried five Southern states in the 1968 election after a tempestuous campaign in which he claimed "there's not a dime's worth of difference" between the major party candidates, Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat Hubert Humphrey.

He didn't pull enough votes to throw the election into the U.S. House of Representatives, as it once appeared he might. But undaunted by the defeat, Wallace began pointing toward an even more serious bid for the White House in 1972.

First, however, he had to be elected governor again.

Gov. Albert Brewer, who had succeeded Mrs. Wallace at her death, nearly cut short Wallace's rising national career in a dogfight in 1970, a campaign Brewer would claim was tainted by the darkest kind of racial politics from the Wallace camp.

Brewer ed Wallace in the first primary, but Wallace came back to win the runoff and coasted into the governor's office with a new bride, dark-haired Cornelia Snively, on his arm. She was the niece of former two-term Gov. James E. "Big Jim" Folsom and had, as a girl, lived for a time in the stately, white-columned Governor's Mansion.

Wallace launched his 1972 presidential campaign with a slogan: "Send 'Em A Message." He ran well ahead of the splintered field in the Florida Democratic primary, building up delegate totals to rank him No. 1 in the early stages of the campaign.

Then he headed to Maryland for that state's balloting. At a shopping center in Laurel on May 15, 1972, Wallace plunged into a crowd of well-wishers to shake hands. Suddenly a blond man in dark glasses lunged forward with a gun.

"The next thing I knew, I heard five firecracker-sounding pops ..." Wallace recalled later. "In my own mind, I knew this was it. I had been shot. I felt no shots, but I felt myself falling, and there I was on the ground. I attempted to move my legs and I knew immediately I was paralyzed."

He had been hit five times; one bullet had jammed against his spine.

Arthur Bremer, a former busboy from Milwaukee, was convicted in the assassination attempt. The shooting had no apparent political motive; the day after the gunfire, Wallace carried both Maryland and Michigan, his most triumphant moment.

But his presidential campaign was over. Because of a change in the state Constitution he could succeed himself as governor, however, so he returned to Montgomery and won a lopsided re-election in 1974.

Wallace tried to fashion another bid for president in 1976. Another Southerner, former Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia, left Wallace in his victorious wake, and Wallace's years on the presidential stage came to a close.

His marriage to Cornelia Wallace, often stormy, broke up. Mrs. Wallace moved out of the mansion in 1977, saying she could no longer tolerate her husband's "vulgarity, threats and abuse." She reported she had bugged her husband's bedroom telephone to find the source of "destructive rumors" that threatened her marriage.

Wallace left office in January 1979 crippled, divorced, often despondent and in physical pain, with no new campaign on the horizon. "I'm through," he said, taking a job in Montgomery as director of rehabilitation resources for the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Then Wallace married for a third time to a blond, 34-year-old former country music singer, Lisa Taylor, a former Wallace campaign trouper and the daughter of a wealthy north Alabama coal miner.

Wallace credited her with reviving his interest in politics, and soon was on the campaign trail again. He courted black votes and got them, telling a group of Baptist ministers that he had been wrong about segregation.

"We thought it was in the best interests of ll concerned. We were mistaken," he said. "The Old South is gone" but "the New South is still opposed to government regulation of our lives."

His challenger in the 1982 primary race was Lt. Gov. George McMillan, who had the active support of such national black leaders as Coretta Scott King and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Wallace repeatedly contended that he represented "the average man and woman, black and white," and led in every predominantly black county, leading the five-way race with 42.6 percent. In the runoff, he narrowly defeated McMillan, and went on to win a record fourth gubernatorial term over Republican Emory Folmar with 61 percent of the vote.

At his fourth inaugural, almost 20 years to the day after his "segregation forever" speech, he pledged "justice and mercy."

"A nation that forgets its poor will lose its soul," said Wallace.

He appointed blacks to Cabinet-level posts and judgeships. Every Democratic candidate sought his endorsement in the 1984 Democratic presidential race, but Wallace refused to get actively involved until the close of the primary season, when he endorsed Walter Mondale.

His final four-year term was marked by repeated bouts of pain linked to his paralysis. When he announced in tears that he would not seek a fifth term, he said in a choking voice that the pain had been an incessant "thorn in my flesh."

"I prayed that it would be removed," he said, "but it was not."

He left the office of governor for the last time on Jan. 19, 1987, watching from his wheelchair as Guy Hunt took the oath of office as Alabama's first Republican governor this century. But Wallace played a role even on that inaugural day, personally giving the oath of office to his son, who had been elected state treasurer.

The four-term governor then took a mostly ceremonial post with Troy State University, working out of a Montgomery office.

Less than two weeks after he left office, his wife of five years filed for divorce, saying in her petition there was "no real love" between them. Wallace did not contest the divorce, which was granted the same day it was filed and which did not require financial support by either party.

Removed from the political spotlight, he worried that history would remember him only for his segregationist defiance.

Stephan Lesher, who wrote a biography of Wallace with the former governor's cooperation, said that even though Wallace recanted his racial stands, he will always be remembered most as the man who cried "segregation forever" and stood in the schoolhouse door.

"It's like the blood stains on Lady Macbeth's hands," said Lesher. "He will never be able to wash out the stains of racism."

Out of power, Wallace's friends worried how he would battle his physical pain without being active in politics.

Wallace made some campaign trips o behalf of his son, who won a second term as state treasurer but then lost in 1992 in a bid for Congress and in the 1994 race for ieutenant governor. The ailing former governor's ability to get around and communicate was limited

he was so deaf that questions often had to be written down for him and he constantly gripped at his midsection in bouts of pain.

Wallace said he bore no bitterness toward Bremer.

"Justice was done, although when he gets out, he will be a free man and I'll still be sentenced to a wheelchair for the rest of my life. But I have no ill feelings about that. In fact, I've forgiven Bremer for shooting me a long time ago," he said.

"All these years I had been thinking maybe that everything I did was because I was strong, but I suddenly realized it wasn't that at all. I suddenly realized how fragile life is and how uncertain it is and how one ought to always be prepared to go."

Wallace will be buried next to his late wife.

The family is asking in lieu of flowers, donations be made to either the Wallace Foundation in Montgomery or the Lurleen Wallace Tumor Institute in Birmingham.