MEMORIES OF AN AMERICAN RACIST

GEORGE WALLACE, (August 25, 1919 – September 13, 1998) was the 45th Governor of Alabama, serving four terms: 1963–1967, 1971–1979 and 1983–1987.

On 13 January 1972, GEORGE WALLACE declared himself a candidate, entering the field with George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey, and nine other Democratic opponents. In Florida's primary, Wallace carried every county to win 42 percent of the vote. When running, Wallace claimed he was no longer for segregation, and had always been a moderate. Though no longer in favor of segregation, Wallace was opposed to desegregation busing during his campaign, a position Nixon would adopt early on as President.

Wallace was shot five times by Arthur Bremer while campaigning in Laurel, Maryland, on May 15, 1972, at a time when he was receiving high ratings in the opinion polls. Bremer was seen at a Wallace rally in Wheaton, Maryland, earlier that day and two days earlier at a rally in Dearborn, Michigan. As one of the bullets lodged in Wallace's spinal column, Wallace was left paralyzed from the waist down.

Bremer's diary, An Assassin's Diary, published after his arrest shows the assassination attempt was motivated by a desire for fame, not by politics, and that President Nixon had been an earlier target.
Bremer was sentenced to sixty-three years in prison on August 4, 1972, later reduced to fifty-three years two months later. Bremer served thirty-five years and was released on parole on November 9, 2007. Wallace forgave Bremer 23 years later.

Bremer's actions inspired the screenplay (1972) for the 1976 movie Taxi Driver which in turn inspired the assassination attempt on the life of President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley, Jr. in 1981.

Following the assassination attempt, Wallace was visited at the hospital by Democratic Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, a representative from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn who at the time was the nation's only African American female member of Congress. Despite their ideological differences and the opposition of Chisholm's constituents, Chisholm visited Wallace as she felt it was the humane thing to do.

Wallace announced that he was a born-again Christian in the late 1970s, and apologized to black civil rights leaders for his earlier segregationist views. He said that while he had once sought power and glory, he realized he needed to seek love and forgiveness.
In 1979, as blacks began voting in large numbers in Alabama, Wallace said of his stand in the schoolhouse door: "I was wrong. Those days are over and they ought to be over."