More recently, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has said that Mr. Trump is “more George Wallace than George Washington.” Mr. Trump’s campaign fired back this week in a statement by Katrina Pierson, a senior campaign adviser to the president, who credited him with increasing funding for historically black schools and signing criminal justice reform.

“There’s only one candidate in this race who bragged about receiving an award from George Wallace, and that’s Joe Biden,” Ms. Pierson said. “Biden also said that Democrats needed a ‘liberal George Wallace, someone who’s not afraid to stand up and offend people.’”

Both quotes refer to articles in The Philadelphia Inquirer, one in 1975 about Mr. Biden’s opposition to busing and another in 1987 mentioning a campaign stop in Alabama during his first presidential campaign. The Biden campaign countered with other clips from the 1970s in which Mr. Biden criticized Wallace and vowed to vote Republican if he won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976.

Wallace made his name as the most prominent segregationist of his time but he neither started nor ended that way. Unlike Mr. Trump, he was a small-town boy from Clio, Ala., who grew up to jump into politics as a progressive, eager to help the disadvantaged with New Deal-style programs. As a judge and a Democratic candidate for governor in 1958, he made a point of promising equality for Black Alabamians. But when he lost that contest to a candidate who demagogued on segregation, Wallace told an aide that “I was out-niggered and I will never be out-niggered again.”

After winning the governor’s mansion with a hard-core racist appeal, he came to national attention in 1963 by promising in his inaugural address “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” and months later by standing in the schoolhouse door in a failed effort to block the integration of the University of Alabama. Wallace that same year ordered the Confederate flag flown above the State Capitol, where it remained for 30 years before being taken down for good.

In “Settin’ the Woods on Fire,” an acclaimed 2000 documentary on his life, Wallace was quoted telling an associate who asked about his race-baiting that he wanted to talk about issues like roads and education but that he never got as much attention as when he thundered about race.

Source: New York Times

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