On May 15, 1972, the man Martin Luther King Jr. once called the “most dangerous racist in America” stepped up to the podium at a suburban Washington, D.C. shopping center. The governor of Alabama and an ardent segregationist, George Wallace was in Laurel, Maryland, campaigning to become the Democratic nominee for president. 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.
As Wallace shook hands with attendees after the speech, gunshots rang out, and screams filled the parking lot. The governor grabbed his stomach and fell to the ground. His second wife, Cornelia, threw herself over his bloody body. Two men seized the shooter, a fame-seeking loner from Milwaukee named Arthur Bremer. Shocked onlookers crowded around as reporters began relaying news of the assassination attempt across the nation.
“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. “It sounds terrible to say, but it was almost a relief when it happened. Obviously, I was so happy he survived.”
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. Shot five times, Wallace was paralyzed from the waist down. Chronic pain and complications stemming from the shooting prevented him from fulfilling his presidential ambitions, though he did mount a final bid for the nomination in 1976.
Instead of ascending to the United States’ highest office, Wallace continued his career in state politics—and, in an unexpected turn of events, spent his remaining years seeking forgiveness from the Black community for the hatred and division he’d sown at the height of the civil rights movement.
Fifty years after his shooting, Wallace’s tangled legacy remains the subject of intense debate. Some observers say the governor deserves forgiveness because he made amends with the very people he had wronged. (Civil rights icon John Lewis, for his part, publicly forgave Wallace in a 1998 New York Times op-ed.) But others see Wallace as an irredeemable villain.