George Wallace first sought the Democratic nomination in the 1958 Alabama gubernatorial election.
87 Facts About George Wallace
2.
George Wallace ran for governor again in 1962, and won the race.
3.
George Wallace left office when his first term expired in 1967 due to term limits, but his wife, Lurleen, won the next election and succeeded him, with him as the de facto governor.
4.
George Wallace won five Southern states but failed to force a contingent election.
5.
George Wallace won election to the governorship again in 1970, and ran in the 1972 Democratic presidential primaries, having moderated his stance on segregation.
6.
George Wallace won re-election as governor in 1974, and he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in the 1976 Democratic presidential primaries.
7.
George Wallace left office in 1979, but re-entered politics and won election to a fourth, and final, term as governor in 1982.
8.
George Wallace is the third longest-serving governor in US history, having served 5,848 days in office.
9.
George Wallace had two younger brothers, Gerald and Jack, and a younger sister named Marianne.
10.
George Wallace became a regionally successful boxer in high school, then went directly to law school in 1937 at the University of Alabama School of Law in Tuscaloosa.
11.
George Wallace was a member of the Delta Chi fraternity.
12.
George Wallace received a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1942.
13.
Early in 1943, George Wallace was accepted for pilot training by the United States Army Air Forces.
14.
In 1938, at age 19, George Wallace contributed to his grandfather's successful campaign for probate judge.
15.
George Wallace gained a reputation for fairness regardless of the race of the plaintiff.
16.
George Wallace was the first judge in Alabama to call me 'Mister' in a courtroom.
17.
Similarly, during efforts by civil rights organizations to expand voter registration of blacks, George Wallace blocked federal efforts to review Barbour County voting lists.
18.
George Wallace was cited for criminal contempt of court in 1959.
19.
In 1958, George Wallace ran in the Democratic primary for governor.
20.
George Wallace took the oath of office on January 14,1963, standing on the gold star marking the spot where, nearly 102 years earlier, Jefferson Davis was sworn in as provisional president of the Confederate States of America.
21.
In September 1963, George Wallace attempted to stop four black students from enrolling in four separate elementary schools in Huntsville.
22.
George Wallace predicted, during a Milwaukee, Wisconsin speech on September 17,1964, that the office-holding supporters of a civil rights bill would politically "bite the dust" by 1966 and 1968.
23.
Jack Newfield wrote in 1971 that George Wallace "recently has been sounding like William Jennings Bryan as he attacked concentrated wealth in his speeches".
24.
The principal achievement of George Wallace's first term was an innovation in Alabama industrial development that several other states later copied: he was the first Southern governor to travel to corporate headquarters in northern states to offer tax abatements and other incentives to companies willing to locate plants in Alabama.
25.
George Wallace initiated a community college system that has now spread throughout the state, preparing many students to complete four-year degrees at Auburn University, UAB, or the University of Alabama.
26.
George Wallace campaigned strongly by expressing his opposition to integration and a tough approach on crime.
27.
In Democratic primaries in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland, George Wallace garnered at least a third of the vote running against three Johnson-designated surrogates.
28.
At graduation exercises in the spring of 1964 at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, George Wallace received an honorary doctorate.
29.
The American press in its attacks upon Governor George Wallace has demonstrated that it is no longer free, American, or honest.
30.
In 1964, Alabama Republicans stood to benefit from the unintended consequences of two developments: Governor George Wallace vacating the race for the Democratic presidential nomination against President Johnson, and the designation of unpledged Democratic electors in Alabama, in effect removing President Johnson from the general election ballot.
31.
Bill Jones indicated that George Wallace agreed with Goldwater's anti-communist stance but opposed the Republican's proposal to make Social Security a voluntary program.
32.
Jones stressed that George Wallace had sacrificed his own presidential aspirations that year to allow a direct Republican challenge to President Johnson.
33.
Goldwater reportedly rejected the overture because he considered George Wallace to be a racist.
34.
Term limits in the Alabama Constitution prevented George Wallace from seeking a second term in 1966.
35.
Therefore, George Wallace offered his wife, Lurleen George Wallace, as a surrogate candidate for governor.
36.
George Wallace felt somewhat vindicated when Republicans in Idaho denied renomination in 1966 to Governor Robert E Smylie, author of the article entitled "Why I Feel Sorry for Lurleen Wallace".
37.
George Wallace claimed that the law would thwart the national government from intervening in schools.
38.
George Wallace predicted that Wallace's legislation would propel the issuance of a court order compelling immediate and total desegregation in all public schools.
39.
George Wallace compared the new Alabama law to "another two-and-a-half-minute stand in the schoolhouse door".
40.
Lurleen George Wallace defeated Martin in the general election on November 8,1966.
41.
George Wallace was inaugurated in January 1967, but on May 7,1968, she died in office of cancer at the age of 41, amid her husband's ongoing second presidential campaign.
42.
George Wallace was "first gentleman" for less than a year and a half.
43.
George Wallace ran for president in the 1968 election as the American Independent Party candidate, with Curtis LeMay as his candidate for vice president.
44.
George Wallace hoped to force the House of Representatives to decide the election with one vote per state if he could obtain sufficient electoral votes to make him a power broker.
45.
George Wallace hoped that Southern states could use their clout to end federal efforts at desegregation.
46.
George Wallace's platform contained generous increases for beneficiaries of Social Security and Medicare.
47.
George Wallace described foreign aid as money 'poured down a rat hole' and demanded that European and Asian allies pay more for their defense.
48.
George Wallace mostly attracted the Southern Democrats who were dissatisfied with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act that were signed earlier in the decade by President Lyndon B Johnson.
49.
George Wallace ran a "law and order" campaign similar to Nixon's, further worrying Republicans.
50.
George Wallace was the master teacher, and Richard Nixon and the Republican leadership that followed were his students.
51.
George Wallace accused Humphrey and Nixon of wanting to radically desegregate the South.
52.
Wallace said, "There's not a dime's worth of difference between the Republicans and Democrats", a campaign slogan that he had first perfected when Lurleen Wallace defeated James D Martin.
53.
Major media outlets observed the support George Wallace received from extremist groups such as White Citizens' Councils.
54.
Indeed, at least one case has been documented of the pro-Nazi and white supremacist Liberty Lobby distributing a pro-George Wallace pamphlet entitled "Stand up for America" despite the campaign's denial of such a connection.
55.
Unlike Strom Thurmond in 1948, George Wallace generally avoided race-related discussions.
56.
George Wallace remains the last non-Democratic, non-Republican candidate to win any pledged electoral votes.
57.
George Wallace received the vote of one North Carolina elector who had been pledged to Nixon.
58.
In 1970, George Wallace sought the Democratic nomination against incumbent Governor Albert Brewer, who was the first gubernatorial candidate since Reconstruction to seek African American voter support.
59.
On January 13,1972, George Wallace declared himself a Democratic candidate.
60.
George Wallace announced that he no longer supported segregation and had always been a "moderate" on racial matters.
61.
However, George Wallace expressed continued opposition to desegregation busing.
62.
George Wallace was hit in the abdomen and chest, and one of the bullets lodged in George Wallace's spinal column, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life.
63.
George Wallace received telegrams from former President Lyndon Johnson, California governor Ronald Reagan and Pope Paul VI.
64.
From his wheelchair, George Wallace spoke on July 11,1972, at the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida.
65.
In November 1975, George Wallace announced his fourth bid for the presidency, again participating in the Democratic presidential primaries.
66.
George Wallace's campaign was plagued by voter concern about his health as well as the media use of images that portrayed him as nearly helpless.
67.
George Wallace's supporters complained that such coverage was motivated by bias, citing the discretion used in coverage of Franklin D Roosevelt's paralysis, before television became commercially available.
68.
George Wallace eventually endorsed Carter, who defeated Republican incumbent Gerald Ford.
69.
George Wallace said that while he had once sought power and glory, he realized he needed to seek love and forgiveness.
70.
George Wallace won the Democratic nomination by a margin of 51 to 49 percent.
71.
George Wallace achieved four gubernatorial terms across three decades, totaling 16 years in office.
72.
The couple had four children together: Bobbi Jo Parsons, Peggy Sue Kennedy, George III, known as George Junior, and Janie Lee Dye, who was named after Robert E Lee.
73.
Lurleen George Wallace was the first woman to be elected governor of Alabama, which she did as a stand-in for her husband, who was barred from serving another term.
74.
In 1961, in keeping with the practice of many at the time to shield patients from discussion of cancer, which was greatly feared, George Wallace had withheld information from her that a uterine biopsy had found possibly precancerous cells.
75.
George Wallace was twice elected state treasurer as a Democrat, and twice elected to the Alabama Public Service Commission.
76.
George Wallace lost a race in 2006 for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor.
77.
On January 4,1971, George Wallace wed the former Cornelia Ellis Snively, a niece of former Alabama governor Jim Folsom, known as "Big Jim".
78.
On September 9,1981, George Wallace married Lisa Taylor, a country music singer; they divorced in 1987.
79.
George Wallace has shared that she was not treated nicely out in public due to her father's segregationist views.
80.
George Wallace would go to school wanting to befriend the black students, but she assumed that they would not like her because of what her father had done.
81.
George Wallace's wife is a born-again Christian woman and I believe he is, too.
82.
George Wallace himself declined to identify as either a Republican or a Democrat.
83.
At a restaurant a few blocks from the State Capitol, George Wallace became something of a fixture.
84.
George Wallace died of septic shock from a bacterial infection in Jackson Hospital in Montgomery on September 13,1998.
85.
George Wallace had respiratory problems in addition to complications from his gunshot spinal injury.
86.
George Wallace's grave is located at Greenwood Cemetery, in Montgomery.
87.
The TNT cable network produced a movie, George Wallace, directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Gary Sinise.