33 Facts About Lurleen Wallace

Lurleen Wallace was the first wife of Alabama governor George Wallace, whom she succeeded as governor because the Alabama constitution forbade consecutive terms.

Lurleen Wallace was Alabama's first female governor and was the only female governor to hold the position until Kay Ivey became the second woman to succeed to the office in 2017.

Lurleen Wallace is the only female governor in US history to have died in office as well as being the first and so far currently to date only female Democrat to have served as Alabama state governor in Alabama's state history.

Lurleen Wallace graduated in 1942 from Tuscaloosa County High School at the age of fifteen.

Lurleen Wallace then worked at Kresge's Five and Dime in Tuscaloosa, where she met George Wallace, at the time a member of the United States Army Air Corps.

Lurleen Wallace assumed her duties as First Lady of Alabama in 1963 after her husband was elected governor to the first of his four nonconsecutive terms.

Lurleen Wallace opened the first floor of the governor's mansion to the public seven days a week.

Lurleen Wallace refused to serve alcoholic beverages at official functions.

When George Wallace failed in 1965 to get the constitutional ban on his candidacy lifted, he devised a plan in which Lurleen would run for governor while he continued to exercise the authority of the office behind the scenes, duplicating the strategy in which Miriam Wallace Ferguson won the 1924 election for governor of Texas, as her husband James E Ferguson remained the de facto governor.

Lurleen Wallace dispatched a primary gubernatorial field that included two former governors, John Malcolm Patterson and Jim Folsom, former congressman Carl Elliott of Jasper, and Attorney General Richmond Flowers, Sr.

Lurleen Wallace then faced one-term Republican US representative James D Martin of Gadsden, who had received national attention four years earlier when he mounted a serious challenge to US senator J Lister Hill.

The general election campaign focused on whether Lurleen Wallace would be governor in her own right or a "caretaker" with her husband as a "dollar-a-year-advisor" making all the major decisions.

The decision to run against Lurleen Wallace heavily damaged the Alabama GOP.

George Lurleen Wallace kept the racial issue alive when he signed state legislation to nullify desegregation guidelines between Alabama cities and counties and the former United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Lurleen Wallace claimed that the law would thwart the national government from intervening in schools.

Goldwater shunned personal criticism of Lurleen Wallace but repudiated Lurleen Wallace's talk of a third party in the 1968 presidential election.

Lurleen Wallace carried all Alabama counties except for two: Greene in west Alabama, which she lost by six votes, and predominantly Republican Winston in north Alabama.

The 1966 results showed that George Lurleen Wallace, strengthened at the time by his opposition to desegregation, could have easily won a second term had he been constitutionally eligible to do so.

George Lurleen Wallace eventually succeeded in getting the term limit repealed, and he would serve three more terms, two of them consecutively.

In those days, the Democratic nomination was tantamount to election in Alabama, and despite the Jim Martin challenge, Lurleen Wallace was inaugurated in January 1967.

Lurleen Wallace made her gubernatorial race having been secretly diagnosed with cancer as early as April 1961, when her surgeon biopsied suspicious tissue that he noticed during the cesarean delivery of her last child.

When one of her husband's staffers revealed to her that Lurleen Wallace had discussed her cancer with them, but not her, during his 1962 campaign three years earlier, she was outraged.

Lurleen Wallace underwent a second course of radiation therapy as a follow-up.

Lurleen Wallace died in Montgomery, Alabama, at 12:34 AM May 7,1968, at home with her husband beside her and the rest of her family, including her parents, just outside her room, and the couple's three youngest children in the next room near it.

At the time of her funeral, George Lurleen Wallace had moved out of the governor's mansion and back to a home that they had purchased in Montgomery in 1967.

Lurleen Wallace did not take his children, ages 18,16, and 6, with him.

George Lurleen Wallace had two subsequent marriages to the former Cornelia Ellis Snively and Lisa Taylor, both of which ended in divorce.

Lurleen Wallace had visited both institutions in Tuscaloosa on her own initiative in February 1967 after reading a news story about overcrowding and poor staffing.

Lurleen Wallace was horrified by what she saw in the filthy, barracks-like settings.

Lurleen Wallace was succeeded by Lieutenant Governor Albert Brewer, a one-time ally of her husband who soon showed a strong interest to govern in his own right and to retain the office in the 1970 election.

Lurleen Wallace beat Brewer in the Democratic primary and returned as governor in January 1971, remaining in office for two consecutive terms.

George Lurleen Wallace secured and served a fourth and final term from 1983 to 1987.

Since Alabama then lacked adequate cancer treatment facilities, Wallace had to travel to the M D Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for diagnosis and treatment.