By the mid-1950s, the modern civil rights movement had come to Alabama. In 1954, the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka had declared that racially segregated public schools violated the 14th Amendment--particularly, the Equal Protection Clause. In August of 1955, some black citizens of Alabama petitioned the state department of education, asking that Alabama should integrate the schools in conformity with the Brown decision. The following December, Rosa Parks refused to move to the rear of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, violating a law that racially segregated buses. Then, a young Martin Luther King became the spokesman for Montgomery's black people who boycotted the bus system for 381 days. In February of 1956, federal courts ordered the University of Alabama to enroll Autherine Lucy, who had been admitted, but then her admission was rescinded. At the end of 1956, the Supreme Court--in Browder v. Gayle--declared unconstitutional the state laws for segregating public transportation. Montgomery then ended its segregation ordinances, and bus riders were allowed to sit anywhere on a bus. Two days later, a shotgun was fired into Martin Luther King's home in Montgomery. Gunshots were fired at integrated buses. Black Baptist churches were bombed.
In 1956, the entire congressional delegation of Alabama joined many other congressmen from the South in signing a "Southern Manifesto" that claimed that Brown v. Board of Education was an unconstitutional abuse of judicial power. They made four arguments. First, that there is no mention of education anywhere in the Constitution. Second, that there is no evidence in the debates preceding the submission of the 14th Amendment to the states that the framers of that amendment intended to change the state systems of education. Third, that Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was a well-established precedent that interpreted the 14th Amendment to mean that "equal protection of the laws" allowed a state to provide "separate but equal" public facilities. Finally, it was argued that the Brown decision violated the principle of states' rights as declared by the 10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
As I have indicated in a previous post, the resistance to the Brown decision as an exercise in judicial lawmaking prompted the conservative legal movement for a jurisprudential philosophy of originalism. But while it is hard to show that the Brown decision was a correct interpretation of the original intent of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, originalists have shown that Brown could be justified as a reading of the original meaning of the 14th Amendment's Privileges and Immunities Clause (Barnett and Bernick 2021: 4-6, 22-30).
Moreover, some originalists now agree with the claim of the abolitionist constitutionalists that the Constitution is founded in the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and therefore Lincoln was right: the text of the Constitution is the silver frame around the golden principles of the Declaration of Independence, and thus the original meaning of the constitutional text must be interpreted in the light of the Declaration of Independence and its Lockean philosophy of natural rights. This Lincolnian rhetoric of constitutionalism founded on the Declaration of Independence is manifest in the rhetoric of the civil rights movement that interprets civil rights as ultimately expressing the natural rights of equal liberty as affirmed in the Declaration of Independence.
Cowie fails to see this, and so he does not see how the Lincolnian rhetoric of equal liberty in the civil rights movement defeated Wallace's rhetoric of freedom as separation. Cowie is also mistaken in describing Wallace's rhetoric as based on "a peculiar ideology of white freedom: an ever-evolving freedom to dominate others" (4). Wallace never used these phrases--"white freedom" and "freedom to dominate others." Instead, Wallace defended freedom as separation--a freedom that respects the separateness of others, including racial separateness. Of course, I understand that Cowie would probably say that what Wallace called freedom as separation was really the white freedom to dominate others.
Wallace manifested his distinctive rhetoric of freedom in his Governor's Inaugural Address of January 14, 1963, after his first election as Governor of Alabama in 1962. He delivered that speech in Montgomery, standing in front of the Alabama State Capitol, at the same spot where Jefferson Davis stood to take his oath of office as President of the Confederacy in 1861.
The most famous line from Wallace's speech was his declaration: "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." But one must consider that line within the context of the whole speech to see how Wallace believed segregation to be in the service of freedom, and the primary theme of his speech was freedom. After this one line about segregation, Wallace used the word "segregation" only once more in the speech. But he used the words "freedom" and "free" over thirty times.
That famous line appeared at the end of this paragraph:
"Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and again down through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation now . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever."
In sounding the drum for freedom, Wallace claims that he is continuing a tradition of freedom that includes the Confederacy. He thus implies that the slavery to which the Confederacy was devoted was somehow compatible with freedom, although he never uses the word slavery here or anywhere else in the speech. Perhaps, he's suggesting that slavery could be understood as a form of segregation. In any case, he is clear that freedom requires defending the Southern States from the tyranny of the federal government and preserving segregation.
Wallace provides an example of this later in the speech when he condemns the actions of President Kennedy in the fall of 1962 in sending 30,000 federal troops to Jackson, Mississippi, to quell the violence provoked by the attempt of a black man--James Meredith--to register as a student at the University of Mississippi, despite the resistance of Governor Ross Barnett. Here then is an example of federal tyranny ruling by military force over the sovereign state of Mississippi to overturn the lawful segregation of Mississippi's schools. But how does such segregation serve freedom?
Wallace's answer later in the speech is that freedom requires "respecting the separateness of others," and segregation is a form of separation. Freedom for the states requires that they be separated from one another and from the national government. Religious freedom requires respecting the rights of religious believers to have separate denominations. Freedom for political parties means that each party has its "separate political station." Similarly, freedom in our racial lives means that each race has its "separate racial station."
Wallace explains:
"And so it was meant in our racial lives . . . each race, within its own framework has the freedom to teach . . . to instruct . . . to develop . . . to ask for and receive deserved help from others of separate racial stations. This is the great freedom of our American founding fathers . . . but if we amalgamate into the one unit as advocated by the communist philosophers . . . then the enrichment of our lives . . . the freedom for our development . . . is gone forever. We become, therefore, a mongrel unit of one under a single all powerful government . . . and we stand for everything . . . and for nothing."
Wallace believed that this conception of freedom as separation could have a broad popular appeal--not just in the South but across the nation--and he explicitly promised to lead a national political strategy to promote this kind of freedom throughout the country; and as part of that strategy, the votes of the South could decide the next presidential election.
In his speech, he first addressed his fellow Southerners in the South, then Southerners who had "moved north and west throughout this nation," and finally those native people in all regions of the country:
"And you native sons and daughters of old New England's rock-ribbed patriotism . . . and you study natives of the great Mid-West . . . and you descendants of the far West flaming spirit of pioneer freedom . . . we invite you to come and be with us . . . for you are of the Southern mind . . . and the Southern spirit . . . and the Southern philosophy . . . you are Southerners too and brothers with us in our fight."
Wallace insisted that all Americans should recognize that the American system of freedom was founded by Southerners:
"We remind all within hearing of this Southland that a Southerner, Peyton Randolph, presided over the Continental Congress in our nation's beginning . . .that a Southerner, Thomas Jefferson, wrote the Declaration of Independence, that a Southerner, George Washington, is the Father of our Country . . . that a Southerner, James Madison, authored our Constitution, that a Southerner, George Mason, authored the Bill of Rights, and it was a Southerner who said, 'Give me liberty or give me death,' Patrick Henry."
This is Wallace's only reference to the Declaration of Independence in this speech. And notice that he does not quote any of its most famous language--"that all men are created equal," and endowed with rights such as "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Similarly, he does not quote any of Mason's most famous language in the Bill of Rights--"that all men are by nature equally free and independent." Thus, Wallace does not allow his audience to see that while these documents do affirm freedom, it's an equal freedom for all men, which was affirmed in the 14th Amendment as the equal liberty of all citizens of the United States. Indeed, in Wallace's speech, the words "equal" and "equality" never appear.
Now, of course, Wallace could have argued that his freedom as separation does not violate the principle of equality because the separate "stations" of life can be "separate but equal," as majority of the Supreme Court had declared in Plessy v. Ferguson. But then he could have been challenged by anyone familiar with Justice John Marshall Harlan's dissent in Plessy, in which he said: "The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway, is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution." The white race might deem itself to be "the dominant race in this country," Harlan observed. "But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law" (Plessy v. Ferguson 163 U.S. 537, 559, 562 [1896]).
The equal freedom of citizens before the law denies any freedom for a ruling class of citizens to dominate others. That's the principle of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that supported the rhetoric of the civil rights movement and defeated Wallace's rhetoric of freedom as separation.
Six months after Wallace's inauguration, his attempt to prevent the racial integration of the University of Alabama created a nationally televised confrontation between these two concepts of freedom: freedom as separation versus equal freedom under law. In his campaign for the governorship, Wallace had promised to "stand in the schoolhouse door" to prevent any attempt by federal authorities to integrate the public schools of Alabama. On June 11, 1963, he fulfilled his promise by standing at the entrance of a building at the University of Alabama where two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, wanted to register. President Kennedy had federalized the Alabama National Guard and ordered some of its units to the university to prevent any violent resistance to the students' registering. This became a standoff between Wallace standing at the entrance of the building and U. S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach standing in front of Wallace.
Wallace read a speech arguing that the federal enforcement of school integration in Alabama was unconstitutional because it violated the 10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." The organization and management of public schools was clearly a power not delegated to the federal government, Wallace asserted, and therefore it was reserved to the state governments.
But a few hours after Wallace had spoken, the General in command of the federalized Alabama National Guard walked up to Wallace, and said, "It is my sad duty to ask you to step aside, on order of the President of the United States." Wallace responded by saying: "Alabama is winning this fight against Federal interferences because we are awakening the American people to the trend toward military dictatorship in this country." He then walked away, and he was driven back to Montgomery.
Cowie agrees with Wallace that he was "winning this fight." He explains: "Wallace lost the policy but won the political moment. He would continue to do the same throughout his career. . . . by wrapping racism into questions of federal power, and then making both race and federal intervention into an assault on American freedom, Wallace had himself a winning formula and a growing national audience" (332-33).
Cowie is wrong about this, however. Although Wallace had gained "a growing national audience" for a few years, he eventually lost the political debate over freedom and equality, because the rhetoric of the civil rights movement appealed to the principle of equal liberty as rooted in the American founding and particularly in the Declaration of Independence, and this proved to be more persuasive with more Americans than Wallace's principle of freedom as separation.
This contrast between these two kinds of freedom emerged immediately after Wallace's speech at the University of Alabama on June 11 when President Kennedy delivered a nationally televised speech on civil rights that evening. Kennedy defended his enforcement of the federal court order calling for the admission of the two black students.
He began by invoking the fundamental principle of equal liberty in the Declaration of Independence by saying that America "was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened."
While the words "equal" and "equality" never appeared in Wallace's speech, they appeared 11 times in Kennedy's speech. While Wallace spoke of "freedom and liberty under the law," Kennedy spoke of equal freedom under law.
And while Kennedy reminded his audience that 1963 was the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, Wallace said nothing about this.
Later that summer, the significance of that Lincolnian anniversary was again evoked by Martin Luther King in his "I Have a Dream Speech," delivered at the "March on Washington" gathering of hundreds of thousands of people in front of the Lincoln Memorial. King's speech was the single most powerful speech of the civil rights movement and one of the three most powerful political speeches in American history: the other two were carved into the walls of the Lincoln Memorial--the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. Remarkably, Cowie has only two sentences about King's speech, and he says nothing about how this speech surpassed Wallace's speech in shaping American public opinion (328).
King's speech is driven by Abraham Lincoln's rhetoric of equal liberty and particularly his interpretation of the Declaration of Independence as providing the "standard maxim of free society." King begins his speech by pointing to Lincoln.
"Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. . . . But one hundred years later, the Negro is still not free."
He then turns to the promise of equal liberty in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
"In a sense, we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the 'unalienable Rights' of 'Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.' It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note."
King then speaks of this promise of equal liberty as a Dream--the American Dream. In the second half of his speech, he expresses that dream rhetorically through two uses of anaphora (the Greek for "carrying back")--a rhetorical device that consists of emphasizing a thought by repeating a sequence of words at the beginning of sentences. He does this first with "I have a dream" and then with "Let freedom ring."
He repeats "I have a dream" eight times. This dominates the middle of the speech, and it is the most memorable passage of the speech. His first "I have a dream" anchors the entire speech in Lincoln's vision of the Declaration of Independence:
"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"
He concludes with the music of the Liberty Bell ringing: "Let freedom ring . . ."
His last words are the ecstatic words of a black spiritual:
"Free at last! Free at last!
"Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
George Wallace had nothing to compete with that!
I have a clear memory of the power of King's speech as I watched it on television. I was a 14-year-old high school student in a racially segregated school system in Wills Point, Texas. So, I saw the racial inequality that still prevailed in the American South in 1963. But then when my parents moved to Big Spring, Texas, in 1964, I discovered that Big Spring High School was racially integrated, and that it had been one of the first school systems to integrate in Texas in 1955, shortly after the Brown decision.
Looking back on those days, I can now see that King's Lincolnian rhetoric at the March on Washington was a turning point in the history of the civil rights movement. After the assassination of John Kennedy on November 22, 1963, Lyndon Johnson continued to push for civil rights legislation such as the Civil Rights Law of 1964 and the Voting Rights Law of 1965.
Johnson's confrontation with Wallace came in the spring of 1965. Civil rights protestors demanding voting rights for blacks planned to march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery. But on March 7, as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, they were attacked by police who Wallace had ordered to stop the marchers. The marchers were brutally beaten, and the attacks were broadcast on national television. It came to be known as "Bloody Sunday." This shocked the nation.
Wallace asked for a meeting with Johnson, and Johnson immediately agreed to meet him at the White House. Johnson was well-known for working people over in personal meetings. And he did that to Wallace. "What do you want left when you die?" he asked Wallace. "Do you want a great big marble monument that reads, 'George Wallace--He Built,' or do you want a little piece of scrawny pine board that reads, 'George Wallace--He Hated'?" He told Wallace that he needed to obey the court orders allowing the Selma march and to stop the police attacks on the protestors. He should also support voting rights for blacks. Wallace left the meeting feeling defeated. He told his aides: "When the President works on you, there's not a lot you can do" (Cowie 345-46).
Two days later, Johnson delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress proposing the Voting Rights Act. Continuing in the tradition of Lincolnian rhetoric, Johnson appealed to the principle that "all men are created equal" and endowed with equal liberty. His most famous line was one sentence: "And--we--shall--overcome."
A few days after this speech, a federal judge ordered that the civil rights protestors should be allowed to resume their march with protection from federal officers. Prior to the march, Wallace appeared before the state legislature and said: "I do not ask for cowardice, but I ask you for restraint in the same tradition that our outnumbered forefathers followed." The Confederacy was surrendering once more! "Though it be galling," Wallace said, white Alabamians should "stay home."
Cowie writes: "He washed his hands of the situation, and the state house erupted in applause for what was basically Wallace's bitter retreat. 'I have kept faith with you,' he declared. Wallace again affirmed his unique political skill set: losing the fight but winning the politics" (347).
"Winning the politics"? No, Cowie is wrong about that. Wallace lost the politics. And ultimately, he even admitted that he had lost by asking forgiveness for his losing battle against civil rights. Strangely, Cowie refuses to see this.
Wallace ran for president four times--1964, 1968, 1972, and 1976--and he lost four times. He reached his peak in 1968 when he ran as a third-party candidate and won 46 electoral votes from five Southern states. When he was campaigning in Maryland in 1972, he was shot four times in an assassination attempt. He was left paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life.
Beginning around 1978, Wallace began to feel guilty for the wrongs he had inflicted on black people, and he asked for their forgiveness. He called many black politicians and civil rights leaders and asked to meet with them to ask for their forgiveness. John Lewis, whose skull had been cracked by police beating him on "Bloody Sunday" in Selma, said: "He literally poured out his soul and heart to me. . . . He kept saying to me, 'John, I don't hate anybody, I don't hate anybody. I don't hate black people. I want to ask your forgiveness for anything I've done to wrong you'" (Carter 1995: 461-62).
When Wallace won his fourth and last term as governor in 1982, he won 90% of the black vote. During that last term, he appointed a record number of blacks to state positions, including, for the first time, two black members of his cabinet.
In March of 1995, on the 30th anniversary of the Selma march to Montgomery, hundreds of people retraced the steps of the march. When they reached Montgomery, Wallace was there to congratulate them and to ask forgiveness for what he had done in 1965. An article about this appeared on the front page of the New York Times for March 11, 1995, with the headline "Emotional March Gains a Repentant Wallace." I remember reading that article and thinking--Wow, how America has changed for the better!
Cowie passes over all of this quickly in two sentences: "The governor from Clio had since wept and repented, prayed and commuted with civil rights leaders about his racist sins. He regretted it all, he openly proclaimed, and asked everyone he could for forgiveness."
Cowie then immediately dismisses the significance of this by saying: "In the meantime, the gains of the civil rights movement and Voting Rights Act were steadily worn down by the aggressive localism Wallace had championed" (412). Here again is Cowie's claim that Wallace was always "winning the politics."
Cowie's attempts to offer evidence to support this claim are not persuasive. For example:
"Since the 1960s, a slow motion 'redemption' undermined the gains of the Second Reconstruction of the civil rights era. Since Fred Gray left office in 1972, no African American Democrat has represented Barbour County. James Rapier's one term in the US Congress during Reconstruction stands out as the lonely interregnum of Black elected leadership to Washington, DC" (405).
Both of these claims are false. Barbour County is in State House District 84, which is represented by a black politician--Berry Forte--who has served since 2010. Of the 105 representatives in the Alabama State House, 26 are black, which correlates with the 26% black proportion of Alabama's population.
It is also not true that there is no black elected leadership from Alabama in Washington. Of the seven Alabama representatives in the U.S. House, one is black--Terri Sewell (7th District)--who has served since 2010.
Here's another example of Cowie trying to show evidence that Wallace's white freedom has prevailed over the civil rights movement in Barbour County: "Over a century after the polling place massacre in 1874, the Eufaula police killed two African American brothers in 1983, inspiring the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to launch a campaign on their behalf" (405). Cowie does not tell his readers that a grand jury (with 12 whites and 6 blacks) cleared the two police officers, saying that there was evidence that one of the victims--Hampton Russaw--had fired first at a police officer.
Cowie also attempts to present evidence that the U.S. Supreme Court has overturned the constitutional right to vote for blacks. He writes: "In the Supreme Court's monumental decision in 2000, Bush v. Gore, the nation learned something long extant but that few people knew. . . . Few knew . . . as the court's majority declared, 'the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote' short of enforcing what states decide their systems to be" (412).
Cowie has distorted the meaning of this brief quotation from Bush v. Gore by taking it out of context. If you go to page 104 of the opinion, you will see that he has quoted a few words from a long sentence: "The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as the means to implement its power to appoint members of the electoral college." They cite Article II, sec. 1, of the Constitution, which leaves the state legislatures free to decide how their state's electors are to be chosen. Originally, most state legislatures chose the electors themselves. But by the 1830s, most of the state legislatures allowed the electors to be chosen by popular vote. So, the court explains: "History has now favored the voter, and in each of the several states, the citizens themselves vote for Presidential electors. When the state legislature vests the right to vote for President in its people, the right to vote as the legislature has prescribed is fundamental; and one source of its fundamental nature lies in the equal weight accorded to each vote and the equal dignity owed to each voter." So, under these conditions, the individual citizen does have a federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President! Cowie does not allow his reader to see this.
Cowie also distorts the decision in Shelby v. Holder. He writes:
"By 2013, the teeth of the Voting Rights Act were extracted in the Alabama-based Supreme Court case Shelby v. Holder. Under the original Voting Rights Act, jurisdictions with a history of discrimination in voting had to submit any proposed changes to their voting systems and procedures to the U.S. Department of Justice or a federal district court. After Holder, they did not. The half-century-long project to redeem power from federal authority was near complete as state after state passed new voting restrictions and rejected proposed federal voting reforms" (413).
If you look at the decision in Holder, you will see that what the Court did was to strike down section 4 (b) of the Voting Rights Act that laid down a coverage formula based on data that was over 40 years old. The Congress could rectify this by amending the Voting Rights Act to devise a new coverage formula based on updated data. Some such amendments have been proposed in the Congress beginning in 2014, but so far none have passed. The fault here is in the Congress's failure to pass the necessary amendment.
In any case, I don't see any evidence here for Cowie's claim that Wallace's defense of racial segregation succeeded in reversing the gains won by the civil rights movement. On the contrary, what we see is that the Lincolnian rhetoric of equal liberty defeated Wallace's rhetoric of freedom as separation, which Wallace himself conceded in the last twenty years of his life in admitting that his opposition to civil rights had been wrong.
REFERENCES
Barnett, Randy E., and Evan D. Bernick. 2021. The Original Meaning of the 14th Amendment; Its Letter and Spirit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Carter, Dan T. 1995. The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, The Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Cowie, Jefferson. 2022. Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power. New York: Basic Books.
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