R e d e m p t i o n
In gracious and spiritual words, Joseph Lowery, a leader in the original march and now the President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, thanked the former separatist “for coming out of your sickness to meet us. You are a different George Wallace today. We both serve a God who can make the desert bloom. We ask God's blessing on you.”
The evidence suggests genuineness. In 1979, at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery—where Martin Luther King Jr. pastored in the 1950s—Wallace made an unpublicized and unannounced Sunday morning visit to the congregation. As recounted by Stephen Lesher in his 1994 book, George Wallace: American Populist, the former governor was pushed up the aisle and spoke: “I have learned what suffering means. In a way that was impossible {before the shooting}, I think I can understand something of the pain black people have come to endure. I know I contributed to that pain, and I can only ask your forgiveness.”
Some years later, after Lewis had been elected to Congress, he heard from Wallace. “He said to me, ‘John Lewis, will you come by and talk with me?’”
“And I remember the occasion so well,” Lewis says. “It was like someone confessing to their priest or to a minister. He wanted people to forgive him. He said to me, ‘I never hated anybody; I never hated any Black people.’”
“He said, ‘Mr. Lewis, I’m sorry.’ And I said, ‘Well, Governor, I accept your apology.’”
In Wallace's last term as governor in the late 1980s, he hired a black press secretary, appointed more than 160 blacks to state governing boards and worked to double the number of black voter registrars in Alabama's 67 counties. In part, it was the politics of patronage—in his last race for governor he won with 60 percent of the vote and well over 90 percent of the black vote—but on a deeper level, it was using his waning political power to bond with those he once scorned. Tuskegee Institute responded with an honorary degree.