T h e B o o k
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."
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This scene at St. Jude's—he is the patron saint of hopeless causes—invites an obvious and skeptical question: Was Wallace, the one-time spewer of venom, sincere? Or was it nothing more than a ploy at going out on positive publicity rather than being embedded in history as the racist blocking a schoolhouse door?
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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."