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MADE THE TIME COVER - GEORGE C.
WALLACE 1963
Segregation Forever
It follows the full text transcript of
Governor George C. Wallace's Inaugural Address,
also called his Segregation Forever speech, delivered at
Montgomery, Alabama - January 14, 1963.
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Governor
Patterson, Governor Barnette, from one of the
greatest states in this nation, Mississippi,
Judge Brown, representing Governor Hollings of
South Carolina, members of the Alabama
Congressional Delegation, members of the Alabama
Legislature, distinguished guests, fellow
Alabamians: |
Before I begin my
talk with you, I want to ask you for a few
minutes patience while I say something that is
on my heart. I want to thank those home folks of
my county who first gave an anxious country boy
his opportunity to serve in State politics. I
shall always owe a lot to those who gave me that
first opportunity to serve.
I will never
forget the warm support and close loyalty at the
folks of Suttons, Haigler's Mill, Eufaula, Beat
6 and Beat 14, Richards Cross Roads and Gammage
Beat at Baker Hill, Beat 8, and Comer, Spring
Hill, Adams Chapel and Mount Andrew, White Oak,
Baxter's Station, Clayton, Louisville and
Cunnigham Place; Horns Crossroads, Texasville
and Blue Springs, where the vote was 304 for
Wallace and 1 for the opposition, and the dear
little lady whom I heard had made that one vote
against me, by mistake, because she couldn't see
too well, and she had pulled the wrong lever,
bless her heart. At Clio, my birthplace, and
Elamville. I shall never forget them. May God
bless them.
And I shall forever remember that election day
morning as I waited, and suddenly at ten o'clock
that morning the first return of a box was
flashed over this state: it carried the message
Wallace: 15, Opposition: Zero. And it
came from the Hamrick Beat at Putman's Mountain
where live the great hill people of our state.
May God bless the mountain man, his loyalty is
unshakeable, he'll do to walk down the road
with.
I hope you'll forgive me these few moments of
remembering, but I wanted them and you to know,
that I shall never forget. And I wish I could
shake hands and thank all of you in this state
who voted for me, and those of you who did not,
for I know you voted your honest convictions.
And now, we must stand together and move the
great State of Alabama forward.
I would be remiss, this day, if I did not thank
my wonderful wife and fine family for their
patience, support, and loyalty. And there is no
man living who does not owe more to his mother
than he can ever repay, and I want my mother to
know that I realize my debt to her.
This is the day of my Inauguration as Governor
of the State of Alabama. And on this day I feel
a deep obligation to renew my pledges, my
covenants with you, the people of this great
state.
General Robert E. Lee said that duty is
the sublimest word on the English language and I
have come, increasingly, to realize what he
meant. I shall do my duty to you, God helping,
to every man, to every woman, yes, to every
child in this state. I shall fulfill my duty
toward honesty and economy in our State
government so that no man shall have a part of
his livelihood cheated and no child shall have a
bit of his future stolen away.
I have said to you that I would eliminate the
liquor agents in this state and that the money
saved would be returned to our citizens. I am
happy to report to you that I am now filling
orders for several hundred one-way tickets and
stamped on them are these words "For liquor
agents. Destination: Out of Alabama." I am happy
to report to you that the big-wheeling
cocktail-party boys have gotten the word that
their free whiskey and boat rides are over, that
the farmer in the field, the worker in the
factory, the businessman in his office, the
housewife in her home, have decided that the
money can be better spent to help our children's
education and our older citizens, and they have
put a man in office to see that it is done. It
shall be done. Let me say one more time, no more
liquor drinking in your governor's mansion.
I shall fulfill my duty in working hard to bring
industry into our state, not only by maintaining
an honest, sober and free-enterprise climate of
government in which industry can have
confidence, but in going out and getting it, so
that our people can have industrial jobs in
Alabama and provide a better life for their
children.
I shall not forget my duty to our senior
citizens, so that their lives can be lived in
dignity and enrichment of the golden years, nor
to our sick, both mental and physical, and they
will know we have not forsaken them. I want the
farmer to feel confident that in this State
government he has a partner who will work with
him in raising his income and increasing his
markets. And I want the laboring man to know he
has a friend who is sincerely striving to better
his field of endeavor.
I want to assure every child that this State
Government is not afraid to invest in their
future through education, so that they will not
be handicapped on every threshold of their
lives.
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 time again
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 today,
segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
The Washington D.C. school riot report is
disgusting and revealing. We will not sacrifice
our children to any such type school system, and
you can write that down. The federal troops in
Mississippi could be better used guarding the
safety of the citizens of Washington D.C., where
it is even unsafe to walk or go to a ballgame,
and that is the nation's capitol. I was safer in
a B-29 bomber over Japan during the war in an
air raid, than the people of Washington are
walking to the White House neighborhood. A
closer example is Atlanta. The city officials
fawn for political reasons over school
integration and then build barricades to stop
residential integration, what hypocrisy!
Let us send this message back to Washington by
our representatives who are with us today, that
from this day we are standing up, and the heel
of tyranny does not fit the neck of an upright
man; that we intend to take the offensive and
carry our fight for freedom across the nation,
wielding the balance of power we know we possess
in the Southland; that WE, not the insipid bloc
of voters of some sections will determine in the
next election who shall sit in the White House
of these United States; that from this day, from
this hour, from this minute, we give the word of
a race of honor that we will tolerate their boot
in our face no longer, and let those certain
judges put that in their opium pipes of power
and smoke it for what it is worth.
Hear me, Southerners! You sons and daughters who
have moved north and west throughout this
nation, we call on you from your native soil to
join with us in national support and vote, and
we know, wherever you are, away from the hearths
of the Southland, that you will respond, for
though you may live in the farthest reaches of
this vast country, your heart has never left
Dixieland.
And you native sons and daughters of old New
England's rock-ribbed patriotism and you sturdy
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 spirit, and
the Southern philosophy. You are Southerners too
and brothers with us in our fight.
What I have said about segregation goes double
this day. And what I have said to or about some
federal judges goes triple this day.
Alabama has been blessed by God as few states in
this Union have been blessed. Our state owns ten
percent of all the natural resources of all the
states in our country. Our inland waterway
system is second to none and has the potential
of being the greatest waterway transport system
in the entire world. We possess over thirty
minerals in usable quantities and our soil is
rich and varied, suited to a wide variety of
plants. Our native pine and forestry system
produces timber faster than we can cut it and
yet we have only pricked the surface of the
great lumber and pulp potential.
With ample rainfall and rich grasslands our live
stock industry is in the infancy of a giant
future that can make us a center of the big and
growing meat packing and prepared foods
marketing. We have the favorable climate,
streams, woodlands, beaches, and natural beauty
to make us a recreational Mecca in the booming
tourist and vacation industry. Nestled in the
great Tennessee Valley, we possess the Rocket
center of the world and the keys to the space
frontier.
While the trade with a developing Europe built
the great port cities of the east coast, our own
fast developing port of Mobile faces as a
magnetic gateway to the great continent of South
America, well over twice as large and hundreds
of times richer in resources, even now awakening
to the growing probes of enterprising capital
with a potential of growth and wealth beyond any
present dream for our port development and
corresponding results throughout the connecting
waterways that thread our state.
And while the manufacturing industries of free
enterprise have been coming to our state in
increasing numbers, attracted by our bountiful
natural resources, our growing numbers of
skilled workers and our favorable conditions,
their present rate of settlement here can be
increased from the trickle they now represent to
a stream of enterprise and endeavor, capital and
expansion that can join us in our work of
development and enrichment of the educational
futures of our children, the opportunities of
our citizens and the fulfillment of our talents
as God has given them to us.
To realize our
ambitions and to bring to fruition our dreams,
we as Alabamians must take cognizance of the
world about us. We must re-define our heritage,
re-school our thoughts in the lessons our
forefathers knew so well, first hand, in order
to function and to grow and to prosper. We can
no longer hide our head in the sand and tell
ourselves that the ideology of our free fathers
is not being attacked and is not being
threatened by another idea, for it is.
We are faced with
an idea that if a centralized government assume
enough authority, enough power over its people,
that it can provide a utopian life; that if
given the power to dictate, to forbid, to
require, to demand, to distribute, to edict and
to judge what is best and enforce that will
produce only "good," and it shall be our father
and our God. It is an idea of government that
encourages our fears and destroys our faith, for
where there is faith, there is no fear, and
where there is fear, there is no faith.
In encouraging our
fears of economic insecurity it demands we place
that economic management and control with
government; in encouraging our fear of
educational development it demands we place that
education and the minds of our children under
management and control of government, and even
in feeding our fears of physical infirmities and
declining years, it offers and demands to father
us through it all and even into the grave. It is
a government that claims to us that it is
bountiful as it buys its power from us with the
fruits of its rapaciousness of the wealth that
free men before it have produced and builds on
crumbling credit without responsibilities to the
debtors, our children. It is an ideology of
government erected on the encouragement of fear
and fails to recognize the basic law of our
fathers that governments do not produce wealth,
people produce wealth, free people; and those
people become less free as they learn there is
little reward for ambition, that it requires
faith to risk and they have none as the
government must restrict and penalize and tax
incentive and endeavor and must increase its
expenditures of bounties, then this government
must assume more and more police powers and we
find we are become government-fearing people,
not God-fearing people.
We find we have
replaced faith with fear and though we may give
lip service to the Almighty, in reality,
government has become our god. It is, therefore,
a basically ungodly government and its appeal to
the pseudo-intellectual and the politician is to
change their status from servant of the people
to master of the people, to play at being God
without faith in God and without the wisdom of
God. It is a system that is the very opposite of
Christ for it feeds and encourages everything
degenerate and base in our people as it assumes
the responsibilities that we ourselves should
assume. Its pseudo-liberal spokesmen and some
Harvard advocates have never examined the logic
of its substitution of what it calls "human
rights" for individual rights, for its
propaganda play on words has appeal for the
unthinking. Its logic is totally material and
irresponsible as it runs the full gamut of human
desires including the theory that everyone has
voting rights without the spiritual
responsibility of preserving freedom. Our
founding fathers recognized those rights but
only within the framework of those spiritual
responsibilities. But the strong, simple faith
and sane reasoning of our founding fathers has
long since been forgotten as the so-called
"progressives" tell us that our Constitution was
written for "horse and buggy" days, so were the
Ten Commandments.
Not so long ago men stood in marvel and awe at
the cities, the buildings, the schools, the
autobahns that the government of Hitler's
Germany had built, just as centuries before they
stood in wonder of Rome's building. But it could
not stand, for the system that built it had
rotted the souls of the builders and in turn
rotted the foundation of what God meant that men
should be. Today that same system on an
international scale is sweeping the world. It is
the "changing world" of which we are told it is
called "new" and "liberal". It is as old as the
oldest dictator. It is degenerate and decadent.
As the national racism of Hitler's Germany
persecuted a national minority to the whim of a
national majority, so the international racism
of the liberals seek to persecute the
international white minority to the whim of the
international colored majority, so that we are
foot-balled about according to the favor of the
Afro-Asian bloc. But the Belgian survivors of
the Congo cannot present their case to a war
crimes commission, nor the Portuguese of Angola,
nor the survivors of Castro, nor the citizens of
Oxford, Mississippi.
It is this theory of international power politic
that led a group of men on the Supreme Court for
the first time in American history to issue an
edict, based not on legal precedent, but upon a
volume, the editor of which said our
Constitution is outdated and must be changed and
the writers of which, some had admittedly
belonged to as many as half a hundred
communist-front organizations. It is this theory
that led this same group of men to briefly bare
the ungodly core of that philosophy in
forbidding little school children to say a
prayer. And we find the evidence of that
ungodliness even in the removal of the words "in
God we trust" from some of our dollars, which
was placed there as like evidence by our
founding fathers as the faith upon which this
system of government was built.
It is the spirit
of power thirst that caused a president in
Washington to take up Caesar's pen and with one
stroke of it make a law. A law which the
law-making body of Congress refused to pass, a
law that tells us that we can or cannot buy or
sell our very homes, except by his conditions,
and except at his discretion. It is the spirit
of power thirst that led the same president to
launch a full offensive of twenty-five thousand
troops against a university, of all places, in
his own country and against his own people, when
this nation maintains only six thousand troops
in the beleaguered city of Berlin.
We have witnessed
such acts of "might makes right" over the world
as men yielded to the temptation to play God,
but we have never before witnessed it in
America. We reject such acts as free men. We do
not defy, for there is nothing to defy since as
free men we do not recognize any government
right to give freedom or deny freedom. No
government erected by man has that right. As
Thomas Jefferson said, "The God who gave us
life, gave us liberty at the same time; no King
holds the right of liberty in his hands." Nor
does any ruler in American government.
We intend, quite simply, to practice the free
heritage as bequeathed to us as sons of free
fathers. We intend to re-vitalize the truly new
and progressive form of government that is less
that two hundred years old, a government first
founded in this nation simply and purely on
faith, that there is a personal God who rewards
good and punishes evil, that hard work will
receive its just deserts, that ambition and
ingenuity and inventiveness, and profit of such,
are admirable traits and goals that the
individual is encouraged in his spiritual growth
and from that growth arrives at a character that
enhances his charity toward others and from that
character and that charity so is influenced
business, and labor and farmer and government.
We intend to renew our faith as God-fearing men,
not government-fearing men nor any other kind of
fearing-men. We intend to roll up our sleeves
and pitch in to develop this full bounty God has
given us, to live full and useful lives and in
absolute freedom from all fear. Then can we
enjoy the full richness of the Great American
Dream.
We have placed this sign, "In God We Trust,"
upon our State Capitol on this Inauguration Day
as physical evidence of determination to renew
the faith of our fathers and to practice the
free heritage they bequeathed to us. We do this
with the clear and solemn knowledge that such
physical evidence is evidently a direct
violation of the logic of that Supreme Court in
Washington D.C., and if they or their spokesmen
in this state wish to term this defiance, I say
then let them make the most of it.
This nation was never meant to be a unit of one
but a united of the many. That is the exact
reason our freedom loving forefathers
established the states, so as to divide the
rights and powers among the states, insuring
that no central power could gain master
government control.
In united effort we were meant to live under
this government, whether Baptist, Methodist,
Presbyterian, Church of Christ, or whatever
one's denomination or religious belief, each
respecting the others right to a separate
denomination; each, by working to develop his
own, enriching the total of all our lives
through united effort. And so it was meant in
our political lives, whether Republican,
Democrat, Prohibition, or whatever political
party, each striving from his separate political
station, respecting the rights of others to be
separate and work from within their political
framework and each separate political station
making its contribution to our lives.
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.
The true brotherhood of America, of respecting
the separateness of others and uniting in effort
has been so twisted and distorted from its
original concept that there is a small wonder
that communism is winning the world.
We invite the negro citizens of Alabama to work
with us from his separate racial station, as we
will work with him, to develop, to grow in
individual freedom and enrichment. We want jobs
and a good future for both races, the tubercular
and the infirm. This is the basic heritage of my
religion, if which I make full practice for we
are all the handiwork of God.
But we warn those, of any group, who would
follow the false doctrine of communistic
amalgamation that we will not surrender our
system of government, our freedom of race and
religion, that freedom was won at a hard price
and if it requires a hard price to retain it, we
are able and quite willing to pay it.
The liberals' theory that poverty,
discrimination and lack of opportunity is the
cause of communism is a false theory. If it were
true the South would have been the biggest
single communist bloc in the western hemisphere
long ago, for after the great War Between the
States, our people faced a desolate land of
burned universities, destroyed crops and homes,
with manpower depleted and crippled, and even
the mule, which was required to work the land,
was so scarce that whole communities shared one
animal to make the spring plowing. There were no
government handouts, no Marshall Plan aid, no
coddling to make sure that our people would not
suffer; instead the South was set upon by the
vulturous carpetbagger and federal troops, all
loyal Southerners were denied the vote at the
point of bayonet, so that the infamous, illegal
14th Amendment might be passed. There was no
money, no food and no hope of either. But our
grandfathers bent their knee only in church and
bowed their head only to God.
Not for a single instant did they ever consider
the easy way of federal dictatorship and
amalgamation in return for fat bellies. They
fought. They dug sweet roots from the ground
with their bare hands and boiled them in iron
pots, they gathered poke salad from the woods
and acorns from the ground. They fought. They
followed no false doctrine. They knew what the
wanted and they fought for freedom! They came up
from their knees in the greatest display of
sheer nerve, grit and guts that has ever been
set down in the pages of written history, and
they won! The great writer, Rudyard Kipling
wrote of them, that: "There in the Southland of
the United States of America, lives the greatest
fighting breed of man in all the world!"
And that is why today, I stand ashamed of the
fat, well-fed whimperers who say that it is
inevitable, that our cause is lost. I am ashamed
of them and I am ashamed for them. They do not
represent the people of the Southland.
And may we take note of one other fact, with all
trouble with communists that some sections of
this country have, there are not enough native
communists in the South to fill up a telephone
booth, and that is a matter of public FBI
record.
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.
Southerners played a most magnificent part in
erecting this great divinely inspired system of
freedom and, as God is our witnesses,
Southerners will save it.
Let us, as Alabamians, grasp the hand of destiny
and walk out of the shadow of fear and fill our
divine destination. Let us not simply defend but
let us assume the leadership of the fight and
carry our leadership across this nation. God has
placed us here in this crisis, let us not fail
in this our most historical moment.
You are here today, present in this audience,
and to you over this great state, wherever you
are in sound of my voice, I want to humbly and
with all sincerity, thank you for your faith in
me.
I promise you that I will try to make you a good
governor. I promise you that, as God gives me
the wisdom and the strength, I will be sincere
with you. I will be honest with you.
I will apply the old sound rule of our fathers,
that anything worthy of our defense is worthy of
one hundred percent of our defense. I have been
taught that freedom meant freedom from any
threat or fear of government. I was born in that
freedom, I was raised in that freedom, I intend
to live life in that freedom and, God willing,
when I die, I shall leave that freedom to my
children as my father left it to me.
My pledge to you, to "Stand up for Alabama," is
a stronger pledge today than it was the first
day I made that pledge. I shall "Stand up for
Alabama," as Governor of our State, you stand
with me and we, together, can give courageous
leadership to millions of people throughout this
nation who look to the South for their hope in
this fight to win and preserve our freedoms and
liberties, so help me God.
And my prayer is that the Father who reigns
above us will bless all the people of this great
sovereign State and nation, both white and
black.
I thank you.
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