For most of his life, Peggy Sue’s dad was a racist.
During the tumultuous Civil Rights era — and many of the years preceding and those to follow — there was no ambiguity about where he stood. Blacks were inferior and a threat to white society.
Of course, that hardly makes Peggy’s family story unique in this part of the world. Her dad’s view on race were the prevailing view among the majority of white Southerners of his time.
It was, in fact, the view of my father, too.
My dad and Peggy Sue’s dad were born a year apart, mine in Mississippi, hers in Alabama.
But there is one notable difference: I was never called to answer for my dad’s view on the subject of race.
Thursday evening, Peggy Sue, now 67, stood on the stage at Nissan Auditorium on the Mississippi University for Women campus and told the story of her father, a story she’s been telling for eight years now on campuses and conferences across the nation.
“When I was 13, my father stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama,” Peggy Wallace Kennedy said.
Peggy Sue’s dad is George Corey Wallace Jr., the four-term governor of Alabama and four-time presidential candidate who will forever be remembered for his largely symbolic, but politically strategic, “standing in the schoolhouse door,” in an attempt to bar admission of two black students to the University of Alabama in 1963.
“My father stood in the schoolhouse door for many reasons,” Peggy Sue said Thursday. “At the end of the day, it was good politics. It made him a household name.”
It also cast a shadow over the life of a 13-year-old girl who did not share her father’s view on race and segregation.
“Even at 13, I was against segregation,” she said. “But in our family, no one asked our opinion. He never really asked for my opinion. I just thought it was wrong. Because my father’s politics were thought to be my politics, it was hard to overcome. Only my closest friends knew how I felt. Everybody else just assumed.”
A couple of years after her father stood in the schoolhouse door, Peggy Sue was provided an opportunity to express her own view on segregation.
“My high school was integrated when I was in 10th grade,” she said. “I wanted to go up to those 11 students who came in to our school that first day and say, “Welcome. You are where you are supposed to be.” But I couldn’t. I was surrounded by guards, so it was a lost opportunity for me to stand my ground and do what my better self wanted to do.”
Peggy Sue went on with life. She finished high school, earned her degree, married (her husband, Mark, is a retired judge in Alabama) and raised two boys.
In 2004, she and Mark were watching the Democratic National Convention. After Illinois Sen. Barack Obama addressed the convention, she remembers turning to her husband and saying, “That man is going to be president of the United States one day.”
In 2007, Peggy Sue endorsed Obama’s presidential candidacy, and after the election she was invited to introduce Obama’s Secretary of State, Eric Holder, at an event in Selma, Alabama.
She’s been traveling the county ever since, telling the story not only of her dad’s virulent racism, but of his well-documented change of heart and her unique perspective on race in America.
Where her father’s early speeches were noted for angry rhetoric, Peggy Sue makes her appeals in the affirmative. Hers is a message of diversity, tolerance, love.
In the late 70s, her father renounced his racist views and sought reconciliation with blacks. He won his final term as governor in 1982 with significant support from black voters and made good on his promises, appointing blacks to many offices, including two cabinet positions.
That part of the story, Peggy Sue finds especially comforting.
“There are some people who cannot change,” she said. “You have to hope maybe their hearts will change, but some just won’t, can’t. Fortunately, my father’s heart did change.
“It was a beautiful thing for his children and grandchildren to see.”
It is at that point that the stories of our two dads converge.
When my dad was in his 80s, not too many years before his death, he sat in his den, with three of his grandchildren. I’m not sure how the topic came up, really, but my father began to speak softly:
“We were wrong,” he told his grandchildren. “We shouldn’t have treated (blacks) the way we treated them. I’m so sorry for that.”
Peggy Sue was right.
It was, and is, a beautiful thing.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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