George Wallace in Wisconsin

The Divisive Campaigns that Shaped a Civil Rights Legacy

Ben Hubing

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781439674451
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A revealing account of the tensions that embroiled Wisconsinites as Alabama Governor Wallace took his struggle north of the Mason-Dixon Line

George Wallace ran for president four times between 1964 and 1976. In the Badger State, his campaigns fueled a debate over constitutional principles and values. Wallace weaponized states' rights, arguing that the federal government should stay out of school segregation, promote law and order, restrict forced busing, and reduce burdensome taxation. White working-class Wisconsinites armed themselves with Wallace's rhetoric, pushing back on changes that threatened the status quo. Civil rights activists and the Black community in Wisconsin armed themselves with a different constitutional principle, equal protection, to push for strong federal protection of their civil rights. This clash of ideals nearly became literal as protests and counter-protests erupted until gradually diminishing as Wallace's political fortunes waned.

Historian Ben Hubing explores the tumult surrounding the so-called little man with the big mouth.

1

STAGE SETTING FOR A SHOWDOWN IN MONTGOMERY AND MILWAUKEE

FEDERALISM AND EQUAL PROTECTION DIVERGE IN WISCONSIN

In 1854, national forces had engulfed local events in Wisconsin. An enslaved man named Joshua Glover had escaped from Missouri and settled in Racine to live a quiet but free life two years earlier. However, when Glover’s former enslaver discovered his whereabouts, he obtained an affidavit and, with the help of a posse, violently captured Glover and brought him to a Milwaukee jail to hold him before they were to return to Missouri.¹

The federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required that escaped enslaved people be returned to enslavers in the South and criminalized the act of aiding an enslaved person find freedom. However, Wisconsin had a strong network of abolitionists who opposed slavery and actively helped assist escaped enslaved people via the Underground Railroad. Glover’s detention mobilized these abolitionists, and after a meeting outside the jail led by abolitionist journalist Sherman Booth, the crowd kicked down the outer door, used a beam as a battering ram and freed Glover from the prison cell in a dramatic act of defiance against the federal statute.²

Glover escaped to Canada, but his freedom built momentum in Wisconsin, culminating with the state supreme court ruling that federal courts could not imprison Booth, declaring the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional and in essence nullifying federal law.³ This shocking rebuke of federal authority led to a series of clashes between the federal and state courts, concluding with the U.S. Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roger Taney, reversing the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision, arguing that the state courts were lower in the hierarchy and that federal laws overruled the states.⁴

On the eve of the Civil War, in the midst of a federal crisis on civil rights, Wisconsin abolitionists and the state supreme court utilized federalism to advocate for the equal protection of the state’s Black residents. Activists were willing to defy federal statutes and authority to ensure equal rights for African Americans. A century later, national momentum around civil rights would reemerge in the United States, but this time, federalism and equal protection would be ideals at odds. Black leaders and activists would begin to demand greater federal authority to ensure the rights of African Americans in the Badger State, while proponents of federalism would find an outsider to amplify their desires to thwart federal authority and preserve the unequal status quo.

“SEGREGATION FOREVER!”

When the newly elected governor of Alabama stepped up to the podium on January 14, 1963, George Wallace began his career with the defiant pledge to protect “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!”⁵ After facing defeat four years earlier in his gubernatorial race, Wallace came away with the lesson that he had been “out-n——ed” by his opponent and vowed to take an aggressive stance on racial issues. His campaign and early years as governor were defined by his opposition to Black equality and any federal role in protecting the rights of African Americans in his state. From the beginning, Wallace intended to tap into feelings of grievance and powerlessness among white Alabamians following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which declared segregation in the public schools was unconstitutional.⁶ Wallace vehemently denied being a racist but proudly defended being a segregationist. His gripe, he claimed, was not with Black Alabamians, but with a federal government intervening in the laws and customs of his state. According to historian Dan Carter, Wallace replaced the “age old southern cry of ‘N—— , n——’” with “political equivalents of apple pie and motherhood: the rights of private property, community control, neighborhood schools, and union seniority.”⁷

While the prejudices and personal beliefs of the governor may not be knowable with complete certainty, one Wallace biographer aptly stated that whether he was a bigot or dog whistling to win support, “In the end, an opportunist is no better than a racist, and less honest.”⁸

STAND IN THE SCHOOLHOUSE DOOR

While a poor boy from a small Alabama town called Clio might have seen his ascendancy to governor of his state as the pinnacle, Wallace had his eyes on the presidency from the beginning. And as it would happen, events in his home state would propel the first-term governor into the national spotlight.

His first major showdown with the federal government came a few months later in the fall of 1962, as the integration of the University of Alabama became an issue for the governor to employ his federalism-based rhetoric. When the Kennedy administration put pressure on Wallace to comply with the federal court order to integrate by sending Attorney General Bobby Kennedy to meet with Wallace, the dialogue and any hopes of cooperation evaporated.⁹ Wallace pledged to “stand in the schoolhouse door” to prevent federal troops from integrating the university against the wishes of the state government. Despite his rhetoric, federal judge Seybourn H. Lynn granted the Justice Department an injunction that prevented Wallace from interfering with the admission of two Black students, James Hood and Vivian Malone. The judge pointed out that the U.S. Supreme Court “had rejected the doctrine of interposition” and the governor lacked constitutional grounds to “obstruct or prevent execution of lawful orders of a court of the United States.”¹⁰

On June 11, 1963, Kennedy sent Assistant Attorney General Nick Katzenbach to the campus to ensure the students were allowed to enroll, which led to a public confrontation between Wallace and the Justice Department. Wallace greeted Katzenbach at a podium, ready to make a statement with the media present. Wallace claimed that state sovereignty was violated by “an illegal usurpation of power by the Central Government” and ended with his pledge to “denounce and forbid this illegal and unwarranted action by the Central Government.”¹¹ Invoking the Tenth Amendment, Wallace claimed that states had reserved authority over the operation of schools and that forcible integration of schools was “an attempt to subordinate the rights of self-determination by individuals and states to the wishes of the federal government.”¹² Despite the rhetoric, Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard, and Wallace had no choice but to back down.¹³

The same night as the showdown in Tuscaloosa, President Kennedy addressed the American people over television, calling for Congress pass a civil rights bill to provide increased federal authority to end de jure segregation and outlaw discrimination based on race, sex, creed or national origin.¹⁴ Wallace blasted the proposal as akin to “military dictatorship” and a violation of federal and executive power.¹⁵ Despite his inability to stop Hood and Malone from enrolling at the University of Alabama, Wallace was determined to defeat the pending Civil Rights Bill.

Wallace continued his conflict with federal officials a few months later in Birmingham, again coming up on the losing end. He had pressured city officials to close their public schools rather than integrate, but as he did in Tuscaloosa, he was forced to back away from his defiant efforts in the face of court orders to change course.¹⁶ But it was the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September 15 that increased tension between the federal and state officials. Wallace blamed the bombing on “the Supreme Court, the Kennedy administration and civil rights agitators,” while Kennedy became emboldened to push for a federal civil rights bill, viewing the state and business leaders as ambivalent in fostering the “climate which Kennedy was convinced had led to the death of four little Black girls.”¹⁷

MILWAUKEE’S INNER CORE

Almost 850 miles north of Montgomery, the civil rights movement was gaining momentum in Milwaukee. Since the 1920s, poverty, white flight and municipal neglect had, according to one study, left the Black neighborhoods of the city of Milwaukee “dying at its core.” Milwaukee’s Black residents outpaced their white counterparts in infant mortality, welfare use, joblessness and convictions, and they lagged behind in education and homeownership. Milwaukee’s Black population remained relatively small until 1950, when it increased from 13,000 five years earlier to nearly 22,000. That number tripled by 1960 to over 62,000 and rose to over 100,000 people by 1970.¹⁸

While the Black organizations, churches and clubs worked to address the countless challenges of the Black community, they remained “politically powerless, economically impotent, largely ignored and completely marginalized through the 1950s.”¹⁹ De facto segregation in Milwaukee was equal to that of Birmingham and other southern cities. Socialist mayor Frank Zeidler empathized with the Black community and promoted policies of slum clearance and public housing to help rescue the “submerged people” of the inner core.²⁰ This support led to a nasty reelection campaign for the mayor in 1956, in which his opponents tried to stir up opposition with false accusations that he planned to “import African Americans into their neighborhoods” and that he encouraged migration of Black southerners by posting billboards. In what Time magazine blasted as “The Shame of Milwaukee,” the campaign slogan of Milton McGuire, Zeidler’s opponent, called for “an honest white man for mayor.” Although Zeidler won reelection, he would not run again in 1960 and was replaced by Henry Maier, who favored a “go slow” approach with regards to civil rights.²¹ The response to Zeidler demonstrated that there was political capital and support among white Milwaukeeans to opposing and thwarting civil rights.

EMERGENCE OF THE “SELMA OF THE NORTH”

While the most high-profile moments of the civil rights movement were still years away, the movement’s emergence ran parallel to George Wallace’s ascendance in Alabama. It can be argued that the genesis of the organized movement for greater equality for African Americans was the 1958 murder of Daniel Bell, a twenty-two-year-old Black man who fled after being pulled over by police, likely because he did not want to get caught driving without a license. The police fatally shot Bell in the back at close range, and the officers planted a knife and fabricated a coverup story.²²

Bell’s tragic death was “the signal shot for the black freedom movement in Milwaukee,” sparking organized community protests.²³ The Milwaukee NAACP chapter, allied with clergy and community leaders, clashed with more conservative old guard Black leaders about the wisdom in public demonstrations. Eventually, Calvin Sherard established the Crusaders Civic and Social League, which worked to promote Black businesses, increase Black employment and improve police relations. The group began picketing Milwaukee businesses, eventually affiliating with A. Philip Randolph’s Negro American Labor Council.²⁴ While gaining only limited success and community support, the MNALC organized “the first demonstrations in Milwaukee where people hit the streets and went to jail for their freedoms.”²⁵

As Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door and Kennedy called on the nation to act, a Black paper, the Milwaukee Star, called the president’s speech “one of the greatest speeches of all time” but made no connection to the emerging civil rights movement in Milwaukee.²⁶ Civil rights groups picketed outside city hall, calling for federal civil rights legislation, while Mayor Maier called for the “go slow” approach. By 1963, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had founded a Milwaukee chapter, and it now pushed for a nonviolent approach that was nonetheless more aggressive than the cautious approach of old guard Black leaders. The new group’s first test was in response to a comment from a sausage company president, Fred Lins, who told a reporter that preventing the “ignorant poor” from migrating to Milwaukee would save taxpayers from spending on welfare. Lins was a member of Mayor Maier’s Social Development Commission, tasked with addressing urban problems and gaining federal funds for urban renewal. MCORE began its first campaign with picketing, sit-ins, letter writing and phone-ins. While Lins remained on the commission, the protests unified the Black community, as it became apparent to the more cautious old guard that appeals to white leaders were not fruitful and direct action was needed.

In early 1964, activists began focusing on school integration as their primary issue. Despite the landmark decision Brown v. Board ending school segregation a decade earlier, Milwaukee schools remained largely segregated. Led by Lloyd Barbee, activists pushed for “system-wide racial balance” and opposed Milwaukee Public Schools’ policy of “intact busing,” in which Black students were brought to white schools but kept as a separate unit that was taught separately. The policy even went so far as to return the Black children home for lunch to avoid sharing a cafeteria with white students.²⁷ As Wallace entered the Wisconsin primary, Barbee and others created a new organization called the Milwaukee United School Integration Committee (MUSIC), meant to unite various civil rights groups under an umbrella organization to tackle school integration.²⁸

The crescendo of the civil rights mov...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Stage Setting for a Showdown in Montgomery and Milwaukee
• 2. 1964 Wisconsin Democratic Primary: Wallace Weaponizes Federalism
• 3. 1964 Wisconsin Democratic Primary: Civil Rights and Equal Protection
• 4. 1968 Presidential Campaign: Stand Up for Wisconsin! Wallace and Milwaukee Civil Rights on the National Stage
• 5. 1972 Presidential Campaign, The Beginning of the End
• 6. 1976 Presidential Campaign, Denouement
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author