The Broken Road of Peggy Wallace Kennedy

All white Southerners live with the sins of their fathers. But what if your dad was one of the most famous segregationists in history? Veteran Alabama journalist Frye Gaillard visits the daughter of George Wallace.

Story by Frye Gaillard | Photographs by Wes Frazer

January 7, 2020

In the family’s pilgrimage into that history, they absorbed the quiet at the King gravesite, the reverential whispers among the tourists who had gathered, then walked together up a residential street – “like any other,” Mark remembers – to the house where Dr. King had lived. As they wandered through the rooms, the parents could see in the eyes of their son that Martin Luther King was becoming realer, more than a statue or stick figure from the past, but a man with a family who had lived in this place, and who was murdered when he was only 39 years old.

Then came the museum. It was a newly constructed memorial to the work of Dr. King and the turbulence and progress of the Civil Rights Movement. As they rounded a corner, they came to an exhibit – a story told in large photographs – of an ugly time in the Heart of Dixie. There was George Wallace in the schoolhouse door, there were the dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, and the rubble of the 16th Street Baptist Church, where four young girls, barely older than Burns, had been killed by a bomb. And finally, there were images from the Edmund Pettus Bridge: Alabama State Troopers, ordered by Wallace to stop a march from Selma to Montgomery, beating demonstrators senseless in a cloud of tear gas. 

After a long and somber silence, Burns looked up at his mother and asked: “Why did Paw Paw do those things to other people?”

More than 20 years later, Peggy grows emotional when she tells that story. 

“It was the question,” she says, “that changed my life, I thought to myself, ‘I’ve got to do for Burns what my father never did for me.’ I drew him close and said, ‘Paw Paw never told me why he did those things. Maybe we will have to make it right.’”

In the years since, Peggy has tried. Slowly and quietly she has emerged as an advocate of peace and reconciliation. Now, in the shadow of another troubled time, she has published a memoir about her experience. The book, written in collaboration with Mark, is called The Broken Road: George Wallace and a Daughter’s Journey to Reconciliation. As the title suggests, this is really two stories in one. It is Peggy’s first of all. Her struggle to overcome the sins of the past is a familiar journey to many white Southerners, but few people feel the burden more keenly than the daughter of George Wallace himself.

That is the second story in her book – her father’s. In her telling, George Wallace was a gifted politician who left a legacy of racism and rage, and knew that he had done it, and desperately, urgently sought to make amends. This is a daughter’s portrait of a man who led three public lives, who fashioned, in a sense, three political careers. Ambition practiced with decency defined two of those – the first and the last. But the one in the middle, the one history remembers, stoked the fires of division and hate. And through it all there was the specter of pain. That is where the Wallace story begins. The redemption Peggy offers in The Broken Road is the hope that pain is not where it will end.

George Wallace III spent a troubled boyhood in Clio, Alabama, a town described by journalist Theodore White as a “seedy, mournful village,” where the people found respite from the drudgeries of life in gossip about politics and race. In this desultory place, when others his age might dream of being a cowboy, or perhaps a fireman or baseball star, George Wallace dreamed of something different: He wanted to be governor of Alabama.

He came from a family of fading rural prominence. His grandfather, the first George Wallace, was a country doctor who often bartered his service with small-town patients who could not pay. It was a modest patriarchy rooted in respect, though not in wealth, and respect would vanish in the next generation. By any measure, the second George Wallace, father of the future governor, was a source of misery for his family. Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, he was, as one of his sons remembered, “a man of indiscretion and perpetual drunkenness.” In The Broken Road, Peggy offers this description of her father’s childhood:

When Daddy and his brothers, Gerald and Jack, were young boys, my grandfather would push the living room furniture up against the walls, roll up the rugs, and force the three boys to fight. The Clio telephone company was on the second floor of the building across the street and the operator could see right into Daddy’s living room. On fight nights, the operator agreed to time the rounds and ring the Wallace phone when each was over. Sometimes she would ring the phone early when the fighting got out of hand. Most times that act of mercy didn’t matter – a round was over when my grandfather said it was and not a moment sooner. On many nights the fight ended with my grandfather passed out drunk on the floor. When that happened, his wife, Mozelle, covered him with a blanket while her sons went off to lick their wounds. 

Besides a father’s cruelty and a mother’s helpless inability to stop it, there was the fact that everybody knew. A family once respected for the healer at its head was now the object of pity and disdain, the whispered gossip of a small Southern town. For the youngest George Wallace, politics – the great bloodsport of the rural South – became his chosen path of escape. As a teenager serving as a legislative page, he stood erect on the star near the steps of the capitol, where Jefferson Davis had taken his oath as the Confederacy’s president, and dreamed of the day when he would take an oath.

“I knew then,” he said later, “that I would be governor.”

In the 1940s, during Wallace’s early pursuit of that goal, he allied himself with the progressive wing of Alabama politics. An unexpected truth of history is that Alabama, in those days, was home to some of the most liberal leaders in the South – men nationally respected in the Democratic Party. U.S. Sen. Lister Hill was the dean of politics in the state, a man most remembered for his 1946 legislation, the Hill-Burton Act, to fund hospitals in rural America. As a senator with strong New Deal sensibilities, Hill supported increases in the minimum wage and federal funding of libraries and schools. His Senate protégé John Sparkman followed his lead, earning such admiration in the party he was chosen in 1952 as the running mate for Adlai Stevenson. 

But all of that changed with the issue of race – a reality from which Hill and Sparkman both retreated in a way that George Wallace did not. Not at first. Instinctively, as a young politician, he was drawn to Big Jim Folsom, one of Alabama’s most colorful governors. Folsom was, in the words of journalist Ray Jenkins, “something of a closet integrationist.” He once shared drinks in the governor’s mansion with Adam Clayton Powell, a fearless advocate of civil rights, who represented Harlem in Congress. And when segregationists complained, as he knew they would, Folsom dismissed them as “hound dogs baying at the moon.”

More substantially, Folsom appointed registrars, particularly in Macon County and Mobile, who opened the rolls to thousands of black voters. Though often accused of corruption, Folsom was a man who meant to make a difference. Wallace knew this, and as a Folsom supporter he asked the governor to appoint him to the board of Tuskegee Institute, the college founded by Booker T. Washington. By all accounts, Wallace served conscientiously, which was also true in the 1950s when he was elected as an Alabama Circuit Judge.

“George Wallace,” said J.L. Chestnut, a black civil-rights attorney from Selma, “was the most liberal judge I ever practiced in front of. He was the first judge in Alabama to call me ‘Mister’ in his courtroom.”

Wallace brought those same sensibilities – the economic populism of the New Deal and a message of racial moderation – to his first run for governor in 1958. 

“He cared about things like roads and schools,” his daughter remembers, “things that would actually make life better.” As election day approached, Wallace stared at the camera in a TV ad, his dark eyes softer than they would later become, and declared, with an evident sense of conviction: “I want to tell the good people of this state … if I didn’t have what it took to treat a man fair regardless of the color of his skin, then I don’t have what it takes to be the governor of your great state.”

Wallace, however, faced a formidable opponent. John Patterson, the state’s segregationist attorney general, made no promises about treating people fairly. Taking a stance he would later regret, Patterson drew a hard line on the issue of race. “Once you let the bar down,” he proclaimed, “it’s all over.” He ran with support from the Ku Klux Klan, and told the voters he was “honored” to have it. He won in a landslide. 

In The Broken Road, Peggy Kennedy writes of a sad election night with her family: “Daddy gathered us up and took us to a waiting car to drive to a local television station on the outskirts of Montgomery. He was going to concede. I sat in the middle of the front seat next to Daddy and buried my face in his side. I felt his arm surround me as he pulled me close and whispered: ‘Well, we lost, Sugah, but it is going to be all right. Sweetie, now don’t you cry.’ The tears I was drying with the handkerchief he pulled from his pocket were not for me, they were for him.”

She also writes of the dark underside of that tender moment. A few days after his defeat, Wallace paid a visit to Seymore Trammell, the district attorney of Barbour County, Alabama, who had been one of the leaders in his campaign. “Seymore,” he said, “I was outniggered by John Patterson, and I’ll tell you here and now, I will never be outniggered again.”

In a sense, in that ugly and fateful declaration, Wallace announced the end of his first career and embarked on a path of cynical ambition that would cause indelible harm. His Faustian bargain became a source of pain for his family – especially a little girl who, then as later, always wanted to love him. 

He had long been an absentee father, and in the four years that followed his first run for governor, the distance grew worse. Wallace brooded and raged, and disappeared from home for long periods of time. All his life, he had dreamed of being governor, and now, at 39, he faced the possibility it might not happen. Desperate for attention, he began to spend most of his time in Montgomery, hanging out in restaurants, hotel lobbies, and bars – anywhere he might find a crowd. He was drinking again, sometimes heavily, and he became less discreet in the womanizing that had always enraged his wife, Lurleen. There were frequent fights when he came home, during which she often threatened to leave him. 

“What can you do, Lurleen?” Wallace would say. “You don’t have any skills. You’re not smart. Where are you going to go? How are you going to live?”

“He could be brutal,” writes Peggy. “Hard as nails. I went numb inside when Daddy treated Mama that way.”

Finally, Lurleen left. She packed up her children (Peggy was the second of four) and moved to her parents’ house outside of Tuscaloosa. It occurred to her then, that there might be a way to make her husband change. Lurleen vowed to file for divorce. This was Alabama in the 1950s, and divorce, she knew, would be a deal-breaker for too many voters. Wallace got the message. His brother Gerald, who admired Lurleen, warned him he better make things right, or “you will be a two-time loser and going to somebody else’s inauguration come January of 1963.”

Wallace did what he had to do.

George Wallace’s walking cane.

When he ran for governor in 1962, with Lurleen now back at his side, he campaigned with a kind of bare-knuckled ferocity that would soon become his trademark. As Dan Carter noted in The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics, Wallace understood the resentments that simmered in a state like his own – a place deeply scarred by its rural poverty, where the struggles of life could sometimes ennoble, but just as often embitter. And buried somewhere near the heart of it all was the issue of race.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rick Bragg, who grew up hard in northern Alabama, remembered being a boy at a Wallace rally, too young to understand all of what was being said, but still grasping the fundamental message: People like his family were better than blacks. “We had not known,” Bragg wrote, “that we were better than anybody.”

Peggy Kennedy writes of an almost frightening kind of excitement when her father won and took the oath of office. At the age of 12, she was awestruck by the ceremony of inauguration day – and by the roaring approval that came from the crowd when Wallace, a superb Southern orator, delivered an address written for him by a Klansman: “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 now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

The story of the next 10 years is all too familiar. Wallace unleashed a torrent of incendiary rhetoric that created a climate in which many people were killed. These were the images that came to define him: a bombed-out church, police dogs tearing at a teenager’s flesh, and always Wallace’s jutting jaw and defiant words, stirring the racism that was always there. Peggy knew that this was true. She also knew that when her father ran for president in 1964 and 1968, he helped teach the nation to think in code. His campaign slogan, Stand Up for America, really meant, she admits, “stand up for white Southerners,” or the white working class in the North and Midwest. 

In a grim foreshadowing of a future time, she saw the violence at his campaign rallies. 

“In 1968,” she says, “he had a lot of African American protesters who would fight with Wallace people. I remember people throwing chairs.” 

Wallace himself did little to discourage it. In June 1968, while railing against “anarchist demonstrators and hippies,” he told an audience of his supporters in Memphis, “If you will elect me president and any anarchists lie down in front of my car, that will be the last car they ever lie down in front of.” This was the dark and brilliant heart of his charisma, to reach deep into the resentments of the crowd and stir them into a catharsis of hate – to make the people in his audience believe their worst instincts were actually their best. It was a potent toxin in America, and, some would argue, it changed the political DNA of this country. 

Then came 1972. On May 15, running for president yet again, Wallace was shot at a campaign rally in Maryland. The bullet pierced his spine. Peggy, who was then in college, flew to Maryland and rushed to Holy Cross Hospital, where he had undergone life-saving surgery. There was an eerie unreality about the scene.

A battery of surgical lights suspended from the ceiling over Daddy’s bed cast beams of pure white. Humming machines with blinking red and green lights and tubes sprouting from their bottoms and sides stood haphazardly about. I shivered in the cold. Armed Secret Service agents stood in the shadows…. “Hey, Daddy, this is Peggy,” I said. “I came to see you as fast as I could.” I began to cry. Daddy looked my way. “Now, sweetie, don’t you cry. It’s going to be all right.”

In the coming hours, other visitors would make their way to his bedside. One of them was Ethel Kennedy, who, four years earlier, had lost her husband to an assassin. She said Robert Kennedy would want her to be there. The visit surprised and moved Peggy, but the most astonishing well-wisher of all was a woman who was also running for president. Shirley Chisholm was a fierce trailblazer, the first woman to seek the presidential nomination of a major party, and the first black woman elected to Congress. Among the ranks of her followers was a former Black Panther named Barbara Lee, who now represents California in Congress. Lee warned Chisholm sternly, “Don’t you go visit that racist.”

Chisholm brushed the warning aside. 

During her short time in Congress, besides her militant pursuit of equality, Chisholm had established a counter-reputation for reaching across the aisle, and working with people very different from herself. She collaborated with Sen. Bob Dole, a Kansas Republican, to create the still-standing nutrition program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Because of white allies, Chisholm said, “poor babies have milk and poor children have food.” But now, her spirit of generosity was being pushed to new and untested limits. George Wallace stood for things she found repugnant. And yet, he was also a human being. As Wallace lay badly wounded in a hospital bed, unable to move the lower parts of his body, Chisolm reached out.

“She and daddy talked real low,” remembers Peggy. “They prayed together. Daddy asked her, ’What are your people going to say about you being here?’ She told him it didn’t matter: ‘I would not want this to happen to anyone.’ Daddy’s face changed. There was just something that came over him. I think a seed was planted that day.” 

Mark Kennedy (no relation to the Massachusetts political dynasty), who later became close to his father-in-law – “as close as anybody could be to the governor” – thought Wallace had never been a man of empathy. But now. In the visit with Shirley Chisholm, he had been its recipient, in a way he never expected.

And all he could do was lie there and think about it.

In the months and years that followed, George Wallace talked to his daughter and son-in-law about the 1960s, including the Birmingham church bombing, and how — to use Peggy’s unflinching words — “his actions and rhetoric had caused four little girls to die.” Sometimes, Wallace grew defensive, and his thoughts were a jumble of rationalization. In The Broken Road, Peggy writes of a conversation in which he declared: “I was never against the blacks. I never, in any of my speeches, made slanderous or derogatory comments about the blacks…. I resent the continuing branding of me as a racist…. The issue I felt so strongly about was the issue of the growing federal bureaucracy and how it would devastate the state’s sovereign power.”

As he made his way through the bitterness that went with his wounds and his depression over life as a paraplegic, his introspections grew more honest. No, he was not just talking about states’ rights, and yes, he was sorry for his mistakes. In his later years, said Peggy in a recent interview, her father would talk for hours “about how wrong he was on race and segregation.”  

“I know that now,” he told her. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about it.”

Nor was this merely his private remorse. On a Sunday morning in 1979, Wallace made an unannounced visit to Dr. King’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where he told the congregation, “I have learned what suffering means. 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 for forgiveness.”

Some observers in Alabama, including white journalists like the late Bob Ingram, remained forever skeptical about Wallace’s remorse. Many people, said Ingram, thought the governor was merely “auditioning for heaven,” while others noted that he “knew how to count.” African Americans, once denied the ballot, now registered to vote in large numbers, and in his final run for governor, Wallace overwhelmingly won their votes. As Peggy acknowledges in The Broken Road, he paid that particular political debt.

During his last term of office, beginning in 1983, Daddy would appoint 160 African American Alabamians to state boards and agencies and double the number of black voter registrars in Alabama’s sixty-seven counties. … He had done what he could to disenfranchise and even destroy the black community, and Daddy believed God struck him down for what he had done. He began to come to terms with the suffering he had caused others. There was a connection in his mind between his journey to redemption through suffering and African Americans’ journey to freedom through suffering.

That is the larger truth Peggy holds in her heart, and offers in the pages of her book: The change in George Wallace was genuine and deep, and he was, at the end of his career, the man that he had been at the start. This is the heart of her reconciliation, her affirmation of hope. But for Peggy, like her father, none of this came without a price.

In the end, The Broken Road is a multi-layered memoir, searing in its candor. If the life of George Wallace commands our attention, the story of his daughter is nearly as dramatic. We find her there, in these same pages, as she recounts the sting of a father’s neglect, and how she cringed at his ugly treatment of her mother. By her teenage years, things were better in the Governor’s mansion, but even then she could feel something wasn’t right. Her father’s politics were deeply disturbing, and there were few people she could talk to about it. 

“In our family,” she says, “no one asked me for my opinion. I really had no voice.”

She could share other things with her mother and felt safe in her presence. Lurleen Wallace was a warm-hearted woman, who loved her children and the company of friends, loved to water-ski and fish, and find other ways to have a good time. But Lurleen was also dying of cancer. In April 1968, she gave her daughter a pair of diamond earrings to wear to the prom, then died soon afterward on May 7. For a brief time, George Wallace fell apart. He wept in the privacy of his home and left his daughter to struggle with her grief. 

Abruptly, however, he found relief on the campaign trail – a transformation so immediate and sudden that even some supporters found it unseemly. When he ran for president in 1968, Peggy sometimes traveled with him; she loved her father and needed him now as she continued to mourn the loss of Lurleen. But she knew that family was a distant second in his life, compared to the adrenalin rush of politics. She lived with that truth for the rest of her life. Four years later, she absorbed the shock of the shooting in Maryland, and Wallace’s difficulty in coming to terms with it, even as he wrestled with the sins of his past.

Not long after that trauma, she says, she made one of the best decisions of her life. She married Mark Kennedy. At first, their road together was rocky. As a husband, and later as a father, Mark was everything that George Wallace was not. He was a listener, for one thing. He actually wanted to know what she thought, and Peggy had trouble believing it was real. She grew detached. Chronic depression stalked her life, worsened by the terrors of migraine headaches - and once, when a bad one put her in the hospital, the doctors found a tumor behind her eye.

“That sank in,” she remembers, “and my psyche said, ‘I’ve had enough. I think I’ll have a little psychotic break.’”

She found herself in a psychiatric ward, screaming at her family for allowing the staff to put her in restraints. It was a long road back, a journey she made with her husband and two sons, and she was grateful for the depth of their understanding. The experience reaffirmed what she already knew; the love of her family was unconditional, and even when there was no crisis, they valued the things she had to say. It gave her confidence, reinforcing the belief that she could make it through. 

“We were here for her,” says Mark, “but Peggy was strong. She pulled herself out of a dark place.”

Together, they resumed their journey of conscience, paying homage to Dr. King and embracing the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. With Peggy’s support, Mark became active in politics, running successfully for the Alabama Supreme Court, then serving as chairman of the state Democratic Party. In 2008, they worked and voted for Barack Obama, and on November 5, the day after the election, Peggy wrote an article for CNN in which she offered a startling speculation. If her father were still alive, she wrote, “There is a substantial chance, though not a certainty, that he would put an ‘X’ by Barack Obama’s name.”

Because of the recognition that followed, she was invited in the spring of 2009 to take part in an annual celebration of the Bloody Sunday March. In the course of that commemoration, she walked hand-in-hand across the Edmund Pettus Bridge with Georgia Congressman John Lewis, who was among the marchers beaten savagely by Alabama State Troopers on that day in 1965. They paused at the summit of the bridge, and she remembered the image on the television screen, when she had watched with her mother in the governor’s mansion, of a young John Lewis in a tan trench coat, absorbing the troopers’ blows. Now, here he was, lost, apparently, in thoughts of his own as they gazed at the swirling brown river below. 

“It was as if,” she wrote, “the water was … washing away the pain of the past and giving me the courage to step away and find my true self. ‘Well, sister,’ John finally said, ‘Guess it’s time for the two of us to move forward. Now you hold my hand till we get to the other side.’”

“I found my voice that day,” she says. “I made the choice to speak up and speak out every chance I got.”

Other extraordinary moments have followed. In 2015, on another anniversary, she found herself on the steps of the Alabama Capitol, holding hands this time with Bernice King. It was easy, again, to get lost in the past, and she reflected on the day in 1963, when Bernice’s father, Martin Luther King, had offered his olive branch to the nation. He had proclaimed what seemed more like a fantasy than a dream: “One day down in Alabama … little black boys and little black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and little white girls as sisters and brothers.” A half-century later, Peggy was standing in solidarity with Bernice. 

“We hugged each other,” Peggy remembers, “and I told her I loved her. She said she loved me, too. And we do.” 

Later, she writes, “I could not help but wonder how the course of history might have been different if Martin Luther King and Daddy had known that one day, right down here in Alabama, that little black girl and little white girl holding hands would be their own daughters.”

All of this has given her a sense of purpose, and as an advocate for peace and social justice, she has raised her voice in multiple settings – at universities and churches and civil-rights celebrations, and sometimes before delegations from Congress. Doug Tanner, a Methodist minister and founding director of the Faith and Politics Institute in Washington, D.C., has been the architect of some of those appearances. 

"I've seen her move Congressional audiences to tears," he says, “and as a writer, she has opened a window onto tragedy and shame – and in a profoundly personal way, the possibility of redemption."

But redemption, inevitably, is haunted by the past, and she has seen the through-line from the worst of Wallace to the presidency of Donald Trump. She knows the dread many feel – a fear that maybe the last 50 years have produced a perfect storm of division from which it will be hard for the country to heal. And on the issue she cares about most, the racial justice her father once opposed, she has seen the threat to hard-earned progress. Still, she holds on to hope. She believes it is possible for decency to triumph. She has seen it before. This is the lesson she learned with her father, even as she understood what it cost.