When George Wallace Came to South Bend

Ken Bradford remembers when Wallace brought racism to town... and South Bend turned out to listen

BY KEN BRADFORD // POSTED AUGUST 3, 2025

Among the things I've kept is a vintage campaign button that says, “Wallace for President/Stand Up for America.”

For years, I thought I had gotten the campaign button while George Wallace was appearing at South Bend's Morris Civic Auditorium in April of 1972.

I'm frequently wrong. As it turns out, “Stand Up for America” was his 1968 slogan, when he led a third-party campaign against Richard Nixon and Humbert Humphrey. In 1972 when he ran in the Democrat presidential primaries and came to South Bend, his dominant slogan seems to have been “Send Them a Message.”

I've kept items like this and my “Nixon's the One” bumper sticker handy as a reminder to myself how haywire things can go. I'm afraid we've forgotten far too much about Nixon but also about George Wallace, his presidential campaigns, the message he wanted to send, and to whom.

Wallace was a national phenomenon. And though he wasn't ignorant, with his angry, barking Southern drawl, he appeared so. What we knew of his campaign rallies seemed like parodies of themselves, featuring fire-and-brimstone preachers and corn-pone country bands.

To me, at age 17, his popularity made no sense. This I had to see for myself.

I was too young to vote in the 1972 Indiana primary, but I would be 18 in time for the general election. For my friends Jim and Mike, this would be our first rally, and we stood in line outside the Morris Civic that Tuesday night, April 18, 1972.

We wouldn't have guessed how deeply Wallace was represented in our community. Waiting in line with us were not the spiffed-up folks in suits and ties like you would see in our church or at school gatherings. It was more like families you would see at the county fair, spending more money they could afford.

The Morris was filled that night, but we found seats in the balcony. After about 30 minutes of the side-show stuff, Wallace began his shout. It seemed both crazed and well-rehearsed.

He stayed away from overt race issues. In those days — and maybe these days too — the racism was expressed in a sort of cultural code. Those preachers. Those banjos. The cowboy shirts. Then you look around. No black faces.

When he spoke about government over-reach, it didn't take a flow chart for us to figure out his message was about school integration. He blamed it all on pointy-headed liberals — “bee-yoo-roh-crats,” he called them.

The crowd loved him, as far as we could tell. From where we were sitting, we didn't hear the drowned-out heckling and booing from a handful of protesters.

But as we filed out, the three of us clean-cut teens were confronted by a middle-aged man who began yelling at us for disrespecting the candidate. He tried to provoke us into a fight. I suppose he had heard young people heckling and decided to fight the next young person he saw.

We walked away.

I didn't know much about politics then, but Wallace didn't strike me as a guy who knew how to solve problems. He was like a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon character. We desperately needed someone to get us out of Vietnam, and all he did was shout about bee-yoo-roh-crats.

It occurs to me now that some readers are saying, “George Who?”

I'll provide a quick summary.

Wallace was a four-term governor of Alabama, back in the days when Democrats ruled in almost all of the southern states. He had lost his first big political race, at age 39 in 1958, for the Democratic nomination for governor.

His opponent had been endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan while the NAACP supported Wallace. He felt that his acceptance of black votes had made him look too soft on segregation, and he told aides, “Well, boys, no other son-of-a-bitch will ever outn----r me again.”

And so it went. Elected governor in 1962, he became a hero for racists everywhere in June 1963 by defying President Kennedy's directive to integrate the University of Alabama. Wallace stood blocking the doorway there until U.S. Army troops accompanied the first two black students to enroll.

It's easy to forget how widespread racism — or as they liked to say then, separate but equal — was in the 1960s. Even up north, where black folks were allowed more rights and privileges, a significant percentage of white folks weren't buying into equality.

The Republican Party typically was reviled in the South. It was, after all, the party of Abraham Lincoln. It was the party that freed the slaves and wreaked havoc on Southern traditions during the War Between the States.

Largely because of his work on behalf of segregation, Wallace became a candidate in the 1964 Democrat presidential primaries, and he received surprisingly good support in several northern states, including Indiana.

Then in 1968, as Republican nominee Richard Nixon began wooing disenchanted Southerners, Wallace formed a third party that carried five previously reliable Democrat states. In states he didn't carry, Wallace clawed into Hubert Humphrey's totals enough that the door was open for Nixon to win the presidency.

In 1972, Wallace set his sights on winning the nomination of Democrats, the party he had basically ruined four years earlier. His voting bloc would consist of the segregationists he already had nationwide plus a wide swath of working stiffs who had lost faith in America.

These hardhats blamed the government in part because of the bungling of the Vietnam war, but they also were uneasy with the social upheavals brought on by the rise of feminism, free love, drugs and rock 'n' roll. As church-goers, they clung to the Old Rugged Cross.

Wallace's “Stand Up for America” in 1968 had been a call to roll back these social changes. In 1972, his “Send Them a Message” made villains out of all who had benefited from a more peace-loving, open-minded society.

Most of us don't remember this, but Wallace nearly pulled it off.

Humphrey, the early favorite to win the Democrat nomination, won our state primary May 2 with 47 percent of the vote, but Wallace finished a close second with 41 percent.

And lest we try to blame the rubes downstate for the Wallace movement, the South Bend Tribune reported that Wallace beat Humphrey in St. Joseph County by some 2,000 votes and prevailed in our congressional district as well.

Humphrey told the Tribune's Jack Colwell: “Indiana is a second Alabama to Wallace.”

It's hard to disagree.

Wallace now had all the momentum heading into some big primary states — New York, New Jersey, California and Oregon, among them. But you likely know what happened less than two weeks after the Indiana primary. He was shot five times in a Maryland parking lot by a loner named Arthur Bremer.

Paralyzed from the waist down, Wallace still won the Michigan and Maryland primaries the next day. But he was hospitalized and unable to continue his campaign, so he withdrew his candidacy in July.

Wallace had done well enough elsewhere to win primaries in six states — Michigan, Maryland, Tennessee, North Carolina, Alabama and Florida. In total votes, he received 3,755,424 (23.5 percent), good for third overall nationwide, closely behind Humphrey and George McGovern.

McGovern squirreled away enough delegate votes to win at the convention. In November, though, he was clobbered by Nixon, who made a clean sweep of those southern states Wallace would have carried. McGovern won only one state, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia.

The southern states forgot about the Party of Lincoln jazz and have been Republican strongholds ever since.

Wallace gave it one more try in 1976. But just as voters in those days were squeamish about candidates who were black or female, they couldn't see themselves voting for someone in a wheelchair. He won Democratic primaries in Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina but ultimately stepped aside as another Southerner, Jimmy Carter, earned the nomination.

He made a brief stop in South Bend in late April that year, long enough to get his picture taken and sign a list of delegates after wheeling off the plane at Michiana Regional.

That local delegate list is interesting, by the way. Most of these Wallace Democrats likely became Reagan and, if they lived long enough, MAGA Republicans. The most interesting name from Mishawaka, which I choose not to repeat, is of the self-described international imperial wizard of the Nation Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

Wallace retreated to Alabama, completed his term as governor and added another term before his death in 1998. His legacy lived on, but mainly in the hearts of Republicans.

Part of Ronald Reagan's bedrock appeal in the 1980s was unquestionably racial. When he spoke of “welfare queens and their Cadillacs,” no one needed to ask him the race of those women in question.

His successor, George H.W. Bush, won easily over Michael Dukakis in 1988 in a campaign with ads that featured Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who committed more violent crimes while on furlough from prison in Dukakis's home state. The photo made Horton, who was black, seem to be every decent American's worst nightmare.

After eight years of Bill Clinton as president, George W. Bush had his own eight years, serving a second term despite an 8 percent job approval rating from black voters.

It seems polite not to mention the current president and his savage attacks on folks who don't belong to his personal culture. We all know what we know.

I suppose we could say that this article is just about reflecting on a campaign button I keep on my desk.

If only that were true.

Something else is what bothers me. As Americans, we think we are better, kinder people than we really are. Consider this: We almost had a president meaner than Nixon named George Wallace.

Democratic candidates were chewing each other up in the 1972 primaries, just like the Republicans did in 2016. Wallace with his steadfast 25 or so percent was picking off his opponents, one by one, and was on target to score enough delegates, including our local imperial wizard, to become the Democrat nominee.

He was tasting it, until he was shot in that Maryland parking lot.

In a hypothetical Nixon-Wallace showdown in 1972, the Democrats would have held onto the South and may have enticed enough Separate-But-Equal Fan Clubs to pick up the Midwest and prairie states. If so, he might have beaten Nixon.

Wallace's Stand Up for America and today's Make America Great Again movements both aimed to take us back to 1950. This calamity we have now of a president, legislature and Supreme Court overturning personal freedoms and eliminating general fairness easily could have begun in 1973 instead of 2025.

Given a government's blessing to mistreat the powerless for the past 50 years, I'm guessing we would have done it. The proud moments we've had in my lifetime, with milestones in human goodness and decency, would not have occurred.

Like I said, I'm frequently wrong. But sometimes my deepest fears are on the button.