| U.S. politician George C. Wallace, born this day in 1919, was a four-time governor of Alabama (1962–66, 1970–78, 1982–86) and a four-time presidential candidate (1964, 1968, 1972, 1976) who led the American South in a fight, eventually abandoned, against federal orders to end racial segregation in the 1960s. While campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, he was wounded and left permanently paralyzed below the waist in an assassination attempt on May 15, 1972, at Laurel, Maryland. In the 1980s Wallace renounced his segregationist ideology and sought reconciliation with civil rights leaders. |