Wallace was forgiven, just like Ralph Northam has been forgiven

Mr. Wallace had one more presidential race in him, in 1976, but he quickly faded. Six years later, he was elected Alabama governor for a fourth time. But long before then, he cast himself as a changed, even chastened, man on race relations.

In 1973, he crowned the University of Alabama’s first black homecoming queen, Terry Points. More substantively, he began speaking remorsefully about his race-baiting past — how wrong it was and how sorry he was. In 1979, he went to a church in Montgomery, Ala., where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had once been pastor. There, he spoke of having learned the meaning of suffering. “I think I can understand something of the pain that black people have come to endure,” he said. “I know I contributed to that pain, and I can only ask your forgiveness.”

African-Americans in Alabama granted him redemption. They voted for him in large numbers in his final runs for governor. After he died in 1998 at age 79, Representative John Lewis, an icon of the civil rights era, wrote in The Times that “George Wallace should be remembered for his capacity to change.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/01/us/george-wallace-tapped-into-racial-fear-decades-later-its-force-remains-potent.html

Wallace got the black rural vote because the alternative was worse

Just how much Mr. Wallace has changed the way he talks since his first inauguration 20 years ago, when he vowed Alabama would have ''segregation forever,'' was apparent last week. He called on Alabamians to ''turn to one another and not against one another.'' He also appointed two blacks to his Cabinet and supported the appointment of four others to committee chairmanships in the State House of Representatives.

Such rewards were not surprising. Black voters had helped Mr. Walllace beat back the strong opposition of moderate Lieut. Gov. George McMillan in the Democratic primary. Mr. McMillan, endorsed by urban black leaders, calculated that he could win by holding Mr. Wallace to no more than 10 percent of the black vote.

But among rural blacks, Mr. Wallace's populist pronouncements, purged of racial rhetoric, helped win him a measure of forgiveness that translated into about 35 percent of the vote. Against a rightwing conservative in the general election, he got more than 90 percent of the black vote. Mr. Wallace faces perhaps his toughest term as governor - Alabama has historically been dependent on steel, automobiles and other basic industries that have been hardest hit by the recession - but some other new governors were also looking at hard times.

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/01/23/weekinreview/george-wallace-picks-up-on-a-different-note.html

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