‘Never seen anything like it’: Daughter of infamous racist George Wallace warns that Trump is even worse

AlterNet logoWhen segregationist George Wallace ran against Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat Hubert Humphrey on the American Independent Party ticket in the 1968 presidential race, he was so overtly bigoted that he made even Nixon’s more racist supporters uncomfortable. Nixon, in fact, feared that Wallace would split the right-wing vote and cause Humphrey to lose the election. Peggy Wallace Kennedy, his daughter, is now 69 — and she sees a lot of her late father in President Donald Trump.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Kennedy said last week when speaking to a group of teachers at the Birmingham Public Library in Alabama. “I saw Daddy a lot in 2016.”

Kennedy didn’t mean that she literally saw her father in 2016; Wallace died in 1998 at the age of 79. Rather, she meant that Trump’s 2016 campaign reminded her of the 1968 campaign of her father, whose infamously declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

View the complete July 31 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.