re: Governor Robert Bentley to resign, leaving the state in Kay Ivey's hands

This was all about the VOTES!!! Wallace knew what the people wanted when he made "his stand". Political stunt at it's finest. Probably the best troll job of the time and the people of Alabama jumped in with both feet.

He gets no pass. Call it a political stunt if you want to. I call it hate.

In any event, a man that will not stand for what is right, but will encourage and incite hate, based on the color of a guy's skin, for whatever reason, is a pathetic piece of shite.

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Man you hit the nail on the head. I love Alabama but I will not move back because of the corruption in the government there. Not just the state but local too.

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don't think anybody will ever be able to repair the broken trust between the people of Alabama and their government. And that's why my native State will never amount to shite. And it's also a reason I left.

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Yep

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Who is old enough to have been around and known how things actually were back then?.

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I'm 60, so I'm old enough to remember and I do remember white and black only water fountains at the courthouse. I remember the talk about the Freedom Riders bus firebombed and attacked near Anniston. I can remember, as a child, a black man on the street would often look down and nearly always move to the side when a white man walked toward him. I remember hearing about how Wallace said he was "out****ed" once but never would be "out****ed" again. I remember moving, at 14, from a segregated school in Alabama to an integrated school in Georgia, and being ashamed, when a nice black guy asked me where I had lived, to admit I was from Alabama. It wasn't because I was ashamed of my state, but because I was ashamed of how George Wallace treated people of my new friend's color.

A good man would have been the negotiator of peace, and would have admonished firebombing buses and churches, rather than, at best, implicitly encouraging it.

Yeah. I remember those things. I'm still ashamed it happened at all.

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I'm 60, so I'm old enough to remember and I do remember white and black only water fountains at the courthouse. I remember the talk about the Freedom Riders bus firebombed and attacked near Anniston. I can remember, as a child, a black man on the street would often look down and nearly always move to the side when a white man walked toward him. I remember hearing about how Wallace said he was "out****ed" once but never would be "out****ed" again. I remember moving, at 14, from a segregated school in Alabama to an integrated school in Georgia, and being ashamed, when a nice black guy asked me where I had lived, to admit I was from Alabama. It wasn't because I was ashamed of my state, but because I was ashamed of how George Wallace treated people of my new friend's color.

A good man would have been the negotiator of peace, and would have admonished firebombing buses and churches, rather than, at best, implicitly encouraging it.

Yeah. I remember those things. I'm still ashamed it happened at all.

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What do you guys think about Del Marsh? He's been an avid supporter of the lottery, has been outspoken about Alabama lacking a comprehensive education plan, called for Bentley to resign, and has been one of the senators that believes we should at least look at the potential of passing medical weed. The only thing I don't agree with him is he's against the historic tax credit, which has helped cities in the state (Birmingham especially) get enough funds to revitalize their downtown.

Old Lester was passing out axe handles during his campaign!
In my opinion, the backing of Wallace went further than integration. For a 100 years, the South had been scoffed at, made light of, and treated like second class citizens....and they were tired of it! Wallace went toe-to-toe with the political establishment of that time (usually arguing for states rights), and came away looking nothing like the ignorant, slow thinking and talking hick that the rest of the country had envisioned. The fact is, most of the political mainstream were scared to death to debate him because he had embarrassed most of those that had tried.
I completely agree that Wallace was NOT a good poster boy for the state back then, but there is no denying that he was a very intelligent person.

"...Yes, they've looked down their nose at you and me a long time. They've called us rednecks -- the Republicans and the Democrats. Well, we're going to show, there sure are a lot of rednecks in this country."

1968 ( while running as a third-party candidate )

I find it ironic that states rights have become more and more of a topic of political conversation lately.

It wasn't "directed at" you. It was just a response to his character, or lack of it.

I have heard a few times that in the late 50s he ran for governor on a platform of integration, but I have never read that from a credible source. What I have read is that he tried to appear to be more "moderate" than he became later, when he decided that segregation now and forever was best for our state.

Was he merely an opportunistic liar? Is that the best we can say about the guy? If that's the case, then he pulled it off magnificently. The white and black only water fountains, the church bombings, the beatings, the firebombing of the buses, the standing in the doorway of UA...these things that actually happened, with regularity, made it appear that he actually did support them. He never denounced these things, and he was governor. A stroke of his pen could have changed a lot of these things, but he didn't do that. In the case of standing in the doorway of UA, to prevent blacks from enrolling, he actually took an active stance.

So if he was merely being duplicitous, to fool the white populace that were voting for him, he was successful.

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I'm a Republican but I hate how all our candidates have to do is win a primary and then get assured of multiple terms.

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Up until the very late 1990s/early 2000s the situation was exactly the same except the candidates simply had to win the (D) primary to get assured of multiple terms. In a handful of counties, it is still that way.

There have been very few competitive general elections in Alabama since the end of the Civil War.