George Wallace's Barriers To Equality

Understanding Barriers to Equality: George Wallace One of the biggest obstacles to the American Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s was the combative resistance of southern white racist leadership. Not only did Civil Rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Cleveland Sellers, and Stokely Carmichael have to fight the fundamental racism cemented within southern ideologies, they also had to combat the systematic racism found within southern municipal leadership. This leadership appealed to the deeply separatist and segregationist sentiment held by whites for centuries. This made it extremely difficult for Dr. King and his followers using nonviolent direct action campaigns to work within the parameters of the law in order to legally combat racism and segregation. For

Party politics began to take a shift. While the South attempted to hang on to the Democratic ideals of old, the political scene was becoming a lot more liberal. The election of President Kennedy, three years prior, did little to ease the tensions between the south and the United States government. Northern sympathy swung to the South as they began to see their problems as moral issues. They saw equality as something that should be extended to all mankind no matter the color of one’s skin. The advances made in television also correlated with this gradually liberal shift. People, across the nation, could watch the battles between protesters and law enforcement on their televisions. Yet, the power still rested with southerner’s willingness to enforce federal laws that mandated desegregation and equal voting rights. This is why George Wallace’s speech was so important. His argument was that of opposition. As Governor, he would not support desegregation. This is what made the civil rights struggle so tenuous and difficult. Even if the law was on the side of civil rights leadership, enforcement was the major