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“I know I grew up in the time when a young man in a baggy suit and slicked-down hair stood spraddle-legged in the crossroads of history and talked hot and mean about the colored, giving my poor and desperate people a reason to feel superior to somebody, to anybody. I know that even as the words of George Wallace rang through my Alabama, the black family who lived down the dirt road from our house sent fresh-picked corn and other food to the poor white lady and her three sons, because they knew their daddy had run off, because hungry does not have a color.”
― Rick Bragg, All Over But the Shoutin'

“No two individuals, it would seem, could be further apart politically than [Eldridge] Cleaver and [George] Wallace. Cleaver, on the one hand, embodies and articulates the rage that has gripped large segments of the black community in recent years. Born of desperation and despair, this rage has produced burnings and lootings in the ghetto as well as a philosophy of black separatism that represents more a withdrawal from an intimidating and unresponsive white society than a positive program for political action. This rage was also the source of Cleaver's influence. He could ride its powerful currents to fame and notoriety--which the mass media were more than willing to heap upon him--but he could not begin to propose a solution to the injustices that had produced it. Indeed, to assuage the anger and frustration in the black community would have threatened his own base of power.

Wallace, on the other hand, has often been called the embodiment of white racism and reaction. That he is, but, more precisely, his preeminence was a result of the fear which gripped large sections of the white community throughout the country. The Wallace movement grew to frightening proportions not because of anything that Wallace did but because the politically polarized atmosphere in the country called forth the need for a man who would represent the fears and the very worst instincts of millions of people.

While Cleaver and Wallace seem on the surface to be so very different, they are both simply the manifestations of the same social evils. Black rage and burnt-out ghettos are the product of the economic deprivation of Negro Americans; and white fear and the Wallace vote are the result of the economic scarcity that motivates whites, particularly those in the lower middle class, to feel that they must protect the little they have against the rising demands of blacks. The conditions of deprivation and scarcity, and the consequent growth of racial hostility and political polarization, formed the context within which the events of 1968 unfolded.”
― Bayard Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin

“Glad someone shot deserved to be shot finally,
George Wallace. After you send your basket of balms
And berries for the girls the bomb buried in Birmingham,
After you add your palms to the psalms & palm covered
Caskets of the girls the bomb buried in Birmingham,
I’ll muster a pinch of prayer for you. You are the blind
Protagonist of a story that begins, “In my previous life
My work involved returning runaway slaves to slavery,�
And ends with the image of a black nurse pushing
Your old ass in a wheelchair. Can you guess what black
Folk passing empty cotton fields feel, George Wallace?
I damn you with the opposite of that feeling. I keep thinking
I’m confessing for the first time, the reason I fear you,
And you keep asking why I’m telling this old story again.”
― Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin