George Wallace was the epitome of an oppressor. He was the epitome of the legacy of a slave master.

And this man kept my people down. I'm Jonathan Kapart and this is Voices of the Movement, a series from my podcast, Cape Up, sharing the stories and

lessons of some of the leaders of the civil rights movement and using them to

figure out where we go from here. Our story this week is one of compassion and new beginnings. It's about

building bridges and it's about George Wallace. Yes, that George Wallace, 45th

governor of Alabama,

known as the man who during his 1963 inaugural address

said, segregation now, segregation

tomorrow, and segregation forever.

The man who the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. once called the most dangerous racist in America.

George Wallace was the embodiment of resistance to the civil rights movement, but George

Wallace is also the man who in 1982 ran for governor for a fourth and final term and won 90% of the black vote.

To understand how this happened, you have to start with Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California

and the story of how she got into politics.

I talked to her about this as we stood on the Edmund Pettis Bridge made infamous by the horror

of Bloody Sunday.

I never registered to vote.

I was a Black Student Union President,

working as a community worker for the Black Panther Party,

and made a decision early on not to register to vote because I didn't think politics

made a difference in my life or in the lives of my people. My mother was the first

one of the first 12 African-American students to integrate the University of Texas at El Paso.

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