I was born and raised in South Alabama, which means I came into this world already inheriting a complicated history. The red clay roads, the pine forests stretching out in every direction, the thick summer heat that sits on your chest like a warm blanket you never asked for — that was my world. It was a beautiful place in many ways, a place where people left their doors unlocked and knew their neighbors by name, where church suppers and fish fries and front porch conversations were the fabric of everyday life. But it was also a place shadowed by something uglier, something that had been baked into the soil for generations, and as a young man coming of age there, I had to figure out what I believed in the middle of all of it.

South Alabama in the mid-twentieth century was not a subtle place when it came to race. You knew where lines were drawn. You saw it in the signs that used to hang over water fountains and waiting rooms, in the way certain conversations would go quiet when certain topics came up, in the unspoken rules that everyone seemed to know but nobody had the courage to say out loud were wrong. Growing up there meant you were constantly being handed a worldview without being asked whether you wanted it. The question was whether you were going to accept it without thinking, or whether you were going to use your own eyes and your own conscience to decide what was actually right.

I chose the latter. And one of the clearest expressions of that choice was the fact that I never — not once — cast a vote for George C. Wallace. Neither did anyone in my family.

The Man Behind the Podium

George Corley Wallace was one of the most consequential political figures that Alabama ever produced, and I mean that in the most troubling way possible. He was a gifted politician in the mechanical sense — a man who understood crowds, who could work a room, who knew how to make people feel like he was one of them. He had energy, charisma, and a relentless drive that carried him from the circuit courts of Barbour County all the way to the national stage, where he ran for president not once but four times. In another life, with different choices, he might have been remembered very differently.

But George Wallace made his choices, and the most defining one came on January 14, 1963, when he stood on the steps of the Alabama state capitol and declared, in words that still ring with a particular kind of shame, his commitment to segregation forever. He planted his flag on the wrong side of human decency, and he spent the better part of a decade making sure everybody knew it. He stood in schoolhouse doors. He used the power of his office to obstruct, delay, and deny the basic civil rights of Black Alabamians. He stoked fear and resentment with a skill that would have been impressive if it hadn't been so destructive.

And the thing about Wallace that always troubled me most wasn't just what he believed — it was how he used what he believed to climb. He understood that there was a constituency built on racial resentment, and he worked that constituency like a craftsman. He gave people someone to look down on so they wouldn't notice what they were missing. That's an old trick in Southern politics, and Wallace had mastered it completely. He wasn't just a man with ugly views — he was a man who weaponized those views, who turned them into political capital at the expense of real human beings with real lives.

A Democrat Who Drew His Own Lines

Now, I want to be clear about something, because context matters. At that time in my life, I was a Democrat. In South Alabama in those years, most white working people were Democrats — it was the party of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, the party that had built a lot of the rural infrastructure that kept communities like mine alive. Being a Democrat was not unusual where I came from. It was practically the default setting.

But here is the thing that people need to understand: being a Democrat did not mean you had to support George Wallace. Wallace ran as a Democrat in the Alabama gubernatorial races, and later as an American Independent Party candidate in his 1968 presidential bid, but the party label never obligated me or anyone in my family to go along with what he stood for. A man's character and his convictions belong to him alone. You do not inherit them from a party registration.

My family and I looked at George Wallace, and we saw what he was doing and why he was doing it, and we said no. It was that simple. It was not a complicated political calculation. It was a moral one. We were not going to hand our votes to a man who was building his career on the degradation of other human beings, regardless of what letter appeared next to his name on the ballot. Some lines are worth holding, and that was one of them.

Judging by Actions, Not Appearances

The standard I have always tried to apply to people — and that I learned partly by watching what happened when people didn't apply it — is to judge them by their actions. Not by what they look like, not by where they come from, not by the color of their skin. By what they do. By how they treat people. By whether their word is good. By whether they show up when things are hard. Those are the measures that actually tell you something about a person.

Growing up in South Alabama, I watched people get sorted and judged and dismissed based on things that had nothing to do with who they actually were. I saw talent go unrecognized, potential go unrealized, and lives get made smaller because someone decided that the color of a person's skin was more important than the content of their character. And the waste of it was staggering. The pure, senseless, infuriating waste of human potential and human connection — that's what racism costs, beyond all the obvious moral horror of it.

When I look back at the people I respected most growing up — the ones who earned my admiration and kept it — they were people who judged others on the same standard. They shook hands with people and looked them in the eye and took stock of what was actually there. They were not naive. They understood that some people would let you down and some people would lift you up. But they let experience and behavior make those determinations, not assumptions about race or background. That is the way a fair person moves through the world, and I decided early on that it was the way I wanted to move through it.

The Weight of Hate

Here is what I have come to believe about people who hate others purely because of skin color: they have more problems than the whole world combined could solve. I mean that sincerely. Think about what it takes to sustain that kind of hatred. You have to work at it. You have to refuse every piece of contrary evidence. You have to harden yourself against basic human connection. You have to build walls inside yourself and spend your whole life maintaining them. That is an enormous amount of energy directed at something that produces absolutely nothing good — nothing for yourself, nothing for your family, nothing for your community, nothing for anyone.

Hatred based on skin color is not just morally wrong — though it is certainly that. It is also deeply irrational. It asks you to draw conclusions about a person before you know anything real about them. It substitutes a fantasy for a human being. And once you do that, you have cut yourself off from the actual person standing in front of you, which means you have guaranteed that you will never know them, never learn from them, never be surprised or challenged or changed by the encounter. You have chosen ignorance over knowledge, assumption over experience. That is a terrible way to live.

George Wallace, whatever his private feelings may have been in his later years — and to his credit he did eventually make some public statements of regret — spent the most powerful years of his political career feeding that kind of hatred and harvesting it for votes. He made it respectable and organized and loud. And the people who followed him down that road paid a price for it, even if many of them never fully recognized what they had traded away.

What South Alabama Taught Me

I do not want to be misunderstood here. I love South Alabama. I love the land and the people and the culture and the particular way of life that you find there. I love the directness of it, the way people there will tell you exactly what they think and expect you to be able to handle it. I love the food and the storytelling and the sense of community that wraps around you in a small Southern town. Those things are real and they are worth cherishing.

But loving a place does not mean pretending it has no flaws, and South Alabama in the mid-twentieth century had a serious one. The racial injustice that was woven into the fabric of daily life there was real, and it hurt real people, and it demanded to be confronted rather than excused. The people I admire most from that time and place were the ones who loved Alabama enough to want it to be better — who could hold both the affection and the honest assessment at the same time without one canceling out the other.

My family was not politically prominent. We were not civil rights activists marching in the streets. We were ordinary people trying to live decent lives. But ordinary decency is not a small thing. When ordinary people refuse to vote for a demagogue, when they look at a man building his career on hate and decide quietly but firmly that he will not get their support — that matters. It adds up. It is the kind of thing that, multiplied across thousands of households, actually changes the shape of history, even if nobody ever writes it down.

Character Is the Measure

I am older now, and I have had a long time to think about the lessons that growing up in South Alabama during that era left me with. The most durable one, the one I keep coming back to, is this: character is the only reliable measure of a person. Not their race, not their background, not their political affiliation, not even their professed beliefs. What they do. How they treat people when it costs them something. Whether they tell the truth when lying would be easier. Whether they keep their promises when it is inconvenient. That is character, and that is what matters.

George Wallace failed that test in spectacular fashion. He knew how to read a room and he knew how to give people what they wanted to hear, but he used those abilities in the service of something ugly and divisive, and the Alabama he helped shape — the Alabama of the schoolhouse door, of fire hoses and billy clubs, of a state government actively working against the basic rights of a large portion of its own people — that is not a legacy worth defending or celebrating.

My family and I had no difficulty seeing that, even in the middle of it, even when it was the political water we were all swimming in. We looked at the man and we looked at his actions and we made a judgment. That judgment was: no. Not in our name. Not with our votes. Not in this family.

I tell this story not to hold myself up as some kind of hero, because I am not one. I am just a man who grew up in South Alabama with a family that had enough common sense and basic decency to know that hating someone because of the color of their skin is not only wrong — it is a sign of something deeply broken inside the person doing the hating. If you have reached a place where the shade of someone's skin fills you with contempt before you have even heard their voice, before you have seen how they work or how they love their family or how they carry themselves through difficulty, then you have problems that go far deeper than anything politics can fix or society can solve. You have a problem of the soul.

South Alabama gave me a lot. It gave me a love of the land and a respect for hard work and a deep appreciation for the kind of community that forms when people genuinely know and care for one another. What it also gave me — by showing me what it looked like when those values broke down — was a clear-eyed understanding of what happens when you let fear and resentment replace judgment and decency. I watched it happen around me. I watched it cost people dearly.

And I decided, in the way that a young person decides the things that end up defining their whole life, that I was going to judge people by their actions. Every single one of them, whatever they looked like, wherever they came from. That was the standard I was going to hold myself to, and it was the standard I was going to demand from the politicians I supported with my vote.

George Wallace never met that standard. He never got my vote. He never got anyone in my family's vote. And looking back across all the years, I am proud of that. In a time and place where the easiest thing in the world would have been to go along, we didn't. We looked at what the man was actually doing and we said: no. That's not who we are.

Sometimes the most important political act a person can take is a quiet refusal. A line drawn in the privacy of your own conscience, held steady over years, not for applause or recognition but because it is simply the right thing to do. My family drew that line. And South Alabama, for all its complications and contradictions, helped teach me why it mattered.

Thank you for taking time out of your busy day,Too read my note.