Welcome to the weekend POU!
Today’s features aren’t “hidden” at all, both are quite well known. However it might not be as well known a particular day in history when they privately met under very unusual circumstances. I’m thinking a play of their conversation, just two dynamic actors on stage, Tony award winners…could really make this a great production.
When Shirley met George
In 1972, the Democratic Party fielded a record number of candidates for the Presidential race: George McGovern, Senator from South Dakota; Hubert Humphrey, former Vice President from Minnesota; George Wallace, Governor of Alabama; Edmund Muskie, Senator from Maine; Eugene J. McCarthy, former Senator from Minnesota; Henry Jackson, Senator from Washington; Shirley Chisholm, Representative from New York; Terry Sanford, former Governor of North Carolina; John Lindsay, Mayor of New York City, New York; Wilbur Mills, Representative from Arkansas; Vance Hartke, Senator from Indiana; Fred Harris, Senator from Oklahoma; Sam Yorty, Mayor of Los Angeles, California.
The most dramatic point of the 1972 primary came when avowed segregationist George Wallace, governor of Alabama and presidential candidate, was shot five times in an unsuccessful assassination attempt. Wallace, a segregationist who ran openly racist campaign advertisements, was left paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life.
Surprising everyone and angering her own supporters, Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman presidential candidate in history, visited her racist rival in the hospital.
“Thinking about it then and now, that says everything you need to know about her,” says Robert Gottlieb, then a young Chisholm campaign staffer. “She did not agree with anything Wallace stood for. There’s no question about that. …but she understood that if you really care about the country and you want to affect change you have to embrace everybody. She was a true human being of sensitivity, commitment. And when he was shot, he was a human being in pain. And she wasn’t going to turn her back on him.”
Chisholm wanted to convey, in part, her belief that it was important in a democracy to respect contrary opinions without “impugning the motives” and “maligning the character” of one’s opponents. To view it any other way, Chisholm argued, was to encourage “the same sickness in public life that leads to assassinations.”
“I couldn’t stay long because he was very ill,” Chisholm said in an interview late in her life, and the doctors told me, ‘Congresswoman you have to leave him.’ And he held on to my hand so tightly, he didn’t want me to go.”
Read this umm “interesting” take from an article in 1973: Shirley Chisholm’s Visit
Interview where Shirley Chisholm talks about visiting George Wallace