The daughter of former Alabama Gov. George Wallace (D), known for his fierce opposition to integration, said she “saw Daddy a lot” during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to AL.com.
“The two greatest motivators at [his] rallies were fear and hate,” Peggy Wallace Kennedy said at an event promoting her memoir, “The Broken Road: George Wallace and a Daughter’s Journey to Reconciliation.”
{mosads}“There was no policy solution, just white middle-class anger,” she said. Wallace Kennedy was frequently taken to her father’s rallies during his three presidential campaigns in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
“Unfortunately it does look like the ‘60s now,” Wallace Kennedy said at an event at the Birmingam Public Library last week, according to the publication.
“Each of us individually need to act with compassion and pray for our democracy. I hope we don’t go back. But it looks like where we are slipping … that seems to be where the top is taking us,” she added.
Kennedy Wallace also described meeting Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who was severely beaten in 1965 on the Edmund Pettus Bridge by state troopers deployed by her father, for the first time.
When she first met Lewis, Kennedy Wallace said, he simply took her hand and accompanied her across the bridge, according to AL.com.
“We cannot go backward,” Kennedy Wallace said at the event. “We have to go forward.”