The Rev. Dr. Clay Smith: It makes you think

The first presidential election I remember was in 1968. My parents, with old prejudices inhabiting their souls, supported George Wallace. Adopting their politics, I remember arguing for Wallace during fourth-grade lunch. That memory shames me.

For those of you who don't remember, Wallace was the radical governor of Alabama who declared, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." His rhetoric inflamed white Southerners. While Wallace committed no violence himself, he created an atmosphere where it was encouraged. Birmingham became known as "Bombingham." White supremacists bombed Martin Luther King's brother's home. They bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four young Black girls and injuring a dozen or more. When civil rights leaders tried to march from Selma to Montgomery to present their concerns to Gov. Wallace, they were attacked by police. John Lewis, later a congressman from Georgia, was beaten by Alabama State Troopers, causing head injury trauma.

Wallace ran again for president in 1972. His life was forever altered by four bullets from Arthur Bremer. One of those bullets struck his spine, and he would never walk again.

An article by Kristen Thomason in Baptist News revealed to me something I did not know. Shirley Chisolm, a Black congresswoman from New York, was also running for president in 1972. Though she and Wallace were both Democrats, they did not see eye to eye politically. After Wallace was shot, despite the protests of her staff, Chisolm suspended her campaign for a week.

She did an audacious act of grace: She visited Wallace in the hospital. She held his hand. She told him, "God guides us." When the doctor told her it was time to leave, she recalled, "He held on to my hands so tightly - he didn't want me to go."

That simple act of caring - of loving an enemy - cost Chisolm politically. Her constituents could not believe she would visit a racist segregationist in the hospital instead of taking advantage of the situation. One of her staff said, "She understood that if you really care about the country and you want to effect change, you have to embrace everybody. And when he was shot, he was a human being in pain. And she wasn't going to turn her back on him."

Something changed in George Wallace after he was paralyzed. Chisolm's visit was part of that. Wallace's daughter said, "Shirley Chisolm planted a seed of new beginnings in my father's heart: A chance to make it right." He committed his life to Christ. Giving his testimony to a church, he said he had "been through the valley of the shadow of death" and professed, "I am whole through the grace of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ."

In 1979, he made an unannounced visit to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, where Martin Luther King Jr. had been the pastor. "I have learned what suffering means. In a way that was impossible (before the shooting)," he said. "I think I can understand something of the pain Black people have come to endure. I know I contributed to that pain, and I can only ask for your forgiveness."

Wallace's politics changed, too. When Chisolm presented a bill to Congress mandating minimum wage protection for domestic workers, Wallace worked the phones telling Southern politicians to support the bill and vote for it. He ran for governor of Alabama again in 1982, promising racial equality and to appoint Blacks to positions throughout state government. He kept that promise, appointing over 160 Blacks to judgeships, state boards, and, most importantly, as election officials. Over and over, he asked the Black community to forgive him for his past actions and words.

During a service to remember the march from Selma to Montgomery, Joseph Lowery, president of the NAACP, spoke to the audience and to Wallace, saying, "You are a different George Wallace today. We both serve a God who can make the desert bloom. We ask God's blessing on you."

You may not recognize it, but that sentence is a miracle. It describes a changed heart, which, in turn, changed lives. I never grow tired of hearing what God can do.

When I read Thomason's article, I thought, wouldn't the world be a better place if we, like Shirley Chisolm, had the courage to reach out to our enemies? Can you imagine a country where presidential candidates prayed for each other? What if we let God direct us to ask forgiveness for those we wronged? What if we saw each other as human beings loved by God, no matter our politics or the color of our skin?

It makes you think.

The Rev. Dr. Clay Smith is the lead pastor of Alice Drive Baptist Church in Sumter. Email him at claysmith@adbc.org.