After Wallace: The 1986 Contest for Governor and Political Change in Alabama (review)

O C T O B E R 2 0 1 0 285 taking part in the political process and as a result felt the full brunt of the Voting Rights Act. In 1964 only 19.3 percent of adult African Americans in Alabama were registered to vote; in 1967, just two years after the act’s passage, that number had increased to 51.6 percent, and nearly one-fourth of those new voters had registered with federal officials. In Lowndes and Wilcox counties, where no African Americans had registered to vote before 1965, black voters represented a majority of those registered by 1967. Black voter turnout and public officeholding have also increased dramatically in the state, although only modest gains have been made in electing African Americans to statewide offices. The Alabama experience thus offers a remarkable piece of evidence supporting Bullock and Gaddie’s argument that the Voting Rights Act brought profound yet unequal changes across the South. “It is striking,” the authors conclude, “that Ross Barnett’s Mississippi and George Wallace’s Alabama, less than two generations after those noted opponents to racial progress sought to block the force of history, now have the best composite scores” in the South with regard to African American voter registration , political participation, and officeholding (pp. 340–41). Historians, particularly those interested in the transformation of southern politics in the twentieth century, will find much that is useful in this book. As an important complement to the rich Civil Rights movement historiography, Bullock and Gaddie’s work makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the struggle for civil rights in the South by reminding us that the movement did not end with the legislative accomplishments of 1964 and 1965. By providing hard evidence and concrete statistics, Bullock and Gaddie give powerful testimony for the far-reaching significance of one of the supreme political achievements of the twentieth century. WESLEY G. PHELPS Rice University After Wallace: The 1986 Contest for Governor and Political Change in Alabama. By Patrick R. Cotter and James Glen Stovall. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. xv, 233 pp. $48.00. ISBN 978-0-8173-1660-0. Political scientist Patrick Cotter and journalism professor James Stovall have continued their longstanding writing partnership with a look at the 1986 Alabama gubernatorial election and its consequences. In After Wallace, Cotter and Stovall argue that the 1986 campaign was both important and interesting, and the authors stamp the election as a histori- T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 286 cal mile-marker in the emergence of a strong and viable Republican party presence in Alabama. Guy Hunt’s improbable 1986 victory was “the product of a confluence of regionwide forces” as well as issue and personality factors within the state (p. xiii). The title refers to a new era of Alabama politics ushered in by the retirement of the state’s most formidable political presence, George Corley Wallace, who won four gubernatorial elections between 1962 and 1982, as well as another victory for his first wife, Lurleen, in 1966. In poor health and with a variety of physical maladies and side effects from being shot by would-be assassin Arthur Bremer in 1972, Wallace toyed with running for another term in 1986 before concluding he did not have the health and stamina, financing, or electoral support to earn another victory. Cotter and Stovall correctly characterize Wallace’s exit as creating a political vacuum, and outline a host of Democratic hopefuls including Bill Baxley, Charles Graddick, George McMillan, and former governor Fob James seeking to seize the opportunity. Each of the four had previously been elected to statewide office, yet the campaign was characterized by more blunders and missteps than perhaps any other gubernatorial election in the last half of the twentieth century. Allegations of infidelity, illegal use of state resources, failure to pay taxes, incompetence , closeted relationships with other political parties, and illegally soliciting votes abounded; carefully coded racist appeals—an Alabama gubernatorial campaign tradition—were on display. Cotter and Stovall, codirectors of the University of Alabama Capstone Poll at the time...