THE BROKEN ROAD: George Wallace and a Daughter's Journey to Reconciliation
by Peggy Wallace Kennedy with Justice H. Mark Kennedy
Peggy Wallace Kennedy has been widely hailed as a "symbol of racial reconciliation" (Washington Post), winning numerous awards for her efforts and speaking out on the politics of fear and on finding one's voice. In the summer of 1963, though, she was a young girl watching her father stand in a schoolhouse door as he tried to block two African American students from entering the University of Alabama. This man, governor of Alabama and future presidential candidate George Wallace, was notorious for his hateful rhetoric and his political stunts. But he was also a larger than-life presence in the life of young Peggy, who was taught to sit straight, smile, and not speak up as her father took to the political stage. At the end of his life, Wallace came to renounce his racist views, although he could never attempt to fully repair the damage he caused. But Peggy, after her own political awakening, has dedicated her life to spreading a new Wallace message-one of peace and compassion.
"Why did Paw Paw do those things to other people?" asked Wallace Kennedy's nine-year-old son, Burns, while visiting the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site and Museum. He'd just seen the photo of his grandfather blocking the entrance of University of Alabama. It was this moment that compelled Wallace Kennedy to come to terms with her family's history. "It awakened in me the deep desire to create my own chapter in the Wallace saga," she writes in THE BROKEN ROAD : George Wallace and a Daughter's Journey to Reconciliation.
Collaborating with her husband of 46 years, Justice H. Mark Kennedy, Wallace Kennedy provides an intimate and tender portrait of her family and their circumstances, dreams, and challenges, all within the larger context of a time and place when issues of race and gender were dealt with in ways that many would view as abhorrent today.
In this powerful new memoir, Wallace Kennedy looks back on the politics of her youth and attempts to reconcile her adored father with the man who coined the phrase, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever." As she writes, "My story is much like that of the broken road, heaved up and cracked for the truth of what power can do. It mingles amid history for the sake of the truth, gives rise to the inspiration that no matter who we belonged to, 'each of us can overcome,' and offers hope that America will take the 'road less traveled by' before it is too late."
Timely and timeless, THE BROKEN ROAD speaks to change, atonement, activism, and racial reconciliation, reckoning with the past while firmly focusing on creating a better future.
About the author: Peggy Wallace Kennedy is a nationally recognized speaker, lecturer, and writer. Her father, George Wallace, and her mother, Lurleen Wallace, were both governors of Alabama. Mrs. Kennedy has received, among others, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Rosa Parks Legacy Award; the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation Woman of Courage Award; the Brown Foundation Human Rights Award; and the MLK Commission Award. Her dedication to racial reconciliation offers hope for change in a divided America. She lives in Montgomery, Alabama. Justice H. Mark Kennedy, Peggy's husband of forty-six years, served as a judge for more than two decades including two terms as a Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama.
"Anybody who knows Peggy Wallace Kennedy, or who reads these pages, will understand immediately the anguished authenticity of her passage. Civil rights leaders such as John Lewis ultimately forgave George Wallace for the sins of his past, just as they have embraced his daughter as a sister in the quest for human rights. The Broken Road is the story of how that happened-a needed reminder in these times that love and simple decency can be more powerful than their opposites." -Frye Gaillard, author of A Hard Rain, America in the 1960s
"[A] thoughtful, evenhanded debut ... Kennedy's astute memoir also serves as a probing record of politics and racism in the South." -Publishers Weekly
"(Wallace Kennedy] shows poignantly the toll (George Wallace's] actions took on his family and draws parallels between his tactics and those of Donald Trump .... A fair-minded memoir and portrayal of an exceptionally divisive civil rights-era politician." -Kirkus Reviews
"Searingly revelatory" -Diane Mcwhorter, Pulitizer Prize-winning author of Carry Me Home
Hardcover ISBN:978-1635573657
Ebook ISBN:978-1635573664
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