Lurleen Wallace

No Republican had served as governor of Alabama since David Peter Lewis vacated the office in 1874, and George Wallace's organization proved insurmountable despite an early poll that placed Martin within range of victory.

Jim Martin proclaimed that Wallace was a "proxy" candidate, a manifestation of her husband's "insatiable appetite for power."

Lurleen Wallace used the slogan "Two Governors, One Cause" and proclaimed the words Alabama and freedom to be synonyms.

Martin bemoaned having to campaign against a woman, a position that would soon become anachronistic.

Lurleen Burns Wallace (born Lurleen Brigham Burns; September 19, 1926 – May 7, 1968) was an American politician who served as the 46th governor of Alabama for 16 months from January 16, 1967 until her death on May 7, 1968.

She was the first wife of Alabama governor George Wallace, whom she succeeded as governor because the Alabama constitution forbade consecutive terms.

Lurleen Brigham Burns was born to Henry Burns and the former Estelle Burroughs of Fosters in Tuscaloosa, Alabama on September 19, 1926.

She graduated in 1942 from Tuscaloosa County High School at the age of fifteen.

She then worked at Kresge's Five and Dime in Tuscaloosa, where she met George Wallace, at the time a member of the United States Army Air Corps.

The couple married on May 22, 1943, when she was 16.

Over the next twenty years, Wallace focused on being a mother and a homemaker.

The Wallaces had four children: Bobbi Jo Wallace Parsons (1944–2015), Peggy Sue Wallace Kennedy (born 1950), George III (born 1951), and Janie Lee Wallace Dye (born 1961).

George Wallace's neglect of his family and frequent extramarital affairs resulted in his wife filing for divorce in the late 1950s; she later dropped the suit after he promised to be a better husband.

Wallace assumed her duties as First Lady of Alabama in 1963 after her husband was elected governor to the first of his four nonconsecutive terms.

She opened the first floor of the governor's mansion to the public seven days a week.

She refused to serve alcoholic beverages at official functions.

When George Wallace failed in 1965 to get the constitutional ban on his candidacy lifted, due to facing some opposition from some members of the Alabama Legislature, including his competitive political rival, Ryan DeGraffenried Sr., he devised a plan in which Lurleen would run for governor while he continued to exercise the authority of the office behind the scenes, duplicating the strategy in which Miriam Wallace Ferguson won the 1924 election for governor of Texas, as her husband James E. Ferguson remained the de facto governor.

Shy in public and lacking interest in the workings of politics, Lurleen Wallace was described by an Alabama newspaper editor as the most "unlikely candidate imaginable. It is as difficult to picture her in politics as to envision Helen Hayes butchering a hog."

She herself said "it never even crossed my mind that I'd ever enter politics...."

Lurleen Wallace dispatched a primary gubernatorial field that included two former governors, John Malcolm Patterson and Jim Folsom, former congressman Carl Elliott of Jasper, and Attorney General Richmond Flowers, Sr. She then faced one-term Republican U.S. representative James D. Martin of Gadsden, who had received national attention four years earlier when he mounted a serious challenge to U.S. senator J. Lister Hill.

The general election campaign focused on whether Wallace would be governor in her own right or a "caretaker" with her husband as a "dollar-a-year-advisor" making all the major decisions.

The decision to run against Wallace heavily damaged the Alabama GOP.

Nearly overnight, its fortunes vanished, for most expected George Wallace to succeed in electing his wife, who was running not as the former "Lurleen Burns" but as "Mrs. George C. Wallace."

Neither Martin nor Lurleen Wallace openly sought support from the increasing number of African American voters, many of whom had been registered only since the passage a year earlier of the Voting Rights Act, approved in the political environment of the Selma-to-Montgomery march.

George Wallace kept the racial issue alive when he signed state legislation to nullify desegregation guidelines between Alabama cities and counties and the former United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Wallace claimed that the law would thwart the national government from intervening in schools.

Critics denounced Wallace's "political trickery" and expressed alarm at the potential forfeiture of federal funds.

Martin accused the Democrats of "playing politics with your children" and "neglecting academic excellence."

False reports of Republican strength in Alabama abounded.

The New York Times predicted that Martin "not only has a chance to win the governorship, but at least for the moment must be rated as the favorite."

Political writer Theodore H. White incorrectly predicted that Alabama, instead of Arkansas and Florida as it developed, would in 1966 become the first former Confederate state to elect a Republican governor.

Briefly, a consensus developed that Martin might even lend coattails to Republican candidates in legislative, county, and municipal elections though there was no GOP nominee for lieutenant governor.

The defections of three legislators and a member of the Democratic State Executive Committee reinforced such possibilities.

The New York Times said Alabama Democrats had denounced the national party for so long that it became "no longer popular in many quarters to be a Democrat."

Martin said the South must "break away from the one-party system just as we broke away from a one-crop economy."

He vowed to make Alabama "first in opportunity, jobs, and education."

Keener insight at the time would have revealed that Martin was pursuing the one office essentially off limits to the GOP that year.

In 1973, she was posthumously inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame.

Wallace was Alabama's first female governor and was the only woman to hold the governorship until Kay Ivey succeeded to the office in April 2017.

She is also (as of 2024) the only female governor in U.S. history to have died in office as well as being the first and only female Democrat to have served as governor in Alabama history.