On February 20, 1964, Alabama governor George Wallace woke up early at his hotel in Madison, Wisconsin, to a colorful greeting: University of Wisconsin students had taken red Kool Aid and written “F*** Wallace!” on frozen Lake Mendota. The night before, Wallace had spoken to an unfriendly audience at the university’s Memorial Union as part of a lecture series called “Discourses of Dissent.” Wallace railed against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed nine days earlier by the House of Representatives and pending in the Senate, arguing that it created a tyrannical federal government that destroyed state sovereignty and property rights. As civil rights groups picketed the event, Wallace used humor to disarm the skeptical crowd, suggesting that the picketers replace singing “We Shall Overcome” with “Home on the Range.” He remained affable and witty while avoiding overt racism, arguing that his support for segregation was a matter of states’ rights, not prejudice.1
In addition to the message on the lake, Wallace received a phone call from conservative Wisconsin activists Lloyd and Delores Herbstreith. The couple encouraged the Alabamian to enter the upcoming Wisconsin Democratic presidential primary, believing that his small-government views would resonate in Wisconsin. Wallace entered the primary in March, challenging incumbent president Lyndon B. Johnson in the first of only a handful of primary elections that year. Wisconsin’s vote would take place in early April. While the Herbstreiths were attracted to his small government rhetoric, Wallace had become a national figure after his promise in his January 1963 inaugural address as governor of Alabama to preserve “segregation forever.” True to his word, in June of that year Wallace staged what became known as the “stand in the schoolhouse door” at the University of Alabama, defiantly blocking federal efforts to integrate the Tuscaloosa campus.2
How would a segregationist governor from the South fare in a primary race against a popular incumbent in a midwestern state known for its progressive tradition? Much to the chagrin of many in the Badger State, surprisingly well. Wallace’s rhetoric opposing civil rights under the veil of states’ rights resonated with more Wisconsinites than most pundits would have predicted in 1964, a sign of the turbulent decade the state and city of Milwaukee was living through. The issue of states’ rights was key to his message. “I do not come here to tell you how to handle your local affairs,” he would explain at a rally in Oshkosh in March. “Your systems, traditions and ideals are for you to determine. Your decisions and those of your state are for you alone to make. The same is true of the State of New York, the State of Michigan and the State of Alabama.”3
Wallace’s campaign was met with a rising group of Black civil rights activists in Wisconsin, who used the momentum of the burgeoning movement to resist his candidacy at a grassroots level. Opposition took shape through pickets, protests, publications, alliances with white civil rights groups, and electioneering. While Wallace’s foray into Wisconsin’s political landscape was concerning to many people of color, his campaign did not distract from other pressing civil rights issues. After Wallace’s unexpected strong showing, Black Wisconsinites criticized civil rights groups, as well as the Democratic Party, for not doing more to thwart the campaign, and many of them saw it as a wake-up call that confirmed racial problems in the oft-heralded progressive state.
Wallace Arrives in Wisconsin
In the early 1960s, primaries were in their infancy, with voters directly selecting delegates in only three states (Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland). Sitting presidents like Johnson did not actually campaign or show up on the ballot in these primaries; rather, state
