Retro HoCo: Segregationist George Wallace 1968 rally at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia

Columbia was new when George Wallace came to town. Fifty-five years ago, the nascent community played host to a political rally for the segregationist and former Alabama governor who was running for president in 1968.

Columbia had opened a year before, a planned municipality trumpeted as a paradigm for diversity and racial parity. Yet on the night of June 27, 1968, Wallace — the antithesis of all that the town epitomized — strode onto the stage at Merriweather Post Pavilion before a crowd of 7,500 screaming, (Confederate) flag-waving followers to stump for the Oval Office.

Columbia’s founder was OK with that. Three days earlier, at a tense town meeting, developer James Rouse assured 250 anxious residents that, despite the rally, his dreamscape would survive.

“I am convinced that the fabric of our country is so true that we have the capability of weathering demagogues,” Rouse said. “Only through exposure have they been suffocated. We have a responsibility and the ability in Columbia to be bigger than the world around us.”

Then, on the morning of Wallace’s appearance, town officials purchased an ad in the Sun, cementing their rationale. They would take the high road.

At the rally, the candidate — who arrived an hour late — told his rain-soaked followers that “when I get myself elected, you’ll be able to sell your own property to whom you want” and “you’ll have absolute control of your public school system.” He received a dozen standing ovations, the Sun reported, amid “a spasm of whooping and hollering and foot-stomping” and cries of “Sock it to ‘em, Georgie, sock it to ‘em.”

At the same time, less than a mile away, a crowd of 300 staged a counter rally at the Slayton House, Columbia’s public meeting hall. There, they prayed, sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and summarized the “I Have A Dream” speech by the late Dr. Martin Luther King.

The Wallace rally went off without incident; after 45 minutes, the candidate was gone, to finish a distant third in November’s general election behind Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. In 1972, Wallace again ran for president but was shot and paralyzed from the waist down by a would-be assassin at a May rally in Laurel, just 10 miles away.