George Corley Wallace, the firebrand segregationist who dominated Alabama politics for almost two decades and commanded a prominent position during the US civil rights struggles, died on Sunday of respiratory and cardiac arrest. He was aged 79.
Wallace, a former Democratic governor who rose to power with a blend of virulent racism and pugnacious opposition to big government and liberal social philosophies, became a political hero to millions of working-class white southern voters. Although he moderated his hard-right stance later in his political career and publicly recanted his segregationist past, the former Golden Gloves boxing champion never shook off the image of defiance to racial change that he created in the early 1960s with his cry of "segregation forever" in his first inaugural address, and with his controversial "stand in the schoolhouse door" to block the integration of the University of Alabama.
Wallace dominated Alabama politics, winning four-year terms as governor in 1962, 1970, 1974 and 1982. He also made four unsuccessful runs for the presidency: as a Democrat in 1964, 1972 and 1976, and as a third-party candidate representing the American Independent Party in 1968.
His third-party presidential campaign was the most successful, with Wallace garnering nearly 10 million votes, or about 13 per cent of the total, and carrying five states, all in the South.
Since 1972, when a would-be assassin's bullets cut short the most promising of his presidential campaigns and left him paralysed from the waist down, Wallace had been confined to a wheelchair and suffered from steadily declining health.
In 1986, fighting almost constant pain and depression along with increasing deafness, he rejected an attempt for an unprecedented fifth term as governor and retired from active political life, saying in a tearful farewell at the State Capitol: "I've climbed my last political mountain."
Wallace entered Jackson Hospital in Montgomery last Thursday, suffering from breathing problems and septic shock caused by a severe bacterial infection.
In a statement, the hospital reported that Wallace "gave up his valiant battle with life at 9.45 p.m."
Wallace's son, Mr George Wallace jnr, and one of his daughters, Ms Peggy Wallace Kennedy, were at his side when he died. He is also survived by two other daughters, Bobbie Joe and Janie Lee.