The day we painted George Wallace’s campaign billboard

In 1968, my junior year in high school, George Wallace took part in the presidential election as a third-party candidate.  He took several southern states in that election, and living in Atlanta at the time, one saw his campaign posters all over town.  This sort of inflamed my nascent political passions and those of my friends.

We were a pretty diverse group, but you wouldn’t know it to look at us–we certainly were not diverse in terms of race or class; likewise, we all were galvanized and focused on the same sort of politics and current events of that year–the year of the Tet Offensive and the anti-war protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; the year of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Through the outward turmoil of that year, we were going through our own inward turmoil, knowing that we would graduate the following year with the draft taking more and more of our acquaintances as they graduated ahead of us.  As focused as we were on the Vietnam War, we also saw the civil rights movement ongoing all around us.  1968 was a year of protest of many kinds worldwide, and a year of strong reaction to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. As one striking example, Georgia elected segregationist Lester Maddox governor the year before.

It was within this kind of historical and political context that George Wallace’s supporters put up one of his huge billboards beside the convenience store where my friends and I often sat, drinking Cokes after soccer practice.  The billboard was simply designed.  On a white background was a picture of Wallace, wearing the best he could muster in terms of a smile.  Below his picture was his slogan, borrowed from Barry Goldwater‘s 1964 campaign, “In your heart you know he’s right.”  That got our young minds churning.  We immediately fashioned a series of ripostes and parodies of that slogan, but the poster continued to rankle us day after day.

Being high school juniors, we had recently acquired a modicum of mobility in the form of access to the oldest, most rundown cars our parents owned.  On any given night, at least one of us could prevail and get a car.  In addition, one of our number had naive, tolerant parents who would allow us to take over their basement and then retire at an early hour.  I think you can see where this is going by now; it was a perfect set up for a bit of youthful hi-jinx if there ever was one.

So while one of us could get a car and another of us could get us our freedom at midnight, another of us had artistic ability–at least enough to pull off what we had in mind as a protest of our own.  We got together a bag full of spray paint and batted around ideas for how we could dress up that political billboard that offended us so much.  We came up with an idea we thought we could execute without too much trouble.  We would outline a Ku Klux Klan hood over Wallace’s face and white out his face except for his smiling eyes.  His slogan would be slightly modified as well to read, “In your heart you know he’s a racist.”

The next day, sitting in the parking lot after practice, we liked the billboard quite a bit better than we had before.  Our mission had gone smoothly, and we were well pleased with our result.  My own contribution had been minimal–I had acted as a scaffold, along with another boy, for our budding Michelangelo.  The other two guys acted as lookouts because we were right on Roswell Road, a four-lane thoroughfare that was busy even late at night.  We took the matter of being caught pretty seriously; after all, Lester Maddox was the governor of Georgia at the time, and we could imagine the police taking a dim view of our little prank.

It was early in the campaign, and Wallace’s campaign apparatus was flush, apparently, because the billboard was replaced within a week.  You cannot imagine how it incensed us to be challenged in that way.  The following weekend we arranged another mission, this time with another “vision” of how this poster needed to look.  This time we would alter Wallace’s face with a slash of dark hair over his forehead and an itty-bitty mustache on his lip–we’d make him into Hitler, and we’d change his slogan to read, “In your heart you know he’s a Nazi.”

This time our ranks expanded somehow, as if by magic.  Word had gotten around school, and despite the fact that we all had sworn secrecy, people seemed to know who had done this righteous act of sabotage.  Some of the political types from student government wanted to come along, and somebody had said it would be OK, apparently, because they were waiting for us in another car when we got out late that night.

They were eager to be involved but not to be of much help, however.  They assisted primarily by staying out of the way, “keeping lookout” some blocks down a side street.  Well, obviously, they had a lot more to lose than the rest of us.  After all, they were honor students and, as I said, student politicos.

As smoothly as the prior sortie had gone, this one was rather more fraught.  In addition to the extra people underfoot, we almost ran afoul of the law that night.  We were about halfway finished with our paint job when a police car pulled into the parking lot, his lights swinging around to point almost directly at us.  We just had time to drop into the tall grass and bushes and make like silly rabbits, freezing there 15 feet from his grill.

The policeman was taking a break and sorting through some papers, as far as we could tell from where we lay quivering.  He stayed there for some 30 minutes, and we wondered if he had looked up to see our half-finished art work in front of him.  He never got out; he never moved the car; he simply sat there making us sweat for 30 of the longest minutes we had ever spent.  We used the time to sketch out escape routes by which we would scatter and baffle him if he ever tried to give chase.

Finally, he left, and when we were sure he was gone, we got back up and finished painting the billboard.  It looked even better this time, and the campaign gave up on replacing it.  They papered over our handiwork, and it stayed blank for several more weeks.

The next day at school we were relieved to find that the campus political types had taken great pains to credit themselves with the weekend’s vandalism.  Sometimes a person is moved to boldness in straightening out matters of fact; sometimes one finds it much wiser to snicker up one’s sleeve and stay quiet.  This was one of those times.

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