Journey to Reconciliation
AHF Fellow Peggy Wallace Kennedy offers new insight into Wallace era Story by Carol Pappas Pilgrimage photos by Faith & Politics Institute - Book tour photo by Mark Kennedy Some may say that Peggy Wallace Kennedy’s Sunday and a symbol that would figure heavily in journey along her memoir’s broken road began his mother’s life. with a question her son posed to her when he But at that moment, seeing those particular was 9. Ask Kennedy, and she will likely say it images, Burns uttered a probing question: “Why started a long time before in a place called Clio. did PawPaw do those things to other people?” In the foreword for Kennedy’s new book, The Kennedy didn’t know the answer, but she knew Broken Road, Dr. Wayne Flynt quotes writer the solution. “He was wrong, so why don’t you Oscar Wilde to help him describe Kennedy’s and I make things right?” From that point, she fateful journey. “Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older, they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.” Kennedy, Flynt continued in his own words, “completed that entire life cycle – from childhood innocence to adult revulsion, to forgiveness, reconciliation, and finally to personal wholeness.” The end result is an intimate portrait of growing up the daughter of a shrewd politician from Clio named George Corley Wallace and a strong-willed woman, who died just as she was coming into her own and finding her voice as Alabama’s first female governor. Kennedy found her own voice years later from a child’s innocent question when she and son Burns visited a Civil Rights exhibit in Atlanta. He saw images of his grandfather standing in the schoolhouse door to prevent integration at the University of Alabama. He saw photos of dogs and firehoses attacking people of color who were simply protesting for equal rights. And he saw the Congressman John Lewis and Peggy Wallace Kennedy embrace at Bloody Sunday Edmund Pettus Bridge, anniversary. Kennedy credits him with giving her the courage to use her voice. the scene of Bloody 26
Mosaic • Spring 2020 • alabamahumanities.org
