CENTRE — George Wallace Jr.'s latest tome about his family, "Governor George Wallace: The Man You Never Knew," runs 431 pages and contains 333 photographs. 

That's not bad for a book that the son of the most famous politician in Alabama history says he never even set out to write. 

“I didn’t intend to write a book,” Wallace Jr. said. “I started writing things down several years ago—people, places, events. The more I wrote, the more I realized that my father was a man people did not know. He had been defined, largely, by segregation.” 

Wallace Jr. was in Centre on Friday to promote and sign copies of his new book here at the Cherokee County Historical Museum. He also spoke to patrons and presented a slide show featuring some of the hundreds of photos in the book. 

“We had so many in the archives and photographers that followed my parents while they were in office,” said Wallace Jr., 60. “For instance, there’s a great picture in there of my dad and Pope John Paul II, taken in 1984.” 

Wallace Jr. said one thing many people do not know about his father is that the elder Wallace realized early in his political career that he was being divisive, not nurturing for his state and the people in it. 

“When he ran for governor in 1958 and lost, I remember him saying ‘If I can’t treat a black man fairly I don’t deserve to be governor’,” Wallace said. “But then in 1962, segregation was the overriding concern.” 

Wallace Jr. said he remembers when John Patterson, the hardliner who won the race for governor in 1958, told his father about his campaign trips across Alabama. 

“He said he talked about education and roads and bridges, and people ‘just sat there’,” Wallace said. “But when he talked about segregation, he said people ‘stomped the floors’.” 

Despite his father’s successful follow-up campaign which extolled the virtues of “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” Wallace Jr. said his father’s primary concern was for state’s rights in the face of federal intervention. 

“But race became the identifying topic for George Wallace for all those years,” Wallace Jr. said. It was, Wallace Jr. admitted, a “Faustian bargain” which would become a “ball and chain” around his father’s neck for well over a decade. 

Year later, Wallace Jr. said his father was talking with John Kennedy Jr. when he explained how his experiences changed his feelings about segregation. 

“Over time, my conscience told me I was wrong,” Wallace Jr. said his father told the son of the 35th president of the United States. 

Wallace Jr. said his book also contains an admission his father made about his famous stance in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama on June 11, 1963. 

“My father told me that at the time he was ‘young and brash’,” Wallace Jr. said. “But he was always quick to point out that there was no violence in Tuscaloosa, as there had been in Little Rock.” 

Wallace Jr. said another fact many people do not know about his father is how angry he was when he found out what happened to hundreds of black marchers in Selma on March 7, 1965, a day forever immortalized as “Bloody Sunday”. 

Wallace said one columnist wrote that he “had never seen a man so enraged” after Gov. Wallace learned that troopers sent to Selma to keep the peace had violated his orders by attacking marchers with clubs and tear gas. 

“In his later years, my father wrote to Congressman John Lewis, from Georgia, who had been there that day in Selma, to explain,” Wallace Jr. said. “My father believed in segregation, but he was not a racist.” 

Wallace Jr. said he hopes people who read his book will see a side of his father that he worries history has largely washed over. 

“I felt a need, a deep desire, to write about the man I knew—to move the spotlight from his earlier years to his later years,” Wallace Jr. said. “Maybe it’s hero worship, but his example of working to bring us all together is a great example we could use today.” 

The book is available for $34.95 at www.georgewallacejr.com.