The daughter of notorious segregationist George Wallace says President Donald Trump's racially charged remarks might be worse than her father's, The Birmingham News reported Wednesday.
In remarks to a group of teachers at the Birmingham Public Library last week, Peggy Wallace Kennedy, 69, found parallels between Trump and her father, a former governor of Alabama who vowed at his 1963 inauguration "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." He died in September 1998.
"I've never seen anything like it," Wallace Kennedy said. "I saw daddy a lot in 2016."
"Unfortunately, it does look like the '60s now," she said. "Each of us, individually, need to act with compassion and pray for our democracy. I hope we don't go back. But it looks like where we are slipping . . . that seems to be where the top is taking us."
Wallace invoked race as a major campaign pillar as a presidential candidate in the 1960s and 1970s, and infamously tried to prevent the integration of schools by standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama in 1963.
In 1991, he admitted his past views were wrong.
"The two greatest motivators at [Wallace's] rallies were fear and hate," Wallace Kennedy told the teachers. "There was no policy solution, just white middle-class anger."
"We cannot go backward," she said. "We have to go forward."
Her remarks come amid new criticism of Trump for targeting four minority congresswomen and civil rights icon Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., with racially charged language.
Trump has brushed off the controversy.
"I'm the least racist person there is anywhere in the world," he insisted Tuesday.
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