Wallace bends moral arc of justice within Nascar
29th June 2020 · 0 Comments
It’s very odd, to say the least, that less than two weeks after Darrell “Bubba” Wallace Jr., the only African-American driver in NASCAR’s top series, called on the stock car racing association to ban Confederate flags at its events, that a noose was found hanging near Bubba’s car in his assigned garage space at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama.
It’s no secret that NASCAR’s history is littered with racial discrimination against Black drivers and that the racing events it sponsors have been known to draw a fan base of southern, confederate flag-toting good ole’ boys.
And there’s no doubt that NASCAR’s popularity soared during the television airing of “The Dukes of Hazzard,” the ‘80s-era TV show featuring the Confederate flag emblazoned on the roof of the title characters’ muscle car.
However, in the wake of the worldwide protests against the police murder of George Floyd, racial injustice, and, most recently, confederate symbols, Amazon’s IMDb TV free streaming service is considering pulling “The Dukes of Hazzard” from its service.
Wallace, a Mobile, Alabama native, is the bi-racial son of Darrell Wallace Sr. and Desiree Wallace. His mother called SiriusXM’s “The Joe Madison Show,” to say her son has been racially discriminated against by other racing drivers, even before the noose situation. “This is not his first incident,” Desiree Wallace said. “If he gets into it with another driver, they’re quick to bring out the N-word.”
In an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon before the noose was discovered, Wallace said, “No one should feel uncomfortable when they come to a NASCAR race. It starts with confederate flags.”
The first African-American driver in 50 years to win one of NASCAR’s top three national touring series, Wallace has been the sport’s most outspoken voice for racial justice. Unapologetically Black, Wallace sported an “I Can’t Breathe; Black Lives Matter” T-Shirt under his fire suit in solidarity with protesters around the world during the national anthem; prior to the NASCAR Cup Series Folds of Honor QuikTrip 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway on June 7, 2020 in Hampton, Georgia. The next day, June 8, 2020, he called for a ban on Confederate flags.
Then the noose was discovered.
Shocked and appalled, Wallace, 26, was surrounded by all 39 other drivers in the moments before the race and they were joined by their crews in a march down pit road as they pushed his No. 43 to the front of the line. Wallace climbed out of his car and wept and Richard Petty, his sponsor, embraced him.
After the FBI concluded that Wallace was not the subject of a hate crime, NASCAR released a statement:
“On Sunday, June 21, members of Richard Petty Motorsports (Wallace’s sponsor) discovered a rope tied in the fashion of a noose in the garage stall assigned to the team at the Talladega Superspeedway.
“The FBI report concludes, and photographic evidence confirms, that the garage door pull rope fashioned like a noose had been positioned there since as early as last fall. This was obviously well before the 43 team’s arrival and garage assignment.”
With all due respect, NASCAR’s statement seemed like a preemptive strike to avoid further embarrassment and to downplay further evidence that NASCAR fans, maybe even staffers, harbor racist ideations. Even after banning the confederate flag, fans showed up with confederate flags waving around their tailgating vehicles in parking lots.
During an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon, Wallace seemed to doubt the noose, not really a noose, and the no hate crime conclusion by the FBI. He told Lemon that no matter how long the rope had been up there, it was “a straight-up noose” and not a garage pull.
“I’ve been racing all my life. We’ve raced out of hundreds of garages that never had garage pulls like that. So, people that want to call it a garage pull and put out all the videos and photos of knots being their evidence, go ahead,” Wallace said.
The noose incident called attention to Alabama’s racist lynching history – more than 300 African Americans were lynched in Alabama over a 66-year period – and underscored the relevancy of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened in Montgomery, Ala. in 2018, to honor the thousands of people killed in racist lynchings, nationwide.
The combined museum and memorial is the nation’s first site to document racial inequality in America from slavery through Jim Crow to the present.
“In the American South, we don’t talk about slavery. We don’t have monuments and memorials that confront the legacy of lynching. We haven’t really confronted the difficulties of segregation. And because of that, I think we are still burdened by that history,” said Equal Justice Initiative Executive Director Bryan Stevenson.
Stevenson is a lawyer who spent his legal career fighting for the exoneration of innocent Black men who were falsely imprisoned, as depicted in the film, “Just Mercy,” featuring Jamie Foxx.
Wallace’s path to NASCAR is paved with the sacrifices of Wendell Oliver Scott who obtained his NASCAR license around 1953, making him the first African American ever to compete in NASCAR and the first African American to win a race in the Grand National Series, NASCAR’s highest level.
Scott’s professional driving career started in 1947 on the Dixie Circuit, a race series for Black drivers who were not allowed to enter NCSCC/NASCAR races.
On Dec. 1, 1963, Scott won the Jacksonville 200 at the one-half mile Speedway Park track in Jacksonville, Fla. Interestingly, Richard Petty, Wallace’s sponsor, was also in that race. However, Scott’s win was controversial. Race officials originally declared Buck Baker the winner; even though Baker finished the race two laps down.
Scott wasn’t awarded the win until two years later and his family received the winning trophy in 2010, 20 years after his death. Scott was forced to retire due to injuries from a racing accident at Talladega, Ala. in 1973. The film Greased Lightning, starring Richard Pryor as Scott, was loosely based on Scott’s biography. Scott was posthumously inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2015.
Aside from Wallace’s karmic call for an end to symbols of white supremacy at races sponsored by an organization that once banned African-American drivers and that the Bubba’s surname is Wallace, may be a strong, spiritual signal that the time is now to address structural racism in America.
Wallace’s stance against racial injustice is antithetical to the public pronouncements of another Alabama native whose surname was Wallace and one that Donald J. Trump Sr. emulates: George Corley Wallace Jr.
George Wallace was an American Democratic politician who served as the 45th Governor of Alabama for four terms.
Between 1964 and 1976 Wallace ran for president four times (three as a Democrat and once as an Independent) on a race-baiting, white superiority platform that he believed would appeal to both Southern and Northern whites.
Before his failed attempts to win the Oval Office, at his inauguration as Governor of Alabama, on January 14, 1963, Wallace laid out his opposition to integration and the Civil Rights Movement:
“Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny… and I say… segregation today… segregation tomorrow… segregation forever.“
NASCAR was founded on February 21, 1948, before the end of American apartheid, aka, legal segregation. To its credit, the year before the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, NASCAR had welcomed Wendell Scott into its ranks.
Only seven other African-American drivers besides Wendell Scott, are known to have started at least one race in what is now the Cup Series: Elias Bowie, Charlie Scott, George Wiltshire, Randy Bethea, Willy T. Ribbs, Bill Lester, (2006), and, most recently, Bubba Wallace, in 2017.
But in this hyper-charged climate of protests against racial injustice, NASCAR has fallen under the microscope of scrutiny for allowing the confederate flag to become the unofficial symbol of the racing institution, thanks to its fan base.
And the Talladega Superspeedway noose incident isn’t the only blip on the racing events’ radar.
The LA Times reported that a “makeshift” noose was discovered at Sonoma Raceway in California, the day before the noose was discovered in Wallace’s garage space.
Sonoma Raceway GM and Track President Steven Page confirmed that a noose was found at the facility over the weekend. “It was a piece of twine tied to look like a noose, which was found on a tree at the Raceway.”
With confederate monuments being pulled down, Mississippi being asked to take down its Confederate state flag, five recent suspicious hangings of four Black men and one Latino man (all classified as suicides), and Donald Trump’s promise to sign an executive order protecting Confederate monuments on federal property (never mind that Black taxpayers’ dollars are used to maintain these symbols of white supremacy and treasonous men, who killed to maintain slavery), we have to wonder are we seeing the last gasps of the Civil War?
Or are we going to be locked into a never-ending fight against racial injustice, white privilege, and the Lost Cause?
We hope that the recent worldwide uprising against racial injustice will put to rest all notions of white supremacy, which is a really insane ideology that goes against the reality that all men and women are, indeed, created equal.
We all bleed red.
But hope springs eternal. Perhaps the day will come when there is only one race: The Human Race.
This article originally published in the June 29, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
