|
| 1974 |
August 9: Richard Nixon resigns to avoid impeachment for the Watergate scandal. Gerald Ford is sworn in as president. |
| 1975 |
June: Wallace breaks his leg during physical therapy but does not realize it until weeks later.
November: Wallace announces his fourth, and final, run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Voters' concerns with his health problems, as well as the media's constant use of images of his apparent "helplessness," plague him throughout this campaign. |
| 1976 |
 February: Wallace's campaign is failing both throughout the nation and in the South. He loses the Florida primary, where in the past he had been unbeatable, to former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter.
June: After losing the North Carolina primary to Carter, Wallace concedes defeat and drops out of the presidential race. He ultimately endorsed his fellow Southerner, boasting that he made it possible for a Southerner to be nominated for president.
November: Jimmy Carter narrowly defeats Gerald Ford to become the 39th president of the United States. |
| 1978 |
 January 4: On their seventh anniversary, George and Cornelia Wallace are divorced after a nasty public separation. Unable to run for a third consecutive term as governor, Wallace accepts a position as a consultant at the rehabilitation center of the University of Alabama Medical School. |
| 1979 |
Wallace places a call to civil rights leader John Lewis, to ask his forgiveness for his actions of the past. Lewis as well as many other African Americans who Wallace contacts, accept his repentance. |
| 1980 |
Ronald Reagan is elected president. Later that year, John Hinckley, in an effort to catch the attention of Jodie Foster, tries to assassinate him. Reagan escapes serious injury, but Press Secretary James Brady suffers brain damage as a result of the shooting. |
| 1981 |
Wallace marries his third wife, Lisa Taylor, 30 years his junior and half of a country-western singing duo, Mona and Lisa, who had performed during his campaign in 1968. |
| 1982 |
After a four-year political hiatus, Wallace returns to the Governor's Mansion, defeating his opponent easily, largely with the help of the majority black vote. During what would be Wallace's final term as governor, he appoints a record number of black Alabamians to government positions and establishes the so-called Wallace Coalition, which included the Alabama Education Association, organized labor, black political organizations, and trial lawyers.
Wallace addresses the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and pronounces his past stand on segregation in the schools "wrong." |
| 1986 |
At the end of his fourth term as governor, Wallace tearfully retires from politics. Over the next ten years, his health goes into serious decline. |
| 1987 |
Wallace and Lisa Taylor are divorced. |
| 1996 |
Vivian Malone Jones, one of the black students Wallace tried to stop from enrolling at the University of Alabama in 1963, receives an award honoring her courage from a foundation bearing Wallace's name. |
| 1998 |
September 13: George Wallace dies in Montgomery, Alabama, at 79. |
