On a warm, pleasant afternoon in May 1972, Alabama Governor George Wallace was campaigning in Maryland just before the next day’s primary election and arrived at the Laurel Shopping Center.
Wallace, a far-right maverick Democratic presidential candidate, campaigned on the slogan “Racist now, racist tomorrow, racist forever.” His familiarity with Maryland politics earned him support from the state’s conservative East Coast and blue-collar voters.
Arthur Herman Bremer, a 21-year-old former busboy and janitor from Milwaukee, was driving from the Wheaton Shopping Center, where Wallace’s campaign headquarters was located, to Laurel, carrying a .38-caliber revolver.
Bremer, wearing a Wallace campaign straw hat, mingled with the crowd as country musician Billy Grammer and his band energized the rally. Wallace spoke from a small podium with his wife, Cornelia, at his side. When he finished, he stepped down from the podium and mingled with the crowd.
Bremer greeted Wallace and shot the candidate at close range. Wallace survived, but the bullet was lodged in his spinal cord and he spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. A campaign worker, an Alabama state trooper, and a Secret Service agent were also injured but survived.
Lloyd Pearson / The Baltimore Sun
In May 1972, Alabama Governor George Wallace was giving a campaign speech in the parking lot of a Laurel shopping center and was shot by Arthur Bremer as he walked into the crowd to shake hands.
The incident in Prince George’s County took place a half century before the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
George Wallace had strong presidential ambitions. After a failed bid for the White House as a third-party candidate in 1968, he once campaigned at Baltimore’s Old Civic Center, railing against “spiky-headed bureaucrats,” hippies and anti-war activists.
The would-be assassin was taken to Baltimore County Jail. He was convicted in Upper Marlboro and served 35 years in the Hagerstown Correctional Facility before being released in 2007. His sentence was reduced because he worked as a teaching assistant. He later worked for a cleaning company in Cumberland.
Wallace received the sympathy vote in the 1972 Maryland primary. While hospitalized at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, he read the newspaper reports of Wallace’s unexpected upset in the Democratic primary.
Maryland voters overwhelmingly chose Wallace over Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern. Republican Richard Nixon ultimately won the 1972 general election but was embroiled in the Watergate scandal.
Val Himes, a radio reporter who later appeared on WJZ-TV, was in the crowd in Laurel that day.
“At first I thought he was dead,” she told The New York Times.
According to The Sun, she was escorted by the Secret Service and taken to a discount store in Zayre to retrieve a phone, where she removed the speaker cup from the receiver and attached an alligator clip to contact a radio station. She later discovered blood on her dress.
The Wallace case was not Maryland’s only criminal election drama.
John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, fled Washington and outran his pursuers throughout southern Maryland before being shot dead in a tobacco barn in Virginia. Booth was born in Bel Air and is buried in Green Mount Cemetery.
President John F. Kennedy may have been the target of a crime in Baltimore a year before his death in Dallas in 1963.
A 1962 Baltimore Sun article noted that police arrested an unknown 27-year-old man in Patterson Park. According to the article, in the early morning hours of October 10, 1962, a man with a raspy voice called a Baltimore newspaper office and said, “I’m going to shoot President Kennedy at tonight’s parade.”
The man was arrested in the 400 block of South Lynnwood Avenue. He identified himself as a newspaper reporter but later changed his name to a political activist. He was taken into custody by the Southeastern Police District.
President Kennedy arrived in a Marine helicopter at Patterson Park, near where the men were being held, then traveled in a motorcade to the 5th Regimental Armory, where he addressed a packed, enthusiastic crowd. No further comment was made on the possible criminal incident.
Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, arrived in Baltimore in a Marine helicopter from the same location, Patterson Park, during the 1964 presidential campaign, and was greeted by 8,000 supporters.
Two eggs were hurled at the candidate as he arrived.
Bullets splattered newspaper photographers, and Johnson continued to receive cheers from the 5th Regiment Armory.
Librarian Paul McCardell contributed to this article.
