In a week in which President Clinton's Initiative on Race issued its report, the man who most symbolised racial hatred to many Americans died. But he had also become for many black people a "man redeemed" by the time of his death.
Many blacks were among the 25,000 in the Alabama State Capitol filing past the open coffin of Governor George Wallace, who had once turned police dogs and high-powered hoses on civil rights marchers. At 79 the former "fighting judge" was a frail figure in death after years of paralysis and pain since he was shot during his 1972 campaign for the presidency.
The obituaries struggled to come to terms with the man who began in politics with the infamous slogan, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," and ended with asking blacks for their forgiveness.
Did they really forgive the man whose racist policies resulted in at least 10 deaths during the civil rights struggle in Alabama in the 1960s? He was the man who pledged to "stand in the schoolhouse door" to prevent integration, who said after an early political defeat: "No one will ever out-nigger me again."
The Rev Jesse Jackson, who clashed with Wallace during the civil rights struggle, described him this week as "a figure who represented both tragedy and triumph".
The former president, Mr Jimmy Carter, paid tribute to Wallace as "one of the most effective and dedicated southern leaders in bringing about reconciliation among our people."
The Rev Franklin Graham, son of the evangelist, the Rev Billy Graham, who presided over the funeral service for Wallace, said he had become a born-again Christian in 1983 "and the result was that he was changed, and he became a man redeemed." He had reached out to the man who tried to kill him, Arthur Bremer, still serving his 63-year sentence, telling him "I love you" in a letter, Mr Graham said.
Wallace's funeral cortege through Montgomery passed the King Memorial Church where he had gone in 1983 to ask the astonished black congregation for forgiveness. But the present pastor, the Rev Michael Thurman, said this week: "I saw a historical figure who towered over society, who went with the political flow when it was expedient. And when it was expedient to go the other way, to apologise, to garner the support of African-Americans, to appoint blacks, he did that."
There will continue to be arguments about the sincerity of Wallace's conversion. Its timing certainly helped to get him reelected governor for the fourth time. In the 1982 election when he openly renounced his segregationist past, he won all the 10 counties in Alabama with black majorities and went on to appoint numerous black state officials.
Wallace's political legacy is just as fascinating. The television coverage of the assaults on civil rights campaigners in Alabama by Wallace's state troopers helped President Johnson secure the passage of two landmark acts in 1964 and 1965, effectively ending all legal segregation.
Wallace is also seen as the catalyst who transformed the South from being a solid Democratic stronghold based on segregation to a South now dominated by conservative Republicans such as Newt Gingrich. Wallace began this shift when he broke from the Democrats in 1968 to campaign for the presidency as an Independent, smearing blacks and anti-Vietnam War protesters and winning 10 million votes and five southern states.
Wallace also had an appealing states'-rights message denouncing "big government" in Washington with its "pointy-headed intellectuals" and "eastern press".
Richard Nixon read the signs and in his 1972 campaign with Spiro Agnew on the ticket had devised a "southern strategy" which was a less crude version of Wallace's appeal to working-class whites. Ronald Reagan further refined the Wallace crusade against "big government" in Washington to win over the swing votes of white workers who became the "Reagan Democrats".
Wallace returned to the Democratic fold, but the damage had been done. The post-Civil War hold on the South by the Democrats had been broken for good. Bill Clinton has been elected twice with probably more support from middle-class "soccer moms" in the east than white, male workers in the South.
Wallace knew first hand what it was like to be a poor white from Clio, a backward cotton town. He used his fists to win bantam-weight championships and worked his way through college.
In the second World War, he flew combat missions over Japan, but after the war he refused to fly on dangerous training missions and was discharged with a 10 per cent disability for combat-induced "psycho-neurosis". Years later Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon disclosed Wallace's wartime psychiatric record but he retorted that, unlike his liberal opponent, he could prove he was 90 per cent sane.
Wallace was a gutsy fighter. Since Bremer's bullets severed his spine in 1972, Wallace had been in frequent pain, but this did not stop him campaigning for the presidency in a wheelchair in 1976 and winning the governorship in 1974 and 1982. He retired in 1987 and spent his last years trying to eliminate his racist reputation.
"Segregation wasn't about hate," he told an interviewer. "I didn't hate anybody. I don't hate the man who shot me. When I was young, I used to swim and play with blacks all the time."
"Stand up for Alabama" was his election slogan. Now he is buried beside his first wife, Lurleen, who was elected as a proxy governor in 1966, but who died of cancer two years later.