There still wasn't much very visible Civil Rights Movement protest activity going on in Indianapolis in the Spring of 1964 that I was aware of. So my main recollection of what was happening, on an historical political level, in Indianapolis and in Indiana during the first six months of 1964 is that, during that period, the then-white segregationist Democratic governor of Alabama, George Wallace, came to Indiana and campaigned for the 1964 Democratic presidential nomination in Indiana's 1964 Democratic Party presidential primary; on a platform which opposed enactment of the proposed 1964 Civil Rights Act, that would legally prohibit states in the South from enforcing any of their Jim Crow state laws allowing public accomodations like hotels, motels, restaurants, stores, etc. to discriminate against African-Americans on the basis of race.
The white segregationist Democratic Party presidential primary candidate Wallace--who had previously gained a lot of mass media publicity for defying a federal court decision that required the University of Alabama to end its institutionally racist policy of still refusing to allow any African-American college students to attend that publicly-funded state university in the early 1960's--was expected to attact a lot of white voters in the 1964 Democratic Party presidential primaries of the states in the South. Especially in those Southern states where, before enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, large numbers of African-Americans were being blocked from being able to vote, by various state rules that were applied in a racially discriminatory way by local and state officials.
But what ended up surprising a lot of people in 1964 was that in the Democratic Party's presidential primaries in some states in the North, like Indiana, where legalized segregation did not exist, Wallace was also able to attract a lot of white voters in 1964; although not enough votes to win the 1964 Democratic Party presidential primary in Indiana.
Despite its only morning daily newspaper, the Indianapolis Star, being then-owned by the anti-communist, right-wing extremist publisher, Pulliam (who backed the GOP national convention's 1964 presidential nominee and opponent of enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Barry Goldwater, in 1964) and being the city in which the anti-communist right-wing (and then-still politically influential) American Legion had its headquarters in 1964, the majority of Democratic voters who lived in Indianapolis in 1964 still seemed to be supporters of LBJ's wing of the Democratic Party in the Spring of 1964.
So when the then-Democratic Governor of Indiana in the Spring of 1964, Matthew Welsh (who then lived in Indiana's Governor's Mansion on North Meridian Street in Indianapolis, less than two miles southwest from the neighborhood around East 52nd Street and College Avenue where my parents and I then lived), was put on the Democratic Party's presidential primary ballot--as a "favorite son" stand-in candidate for LBJ--to make sure that the primary would not automatically be won by Wallace because he had no other opponent campaigning against him, the majority of Indiana's 1964 Democratic Party primary voters voted against the white segregationist Wallace in 1964.
The fact that a white segregationist Democratic governor from the South, like George Wallace, could come to a Northern state like Indidana and actually win as many votes (nearly 30 percent) as he did in the Spring 1964 Democratic Party presidential primary in Indiana, also surprised me, somewhat.
Yet because Wallace did not actually win the 1964 Democratic presidential primary in Indiana, despite the degree to which right-wing conservative media political influence in the state seemed much greater than it had been in the state of New York, I also thought, in the Spring of 1964, that George Wallace would always only be no more than a politician who voters of just one region of the USA, the South, would ever end up casting voters for, in any future U.S. presidential campaigns by Wallace. In retrospect, though, I think I did not anticipate in 1964 that, when Wallace did run again for U.S. president as a third-party candidate, he would be able to attract as many white voters in states outside of the Southern region, as he did in the November 1968 election.
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