A Question of Justice: New South Governors and Education, 1968-1976

Introduction

Introduction The South is ready to adjust and become part of the nation. -Florida governor Reubin Askew, 1971 In southern politics 1970 marked a watershed. That year a group ofsouthern governors entered office and changed the way the nation looked at the South and southern state chief executives. Across the region, southern politicians ofa new style were elected governor: from the ranks ofDemocrats came "a no-liquor-no-tobacco Panhandle Presbyterian elder" named Reubin Askew in Florida; John C. West, a racial moderate who rose through the ranks of the South Carolina Democratic Party; a self-styled "country lawyer" in Arkansas named Dale Bumpers; peanut farmer Jimmy Carter of Georgia; William Winter in Mississippi; and Terry Sanford and James Hunt of North Carolina. Republicans A. Linwood Holton in Virginia and Tennessee's Winfield Dunn also represented this new style of governor. So did Democrat Albert Brewer, who inherited Alabama's governorship in 1968 but was not reelected in 1970. Just as the post-World War II economic boom transformed the southern economy, the combination of the civil rights movement, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the subsequent political party realignment, and the rise of moderate southern governors changed the South's political landscape in 1970.1 These governors benefited from paramount changes in southern politics . V. O. Key had predicted as much when he wrote Southern Politics in State and Nation in 1949. Key asserted that for the South to experience a political revival it had to gain its freedom from four major institutions that had constricted the region's political development for decades: disfranchisement ; the one-party system; malapportionment of state legislatures; and Jim Crow segregation. Twenty-six years later, Numan Bartley and Hugh Graham examined the three decades following Key's seminal study and found that his analysis had proven correct. Brown v. Board ifEducation (1954), the civil rights movement, and the subsequent legislation expand- Introduction ing voting and civil rights had sounded the death knell for the traditional, one-party, segregated South. In the years after 1950, Bartley and Graham found a neopopulist resurgence whereby loyal New Dealers such as James "Big Jim" Folsom, Earl Long, John Sparkman, and Estes Kefauver gained state and federal offices by appealing to coalitions of white rural voters, working-class urbanite voters, and the growing number of black voters. Thus, over the twenty-six years between Key's study and that of Bartley and Graham, all four institutions of stagnation and disfranchisement in the South had been destroyed.2 Of the four developments Key prescribed for a new political South, perhaps the most important to the rise of"New South" governors was the 1965 Voting Rights Act. For most ofthese governors black votes meant the difference in their victory over segregationist candidates. Before the 1965 legislation black voters were virtually nonexistent in the region. In Mississippi , only 6.7 percent of voting age blacks were registered to vote in March 1965. Next lowest was Alabama with 19.3 percent. In South Carolina 37.3 percent of blacks were registered. Florida seemed progressive with 51.2 percent, well behind Tennessee's substantial 69.5 percent. 3 By 1967, the situation had changed drastically. Numbers ofblack voters in the South skyrocketed. The biggest jumps came in Mississippi and Alabama . Black voter registration in Mississippi increased 535.9 percent, Alabama 's 167.9 percent. South Carolina black voter registration jumped a relatively modest 37.2 percent. As a whole, the region's black voter registration grew 72.6 percent. This increase contributed to the rise of racially moderate southern politicians as 52. I percent ofeligible blacks were registered to vote by 1967. It also corresponded with, and most likely contributed to, an abatement of racial tension in the region. Essentially, resistant whites realized in varying degrees that blacks and whites would integrate irrevocably. These whites realized, wrote Alexander Lamis, that with integration "the world did not come to an end."4 The result of such massive increases in black voters was the creation of new majority coalitions in state legislatures and new faces in state government , especially the governor's office. The change was so dramatic that by 1972, every southern state save Alabama had elected moderate governors who avoided racial rhetoric and advocated progressive policies. But the progressivism of the class of new southern governors in the 1970S was limited largely to their views on race and reform of state governmental structures. On economic issues they could be quite conservative, reflect- [18.116...