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59 GEORGIA 10 Color-Blind in Georgia Otis H. Stephens The decision in Brown v. Board of Education, on May 17, 1954, was announced near the end of my freshman year at the University of Georgia. I can well remember the widespread publicity accompanying the decision and its generally favorable reception on the all-white Athens, Georgia, campus. Some vocal students, of course, expressed immediate opposition; but in general most of my friends, including students and professors, agreed with my view that the decision was morally right and long overdue. I can remember one professor of Spanish, Dr. Karl E. Shedd, a New Englander with a yale PhD, who suggested on the day after the Brown decision was announced that the Southern states should begin immediately to desegregate the public schools one grade at a time, beginning with the first grade the following September. I do not remember anyone disagreeing with Dr. Shedd on this approach. But, of course, this did not happen. During the summer of 1954—in the months immediately following the first Brown decision—Georgia politics heated up noticeably. Several prominent Democrats were actively seeking the gubernatorial nomination, which, at that time, was tantamount to election. My interest in politics can be traced to my father’s long-term active participation in local government in my hometown of East Point, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. In 1947, two years after leaving a full-time position in city government, my father ran successfully for an unexpired term on city council. He was still on the council in 1954 and was active in the gubernatorial campaign. In those days, Georgia politics was dominated by the Talmadge machine—first Eugene (Gene) Talmadge, a notorious race baiter, and later his son Herman, who started out as an arch-segregationist but eventually (after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965) “moderated” his political stance. My father worked hard in support of the anti-Talmadge faction throughout the 1950s. He and I supported a moderate candidate, Melvin E. Thompson, who initially seemed to have the lead in the 1954 gubernatorial race. That summer, for the first time, I had an opportunity to attend political rallies and to observe campaigning firsthand. All major candidates endorsed school segregation, but Thompson, as I thought then and still believe, would 60 De Jure States and the District of Columbia have complied with the Brown ruling and would not have been an obstructionist with regard to school desegregation. As the summer wore on, negative reaction to Brown hardened, and a militant segregationist, Marvin Griffin of Bainbridge, Georgia, rapidly gained popularity among white voters. With the exception of those living in the Atlanta metropolitan area, most African Americans were effectively disenfranchised in Georgia. Because of the exclusion of African Americans and the existence of Georgia’s notorious county unit system, Griffin emerged as the winner. The county unit system provided for the nomination of candidates by counties, rather than by direct popular vote. A candidate receiving a plurality of popular votes in a county was awarded all the county’s “unit” votes. In this respect, the county unit system resembled the winner-take-all feature of the Electoral College system still in effect in U.S. presidential elections. The county unit votes, in the Georgia Democratic primary, were heavily weighted in favor of farm and rural interests. Each of the 8 most populous counties was awarded six unit votes; the next 30 largest were each allotted four votes; and each of the remaining 121 counties was given two votes. As a result of this lopsided arrangement, rural Echols County with a population of under 2,000 (almost half of whom were disenfranchised African Americans) had two unit votes. By contrast, Fulton County, with a population of nearly 550,000, including most of the Atlanta area where many African Americans had gained the franchise, had six votes. Stressing his commitment to preserve racial segregation in the public schools, Griffin successfully forestalled progress toward integration. In fact, with the help of the Supreme Court’s 1955 “all deliberate speed” formula in Brown II, Georgia schools did not begin to desegregate until the mid 1960s. In the following paragraphs, I focus on one little-known result of the Brown revolution—the integration of the Georgia Academy for the Blind in Macon, Georgia. In early February 1949, I enrolled as a seventh-grade student at the Academy along with my sister Anne, a fifth-grader. Prior to that time, we had attended...

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