Carolina governors Luther Hodges and Terry Sanford were bookends of statesmanship on either side of George Wallace’s energetic manipulation of popular anxiety and indignation. The chronology was: 1954—Brown v. Board; 1956—Pearsall Plan, Alabama’s Segregation Amendment 111, and Hodges reelected; 1958—Patterson wins with Klan support and tries to banish the NAACP; 1960—Sanford beats educated racist Lake; 1962—Wallace wages defiant segregationist campaign and wins. We are left to wonder whether Patterson and Wallace could have led against the pull of popular agitation and followed the path of prudence and progress exemplified by Carolina leaders. At any rate, a self-confident Governor Hodges, two years after Brown, presented the Pearsall Plan to North Carolina voters. It was approved by 80 percent and carried all one hundred counties. Hodges that year won the Democratic nomination (tantamount to election in those days) with more than 400,000 votes to his closest rival’s 29,000. In the fall of 1957, schools in Charlotte, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem were quietly, voluntarily integrated.
In February of 1957, Governor Hodges gave a budget speech to the General Assembly unlike any heard by the Alabama Legislature in my lifetime. His vision was:
I see a land of thriving industry in well-planned small towns and medium-sized cities, without the slum conditions, the polluted air, and the unmanageable congestion of the typical American industrial center. This is a land where all workers are landowners and homeowners, rather than modern-day cliff dwellers, cramped in gloomy rented flats and furnished rooms; a land with prospering farms no longer dependent on a one-or-two-crop market. I see in every community well constructed, modernly equipped and modernly run schools, supported by enthusiastic people who demand nothing less than the best for all children. This is a land where all citizens have sufficient economic opportunity and education to enjoy the best in life. And in this land, looking out over all, there are towers of colleges and universities—for it is an enlightened land—and the spires of many churches—for it is a moral land.
This is the vision, the North Carolina dream. It is not an unattainable thing. We have a great heritage of courage and faith and hard work. We have the people and the resources to turn this dream into reality. You and I, in the years remaining to us, can only lead our state a little way, but if we do that, and hand over to those who come after us the courage and faith which were given us, then, God willing, this vision of North Carolina will become her destiny.
Alabama saw no similarly inspiring vision. It saw a young governor conditioned by the culture in which he was raised, Patterson, wrestling with the NAACP, and the needy, crafty little wizard, George Wallace, booming defiance while behind the screen he was on his knees before a federal judge. When ordered to turn over voting records to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in 1959, the public saw and heard stage-managed defiance, but as Dan Carter recounts in his biography of Wallace, under the cover of darkness late at night Wallace slunk into Judge Frank Johnson’s home. Mrs. Johnson, awakened by the doorbell, heard Wallace plead, “Judge, my ass is in a crack. I need some help.”
The wizard’s machine worked wonders. The fighting little judge secretly arranged to surrender the voting records while dominating the headlines with a blazing anti-government grand jury statement that Wallace crafted and personally typed. The wizard won the 1962 governor’s race and turned the state into his own Land of Oz. It started with an inaugural address in which he said the federal government encourages the “false doctrine of communistic amalgamation” and “encourages everything degenerate and base.” The most memorable rhetorical flourish, of course, was: “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say: Segregation today, Segregation tomorrow . . . Segregation forever!”
The gauntlet thrown by Wallace got a lot of wear—most famously when he threw it at the feet of U.S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach at the University of Alabama to prevent enrollment of a young black woman and man, Vivian Malone and James Hood. That was another Wallace-produced classic: Defiant special effects, which masked the planned and scripted end—surrender. And the medieval glove he flung “at the feet of tyranny” was pretty beat up by thousands of school buses running over it en route to integrated schools. There was no magic in it, only an invitation to a preordained defeat—as tragic as Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg and stupid as the charge of the Light Brigade into the Russian artillery in the Crimea. Nothing was left after Wallace’s rhetorical fireworks but the ash of pointless defiance.
Meanwhile dull, old, commonsensical North Carolina was methodically building the fabulous fountain in the Research Triangle that in time would spew high-salaried jobs by the thousands, and raise towers of nationally ranked research universities. The benefits would prove larger than economic development. It became an importer of intellectual capital. The companies attracted to its agreeably landscaped campus brought the state an infusion of ideas and vision that raised North Carolina business, education and government leadership to a new, more global plateau.
On the surface, the Lake-Sanford campaign did not seem to threaten the ancient regime of segregation into which every Southerner living at the time had been born. Both men spoke in favor of segregation, but Lake opposed the Pearsall Plan and was race-obsessed, threatening “to drive the NAACP from North Carolina.” Sanford assured voters he, too, was against integration but defined Lake as reckless, someone who would let the barbarians through the gates. In a crucial television interview during the runoff, Sanford faced the WRAL cameras and said of Lake: “He is injecting a false issue on integration and it is false because I am, and he knows I am, opposed to integration. The difference is that I know how to handle it, and he doesn’t . . . Professor Lake yells about mixing of the races, about NAACP domination, and is appealing to blind prejudice for the pure and simple purpose of getting himself a few votes.” Then Sanford drew the bright line between recklessness and reason. “Professor Lake has put us in a perilous, dangerous position. His talk is not going to stop anything but his reckless words could start something we can’t stop . . . And though we don’t like it, the Supreme Court has the last word. He is inviting the Supreme Court to step into North Carolina.”
In the anxious climate of the time, Sanford could not allow himself to say what was on his mind—and in his heart. He knew that segregation was finished and believed it was right that it should be. That would become clear in yet another juxtaposition of crazy Alabama and calm Carolina. Four days after Wallace’s inaugural, Governor Sanford announced his statewide Good Neighbor Councils to create equal opportunity for black citizens. He told the audience at Chapel Hill’s Carolina Inn: “We cannot rely on law alone because much depends upon each individual’s sense of fair play . . . We can do this. We should do this. We will do it because it is honest and fair for us to give all men and women their best chance in life.” Alabamians aren’t any different from North Carolinians—our blood is coded with the same wild Highland Scotch, rebellious Irish and tribal African genes. We might have responded to a sensible, local-choice integration plan. Our legislators surely would have thrilled to visions such as those of Hodges and Sanford. We didn’t, because shortsighted, hotheaded leaders manipulated us. Must it be said that we got the leaders we deserve? Surely not.
The significance of those events was not clear to the young, expatriate Alabama reporter, but everything about Sanford just sounded and felt right. In later years, I thought of him as a model. In fact, the night before he died I spoke to the Alabama Political Science Association on a “Tale of Two States” in which Terry shone as a statesman. On learning of his death, I was struck with an eerie connection my family had with North Carolina statesmen. Dad had been in the audience in Birmingham when Governor Aycock began his speech, “I have always spoken of education . . .” A shocked audience then saw him slump to the floor, having just uttered his own epitaph.
Though North Carolina’s democratic oligarchy has produced a line of solid and sensible governors, not all of its public men belonged in a statuary hall of statesmanship. Neither has its story been one of perpetual placidity, undisturbed by the winds of controversy. The state had suffered strikes, labor upheavals of violence by unions and the National Guard. A wave of passive resistance—deeply disturbing to its
