{"response":{"docs":[{"id":"gych_rogp_109","title":"Milton Jones, 19 March 2010.","collection_id":"gych_rogp","collection_title":"Reflections on Georgia Politics oral history collection, 2006-2010","dcterms_contributor":["Short, Bob, 1932-"],"dcterms_spatial":["United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018"],"dcterms_creator":["Jones, Milton, 1936","Short, Bob, 1932"],"dc_date":["2010-03-19"],"dcterms_description":["Milton Jones discusses his childhood in Columbus, Georgia, and his subsequent education at Emory at Oxford, Emory, and Emory Law. Jones recalls successfully running for legislature in 1962 at 25 years old. He recalls the Supreme Court ruling that abolished the county unit system and explains how the system worked. Jones reflects on Brown v. Board of Education, the Dixiecrat uprising in the 1950s, and the integration of the University of Georgia. Jones recalls an incident when the clock was turned off during a reapportionment session and comments on the General Assembly's tendency to reapportion based on racial and political lines. He recalls the circumstances surrounding the legislature's decision to elect its own speaker. Jones reads Representative Bob Flournoy's 1964 speech regarding the demise of the county unit system and comments on several other reapportionment situations. Jones discusses working with Jamie Mackey, Elliott Levitas, and Denmark Groover. He also discusses voting to deny Julian Bond his seat, and the 1966 gubernatorial race. Jones recalls serving on the University System of Georgia Board of Regents and comments on party politics in Georgia. He further discusses crossover voting and party registration in Georgia.","Milton Jones was born on August 13, 1936, in Columbus, Muscogee Co., Georgia. He graduated from Columbus High School in 1954 and then from Emory at Oxford in 1956. He earned a bachelor's degree in law in 1958 from Emory University and a law degree in 1959. He served in the United States Army Reserves from 1954-1962, retiring as a Sergeant 1st class. A Democrat, he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1963 and served until 1970. In 1974, Governor Jimmy Carter appointed him to the University System of Georgia Board of Regents where he served, including as chairman, until 1981.","Finding aid available in repository.","Interviewed by Bob Short."],"dc_format":["video/mp4"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":["eng"],"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection","http://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/sclfind/view?docId=ead/RBRL220ROGP.xml"],"dcterms_subject":["Georgia--General Assembly","University of Georgia","College integration--Georgia--Athens--History","Legislators--Georgia--Interviews","Apportionment (Election law)--Georgia","Political parties--Georgia","Apportionment (Election law)","College integration","Legislators","Political parties","Politics and government","Georgia--Politics and government","Georgia","Georgia--Athens"],"dcterms_title":["Milton Jones, 19 March 2010."],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL220ROGP-109/ohms"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection, ROGP 109, Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, Georgia, 30602-1641."],"dlg_local_right":["Resources may be used under the guidelines described by the U.S. Copyright Office in Section 107, Title 17, United States Code (Fair use). Parties interested in production or commercial use of the resources should contact the Russell Library for a fee schedule."],"dcterms_medium":["oral histories (literary works)","interviews"],"dcterms_extent":["1 interview (99 min.) : sd., col."],"dlg_subject_personal":["Levitas, Elliott Harris, 1930-","Bond, Julian, 1940-2015","Jones, Milton, 1936-","Groover, Denmark, 1922-2001"],"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":"Milton Jones interviewed by Bob Short \r\n2010 March 19 \r\nAthens, GA \r\nReflections on Georgia Politics \r\nROGP-109 \r\nOriginal: video, 99 minutes \r\n \r\nsponsored by: \r\nRichard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies \r\nUniversity of Georgia Libraries \r\nand \r\nYoung Harris College \r\n \r\n BOB SHORT:  I'm Bob Short, this is Reflections on Georgia Politics sponsored by Young Harris College and the Richard B. Russell Library at the University of Georgia.  Our guest is Milton Jones, former member of the Georgia House of Representatives and former chair of the state Board of Regents.  Welcome Milton. \r\n \r\n MILTON JONES:  Thank you Bob. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  With your permission we'd like to divide our conversation into three parts.  First a little bit about you and your early life, then your service in the state legislature and on the board of regents, and finally your life after public service.  I know that you were born and raised in Columbus. \r\n \r\n JONES: Right. Well, I was.  Grew up there and went to school.  We were blessed with a fine public school system in Columbus in those days, at least the white kids.  I graduated from high school, Columbus High School, in 1954.  I was very fortunate.  I got to go to Emory at Oxford, a small two-year college down a couple miles north of Covington.   And then I went to big Emory in Atlanta for three quarters and then into law school.  And I went straight through law school and graduated in August of '59.   \r\n I was fortunate enough -- I couldn't have gone to Emory otherwise, but I picked up some scholarships and financial help, one of which was from the Ty Cobb educational foundation.  A lot of folks might not know it, but Ty Cobb started a foundation with the money he made in baseball and primarily off Coke-Cola stock and it educates, I don't know how may thousands of young men it's helped educate in the last 50, 60 years.  It does other things.  I believe it has a hospital up at Royston and other things, but I take my hat off and salute that gentleman again.   \r\n I married my high school sweetheart.  Went home and started practicing law, September 8, 1958, and it went on from there.  I had been interested in government, primarily in American history and government since I was in high school.  Had a great teacher --  I had many great teachers, I owe my life to them -- by the name of Mary Fort, who was the traditional stereotyped old maid schoolteacher in the '50's.  Her sister was one too.  She taught down in Thomasville Elementary School.  But Miss Mary as we called her, she taught American history and government at Columbus high school.  We figured it out at one time that out of the people she taught, over forty became lawyers.  I mean five or six guys -- Tommy Buck is one you would know for sure -- in my wife's class, the class behind me.  But she had a profound influence on a lot of our lives.  \r\n And of course, law back then was a little more admired profession than it is today.   A young lawyer getting home, I was interested in politics.  We had some local political issues that were arising in the early sixties.  I was involved and was on the winning side of one or two.  And, you know, scratching around trying to build a law practice, you know you got to build name recognition.  A seat came open, well, not didn't come open, but an opportunity came to run for the legislature in '62, and I ran.  When I started running I was 25, I was 26 by the time I was elected.  When I went to Atlanta, I was probably the youngest guy up there.   \r\n And that was in January of 1963, the year that Governor Sanders went in.  That summer that I was running was a very interesting summer, in that the United States Supreme Court, and I think it was in March of 1962, had ruled -- I believe the name of the case was Baker v. Carr.  It was a Tennessee case. But they established the one man one vote rule.  And the next month, the federal court in Atlanta -- Griffin Bell, I think wrote the opinion -- said that it applied to the Georgia legislature too.  Excuse me, he said that it applied to the county-unit system, and a few words may be in order about the county-unit system.   \r\n I'm sure a lot of people that listen to this, or that would be interested in listening to it, probably know about it, but for those who don't, there was a -- the county-unit system was like an electoral college, except it was for Georgia ruther than for federal elections.  And it was the way we elected all the state-wide offices in this state.   It also, in large measure, governed the apportionment of the legislature.  It was called, I think the technical title was the Neill Primary Act.  And I think it had started back probably in the late nineteenth century,  but in the early twentieth century I think it was given statutory form.  And back then of course, everyone was a Democrat.  That had been one of the legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction.  The only Republicans in the county would be what we called the post office Republicans.  So they'd profess to be Republicans so the few times that a Republican got elected president they could be post master.   And then when the Democrats come back in, they'd go back to whatever they had been doing and hope for the next president to be a Republican.  \r\n  But anyway, the only game in town back then was the Democratic primary, because  \r\nthere just wasn't a Republican party.  And I always loved that term, that if you won the Democratic primary it was tantamount to a victory.  I love that word tantamount.  But anyway, the way it worked was the eight largest counties in the state of Georgia had six county-units.  The next 30 had four county-units, and the 121 smallest, there were 159 counties, had two county-units.  And if someone running for governor or lieutenant governor or insurance commissioner or whatever -- if he carried a county, he got all of that county's county-units. The same as if you carry a state today if you're running for president, you get all that state's electoral votes.  I think one or two states have now divided it up, but I don't know.  \r\n And you can see that this really discriminated against your larger urban counties.  Echols county, of course, was the smallest county down there on the Florida line in extreme south Georgia, I think it had 1800 votes.  Fulton county, which was the largest then -- may still be, but I'm not sure.  I think it had close to half a million people.  Well, if you're running for governor and you carried Fulton county with half a million people, you got six county-units.  If you were running for governor and you carried Echols county, you got two.  So you got a third as much votes for the governor's race if you carried Echols county as if you carried a county of a half a million people.   \r\n The apportionment entered into it because each county got a representative for every two county-units.  The ones that had the six county-units, they had three representatives. That would have been Fulton, Dekalb, Bibb, Richmond, Chatham, our county Muscogee.  The next thirty, which would have been in the neighborhood of Valdosta, LaGrange, Griffin, stuff like that.  They had four county-units, so they had two representatives.  And the 121 smallest counties including Echols with 1800 people, they had one representative.  And it was a highly stacked deck in favor of the rural interests in the state.  And that was what the game was at that time.   \r\n Well, after that ruling that spring, the governor's race which had already started -- Marvin Griffin, who had been governor from 19-- well, he was elected in '54 to '58, which means he served from '55 to '5.  Back then the governor could not succeed himself, so he was running for reelection in '62.  Well, not reelection, but he had been out four years since Ernest Vandiver was governor so he could run to be governor again.  Garland Byrd who was the lieutenant governor at the time, was running against Marvin.  Carl Sanders, who was a fine, young, up-and-coming senator from Richmond county, Augusta, he was running for lieutenant governor against Peter Zack Geer.   \r\n Well, that ruling came down and all of a sudden the county-unit system's out, it's popular vote all the way.  And Carl got out the lieutenant governor's race and got into the governor's race.  And shortly thereafter, Garland Byrd had a heart attack, so the race kind of devolved down to Carl Sanders against Marvin Griffin, but now it's on the popular vote rather than the county-unit system.  And I think he was the favorite from then on.  Peter Zack Geer was running against Carl, but then Carl was out of the race.  And then Lester Maddox was also running.  He owned the Pickrick restaurant there in Atlanta, and I think people know who Lester Maddox was.   \r\n But anyway, all of that happened in that summer that we were all running.  And of course, I'm sitting down here running a little, small state representative race, but it was of vital interest, because everyone wanted to know who you were voting for for governor, and all that, you know, and you'd have to try to soft shoe that.  But it was an interesting election.   \r\n Well, one week before that Democratic primary, the federal court ruled in another case that the Georgia General Assembly was malapportioned because it was apportioned based on that county-unit system.  I've just described how the House was apportioned, but the Senate had 54 senators and it was divided up -- Fulton county had one senator.  I don't believe I remember what the gentleman's name was.  And the other 158, they were divided up into senatorial districts.  Normally there were three counties to a senatorial district, and they'd rotate it.  One county would have a senator for two years, the next county would have a senator for two years, the next county would have a senator for two years.  So I mean it was just a constant fruit basket turnover.  \r\n Governor Vandiver -- I think you may have been there at that time -- called a special session immediately after the primary for the purposes of reapportioning the Senate on a population basis, and that all happened.  In 1962 we went from the county-unit system for the method of electing the state-wide offices, and then we had to go up there -- I didn't because I didn't take office until January, but they were kind to me.  I went up there just as an observer and sat around and watched it.  They reapportioned the state Senate there in October, and they had another special election after that because they had to reelect the new senators under reapportionment, and that of course is when Jimmy Carter was elected to the Senate and all the problems between him and Homer Moore down there, and the lawsuit.  But Jimmy eventually prevailed on that write-in on that second special election for the Senate.  It was an interesting year.   \r\n  \r\n SHORT:  That was an interesting decade -- the 60's.  The county-unit system was ruled unconstitutional, you had the reapportionment case, you had the strange election of 1966 when Bo Callaway defeated Lester Maddox, but the legislature elected Maddox.  And you were involved with all that.  What do you remember about those days? \r\n  \r\n JONES:  Well, it was historic times.  Because Carl was elected, and he was a very good governor.  I mean he was an aggressive guy.  Back then a lot had been going on.  In 1954, the year I graduated from high school, that was the year that, of course the Supreme Court of the United States decided Brown v. Board of Education.  Well, that caused significant unrest in the South.  You had the push on the national level, primarily in the Democratic party, for Civil Rights.  You had the Dixiecrat rebellion in the 1958 Democratic convention there, and Strom Thurmond, I think, was the nominee of the Dixiecrats, but Harry Truman won reelection anyway.   \r\n But there was a lot of trouble going on.  You  had James Meredith out there in the University of Mississippi.  Right before all of this started, the very end of Ernest Vandiver's administration, was when you had the integration of the University of Georgia. Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter and all that situation arose.  So there was a lot of turmoil going on.  And it's unfortunate, but we do have a strong racial  element in that period of history at that time.  \r\n We got through that session in 1963.  Governor Sanders, he had a right progressive program, most of it was adopted.  Then in 1964, we had to do something about congressional redistricting.  Back to the one man, one vote ruling that the Georgia congressional districts would not stand muster on the thing, so the federal court said, \"You've got to redistrict.\" And in the regular session of '64, one of the main things that occurred was that we went through a congressional redistricting in '64. And whenever you've got established political districts where you've got counties that have been together for decades, and you come in there and say, \"No, you're not going to be a district anymore, this guy over here is going to represent you,\" and they don't even know him except for his name  --  there was a lot of back and forth about that.   \r\n There was a representative from Clarke County, Athens, by the name of Randall Bedgood, you remember him.  He drew a plan up that most of us liked pretty well.  It didn't suit the governor's office too well, and I don't know why, there wasn't anything particularly wrong with their plan.  The long and the short of it was -- it boiled down to whether we were going to adopt the Bedgood plan or the other plan.  And that's when the clock on the wall episode occurred.   \r\n It was on the last night of the regular session in 1964 and Denny Groover, who was a great legislator, perhaps with the exception of Elliott Levitas, who you've interviewed, was by far and away the most effective legislators I had the pleasure of serving with.  Denny had been Marivin Griffin's floor leader in the '55-'59 period and I think he was from somewhere down in south Georgia at that time, but by the time of the '60s came along he moved up to Gray, right above Macon.  He was elected to the legislature up there.  He was very effective, he was a spellbinder.  Incidently he was a Marine fighter pilot with Boyington's Black Sheep Squadron in the Pacific during World War II.   \r\n But anyway, Denny was in favor of the Bedgood plan.  George T. Smith, who was the speaker -- we'll talk more about the speakership later, if ya'll don't get tired of listening to me by then -- they didn't have the votes to pass the plan they wanted, so they stopped the clock.  If I remember right it was 20 minutes til 12:00 on the last night of the session.  Well, we wanted the clock to go on and run so that we'd run out of time, we'd have to adjourn, and we knew if we came back in a special session -- which we had to do because we were under federal court order -- we thought we could get the Bedgood plan through.  Well, they unplugged the clock and time stopped.  And they continued to pick up a vote here and a vote there, and it was kind of remindful of what's going on in Washington today.   \r\n But the long and the short of it is Denny Groover went up in the balcony, not to pull the clock off the wall, Denny was trying to figure out how to get the clock to start running again.  He was fiddling around with the clock, he was hanging over the railing with one arm, one leg.  Everybody was aghast because we thought he was going to fall and hurt himself.  But somehow in all the scrambling and scratching he was doing up there, he pulled the clock off the wall.  The clock came falling down on the floor, it was quite a row.  But anyway, they got the votes.  About 2:00 they put the clock back running, or a clock back running and the Bedgood plan went down.  Well, that sowed some more seeds of dissension about the governor controlling the selection of the speaker, we can talk more about that later I said.   \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Let me ask you this question about reapportionment.  \r\n \r\n JONES:  Alright. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Is it fair to say that our legislative districts have been drawn primarily for party protection and racial reasons rather than binding common communities together. \r\n \r\n JONES:  I don't know.  I don't know how to answer that question. Because, see,  I haven't been up there since 1970.  And I was not involved on any of the reapportionment committees.  And so I can't say back then -- and I certainly have a clue since then.  I don't recall that being all that much of a factor, though that was the primary reason that we in Columbus wanted the Bedgood plan, because the senatorial district under the Bedgood plan that we would have, would have been centered kind of over there on the west central side of the state, with Columbus kind of in the middle of the thing.  And that is kind of the trade center of the area, and I think it probably was more of a geographic plan than others would have been.  But I don't know how to answer that, I can't say that Bob. \r\n \r\n  SHORT:  Okay, let's get back to the period we had the county-unit system that was declared unconstitutional, we had reapportionment, then we also had a constitutional revision situation when Governor Sanders appointed a commission and it made recommendations to the general assembly for a new constitution that we never got.   \r\n \r\n JONES:  Well, that was two months after the clock pulling episode in the regular session in '64.  Governor Sanders called a special session of the legislature.  I guess they'd enjoyed us so much they wanted us back in town, I don't know.  But we went up there to draw a new constitution.  And by now the House was in high dudgen, let's say.  Going back to the speakership, George L.Smith, a wonderful old lawyer from down in Emmanuel county, Swainsboro, had been speaker of the House under Ernest Vandiver, and he may have been speaker before then, I'm not sure.  I think Marvin Moate was Marvin Griffin's speaker of the house.   \r\n But anyway, he had been the speaker when Carl Sanders got out of the lieutenant governor's race and got into the governor's race in 1962.  He had been over in the Senate for about four years, but nobody in the House knew him.  Everybody knew George L. and most of the House members supported Marvin against Sanders.  I think they said it was something like 40 or 42 members of the Georgia House of 205 members supported Sanders.  So he's got a hostile crowd up there when he comes into office -- well, I'm not going to say they were hostile, but they weren't in good spirits about the thing. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  They didn't adjust to the county-unit system. \r\n \r\n JONES:   Well, it was terse, let's put it that way.  But the governor back then, he selected who he wanted to be the speaker, and he passed the word and the House went along with it, and that's it.  There's no way you can overestimate the power of the speaker of the House in Georgia government.  He appoints every committee chairman. He appoints every member of every committee.  When a bill is introduced, he decides solely what committee it's going to.  It can be a favorable committee, it can be an unfavorable committee.  If you get along with the speaker, you get on good committees, if you don't, you don't get on good committees.  If he tells the chairman of a committee, \"I don't want this bill to come out of committee,\" that bill does not come out of committee.   It doesn't make any difference.  It is an absolute power of what happens.  It's a negative power; he can't make things happen, but he can keep things from happening.   \r\n Anyway, George T., who is representing this crowd that had supported Carl, he was selected over George L., who had been everybody's buddy and had been speaker.  So that started this stuff about, \"You know, we really need to start selecting our own speaker, rather than the governor doing it.  And that started in '63 as soon as George T. replaced George L.  And it got worse.  Denny Groover was stirring the pot, and a lot of the other guys were too.  And in 1964 when that congressional redistricting situation happened and they stopped the clock, it really got hot then.  Incidentally that's when the Beatles came to town, that same month.  They came over here from England in February of 1964 if I remember correctly.  Anyway, we come back up there.   \r\n So, all the forces in the Georgia House, \"We're going to take our rights.  We're going to start selecting our own speaker.  And we're going to write it into the constitution.  The governor is not going to tell us who the speaker is going to be.\"  Well, we had the votes to do it. The 121 smallest counties, they formed the 121 club.  It was just a rural caucus.  You could be completely in sympathy with them,  but you couldn't go to the 121 club caucus.  But every one of them, they swore  that they were going to put that in there.  They selected a wonderful guy by the name of George Brooks.  You and I were talking about George a few minutes before we started this.  He was from somewhere over here around Athens, I've forgotten his county.  But he was the chairman of the 121 club.  There were a lot of people in the urban counties -- the three and two representative counties -- that felt the same way.  Our whole delegation, all three of us were in favor of it.  It's just a question of separation of powers between the legislative and the executive.  The governor ought not to be selecting the speaker of the House.  But there were a lot of votes.  Well, Governor Sanders, he was a very good governor, but he was a very effective governor.  He started working on that 121 and they kind of faded away.  And it did not get adopted.   \r\n \r\n SHORT: That was in '64? \r\n \r\n JONES:  That was in the special session in '64, whenever we were up there to draw this new constitution.  Well, while we're in Atlanta drawing a new constitution, the federal court ruled again.  We had thought -- you know the federal Congress, one house, the Senate is based on geography, the other house, the House of Representatives, is based on population.  And this is what that first '62 ruling said, was that one of them had to be -- you know.  But when we were in special session, I think it was May of 1964, give me some slack, I'm talking about stuff fifty years ago and I'm seventy-three years old.  I may be off a little on the dates and stuff like that.  They said, \"No, both of them have got to be.  You're going to have to reapportion the House.\"  And they did that when we were in special session.  And they said, \"Furthermore, you can forget about this constitution.  We are not going to let the people of the state of Georgia vote on a constitution that is draw by a malapportioned legislature.  So ya'll go home.\"  They adjourned us.  That was it.    Incidentally, and we can get to it later if you want to, and I'm afraid I'm talking too much.  One of the finest speeches I have ever heard -- well, I'm not going to say that -- the finest speech I have ever heard in my life in the context of a political moment, was made on the floor of the House of Representatives after the 121 club faded away.  Not all of them, but most of them did.  By a guy by the name of Bob Flournoy, he was a representative from Cobb county in Marietta, he later served with great distinction as a superior court judge up there.  He has a son who is a superior court judge up there now, if I understand correctly.  And Bob Flournoy, he was one of those urban legilators, he was one of the three from Cobb county.  He would have been in favor of this established legislative independence.  He read them the riot act.  I've kept a copy of his speech, all those years since 1964, what is that?  Forty-six years now.  Because it was just such a wonderful speech. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  What did he say? \r\n \r\n JONES:  This is five pages.  Do you want me to read this thing? \r\n \r\n SHORT:  I do. \r\n \r\n JONES:  I've kept this thing because of what I thought was the significance of it, and I apologize for the length of it, but it is interesting -- I think.  \"Remarks made by Representative Flournoy, House of Representatives, May 20 --\" that's my wife's birthday, incidentally, \"--1964.\"   \r\n This first paragraph is just kind of introductory remarks: \"Freshman legislator, but perhaps what I lack in experience and intelligence, I hope may make up in sincerity of purpose.  For sincerity is a quality I have determined is in rather scarce supply in the House of Representatives in Georgia.\"  This was on point of personal privileges at the beginning of the morning session.   \r\n \"I take the privilege of these brief moments to tell you of the shattering of a dream of mine.  A mirage that was broken on yesterday, and a new dream yet to come true.  I was born in an apartment house in the city of Atlanta.  It was the second story over a combination delicatessen candy store.  That's a polite word for a beer parlor.  It was at the corner of English Avenue and Chestnut Street, an area long since taken over as slums by negroes.  My parents were of Georgia stock, moved to Atlanta from rural Georgia.  They were poor, but honest and proud.  All of my life I have been taught and believed that rural people were the salt of the earth and that somehow rural Georgians are the bulwark of freedom and liberty and independence and integrity.   \r\n \"The proudest days of life were when my grandfather, known far and wide as Uncle Match Hitchcock, carried me every year on the fourth of July to the sacred harp singing at the Paulding county courthouse in Dallas.  Somehow, I felt, the hand of God had painted a picture in rural Georgia and here the very soul of our political institutions were found.  I studied very hard as a student, reading nearly everything I could get my hand on about Georgia, or history, or political institutions.   \r\n \"As a boy I had ruther listen to a political speech by Gene Talmadge, Ed Rivers, or Walter George, than to eat a meal.  As an older boy, I went off to college and I continued my alliance to the most sacred esteem in which I held the face of rural Georgia, her sons and her political leaders.  As president of the Demosthenian Literary Society at the University of Georgia, many a night I debated and argued for Georgia's county-unit system and it's system of government which gave greater weight to the soil that to cities.  For I truly believed that men that were close to the soil were somehow more honest, prouder, more independent, and less apt to be dictated to.  I believed with Thomas Jefferson that an agrarian society was the most fertile soil in which a democratic republic might grow and produce fruit of liberty.   \r\n \"On yesterday, this dream was largely shaken and destroyed.  For I realized that independent men might be found in the middle of streets of concrete as well as in the furrows of fields.  And that those men who were from the farms are no more independent than those who live in the shadow of the skyscraper.  On yesterday I saw the collapse of a long overdue fraud.  The representatives of rural Georgia don't represent farmers and merchants and independent little people. The representatives of rural Georgia are stooges who would sell their birthright for asphalt and gravel.  They are Judas Iscariot, who for thirty pieces out of the pork barrel would betray their heritage.   \r\n \"You may rightly ask me, 'Who do you think you are saying such things to us, 121 representatives from rural Georgia?  You apartment born city slicker?' And I'll answer you.  On yesterday I voted for your amendment respecting secret ballot regarding the speaker's election.  Why?  Because I wanted to help those of you who don't have the courage enough to assert your convictions in the open, in the public.  I'm not afraid to vote my convictions in the open because I voted this very amendment on the board.\"  Talking about the voting light board.  \"I voted for it to try to strengthen those of you who may out of fear be scared to vote your choice for speaker of the House.   \r\n \"But I voted for it for still another reason.  I voted for it because I felt sorry for you. Yes, you 121 representatives from the small counties of Georgia.  I felt sorry for you because you are the captives and victims of the years of ubiquitous fraud that you have perpetrated on your own people.  Yes, the people of rural Georgia.  You have told them that there was no need to make the county-unit system equitable, and because of it's inequity, it was destroyed.  You have told them there would be no integration of the races in Georgia.  You said, 'No, not one.'   \r\n \"And now you are telling the rural people of Georgia in this constitution that they can have a House based on geography, when there isn't a man in this House who believes it's present apportionment will last through June the 15th of this year.\"  Within the week, the federal courts had knocked it down.  \"And when you rural representatives had the once chance to strike a blow for your own independence, you buffed it.  You the great bulwark of the democratic republic, you the men upon whom legislative independence rests, you sirs are frauds.  I must say to the gentleman from Oglethorpe, Mr. Brooks, a man whose sincerity and integrity is beyond question, you know he must mean everything he does say because he does not have the syrupy drawl of Mr.--\" I'm not going to mention that name, \"or the quick wit of --\" another one, no need in mentioning names.  \"The commanding presence of,\" another one, \"or the parliamentary smoothness of,\" another Mr. Anonymous.   \"All he has is the strength of his own convictions, and that sirs means more to me than all the glib tongues of a thousand orators.  Mr. Brooks, sir, for you I felt so embarrassed, so humiliated.  \"This group of men we were led to believe who would stand fast like the Rock of Gibraltar, the shifted like shifting sand.  They said to you, \"Lead on, we will follow.\"  And you looked back and they flushed like a covey of quail.  Yes I voted for your motion, your own lieutenants, however, left you. I didn't attend your committee of 121, but I along with county representatives like Mr. Groover, Mr. Late, Mr. Wilson, Mr. Funk, Mr. Pickert, Mr. Dicus, Mr. Milton Jones.  We helped you muster your ragged little band.   \r\n \"Some may say, \"You're not fair Mr. Flournoy.  I really believed in my position and the way I voted.\"  Don't hand me that.  When a soldier takes to the field, he doesn't choose where to fight, he fights where the battle lines are drawn.  The battle lines were drawn yesterday.  You had to either fight there or not at all, and the staunch 121 melted away.  Please don't feel badly.  I'm not recriminating you, the battle is over.  What difference ultimately will it make whether the speaker is elected openly or by secret ballot?  Very little, if any.   \r\n \"The point is when the battle came, wherever is immaterial, you would not fight.  You were afraid.  The dye is now cast, this House will not write a constitution, it will merely ratify that which is spoon-fed to it, so the quicker the better so the taxpayers will lose as little as possible.  The three branches of government in Georgia, legislative, judicial, and executive are gone in so far as this constitution is being drawn.  Oh, we in the legislature may cross a 't' or dot an 'i' or change a word evidenced to testimony or vice versa.  But your infamous 121 less thirty odd have proved your mettle.  To paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill, if Georgia shall last for a thousand years, men shall say this was her poorest hour.   \r\n \"While 121 represent about 22 percent of Georgia's population, you didn't have the intestinal fortitude to even represent that 22 well, which brings us to the second point I wish to make.  It should now be obvious to all, and the events of the last two days have proved it beyond the doubt of even yourselves, the representatives of rural counties of Georgia don't deserve to be perpetuated in this House.  You don't represent your people, you don't even represent geography.  It should be now apparent that you represent the governor of Georgia and his bidding is your destiny.   \r\n \"I truly wish you could be justified on the grounds that only you rural representatives are independent, self-sufficient, and only you possess integrity sufficient to withstand the autocracy of a powerful executive.  But alas, you have failed.  And now it only remains for the federal judiciary to preach the funeral oration over a legislative system of rural control that only yesterday proved itself to be lacking in vitality, dead.  We of the urban areas didn't kill you, you killed yourself with 121 votes, far in excess of the majority of this House.  You didn't have the political, intestinal fortitude to put across a meager crumb of legislative independence for this House.   \r\n \"At the beginning of these remarks, I told of my unbroken dream of the great independence of the irreproachable combination: lawyer, farmer, statesman.  And I am disillusioned to find you just men after all.  I also told you of a new dream yet to come.  Mr. Cargroan yesterday told you of his dream  of rural and urban Georgia walking down the road together.  And he also mentioned the dreaming of Reverend Martin Luther King.   \r\n I think I too should be privileged to dream a little.  I have a dream of a new Georgia, politically.  I dream of one where relatively few of you 121 faces will return to the House of Representatives.  I dream of a House of Representatives with about 100 members in it, representing a maximum of 50 counties in Georgia.  I have a dream of a general assembly where it's members are paid about $10,000 a year, \" it's more than that now. \"Where they don't have to depend on anyone putting them on interim committees to make a living.  I have a dream of a House of Representatives and a Senate in Georgia that represents no interests except the interests of the people who elect them.  Where legislators are not bribed by highway funds, but where such funds are allocated basically as school funds, on some reasonable and equitable basis.  Where the legislators don't even know who the highway director is, much less have to make weekly trips to beg roads.  I dream of a Georgia where the governor presents his legislation on the basis of it's reasonableness, it's merit, and it's soundness.  Not on the basis of doing him a personal favor, paying a political debt, or sucking a political plum.   \r\n You say, 'How are you going to take politics out of politics?' I answer, we're not going to take politics out of politics, we're just going to change some of the rules so as to conform to a government where all have some rights and no minority can stampede and trample over the majority.  Or the majority deny basics to the minority.  Where neither the rural nor the urban can gleefully apply the lash.  This new House of which I dream may not be more independent than the present House, but it is a cinch it could not be less independent.  Yesterday proved that fact.  Not through the newspapers, not through the federal government, not through the urban masses, but by your own willingness to be masters of your own fate.  I salute you and bid you a fond farewell.\"  And he did not run for reelection.   \r\n  \r\n  SHORT:  Pretty courageous stuff. \r\n \r\n JONES:  Well, you can imagine how many folks took the floor on a point of personal privilege after him.  I mean it was like someone poured gasoline on them and set them  on fire.  He didn't care.  He went back to Cobb county, practiced law, became superior court judge.  It was very strong, but he said what happened, he told what happened.  And of course, like I said, the federal court ruled very shortly thereafter that we were malapportioned, that that constitution would not be submitted to the people, and we went home.   \r\n They also ruled that the House had to be reapportioned the same as the Senate had been, congressional redistricting.  It was too late to do it for the '64 elections, they were going to let the people elected in '64 come in in January and serve that session.  But there would have to be a special election in '65 to finish up the last of the two year term.  You had an election in '64, which was in effect for one year -- the '65 session -- then we had to run again in '65 after we had reapportioned the House in the regular session of '65 to serve the second year.  And then we got back on a two year basis.  But there were two one year session in there.   \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Let's move ahead to 1966.  A very, very strange election that started with Ellis Arnall and Ernest Vandiver as the two main candidates.  Jimmy Carter ran, Herman Talmadge ran briefly, and then withdrew.  What is your recollection of that election? \r\n \r\n Jones: Well, we skipped '65.  And I hope I'm -- if time's a factor, just tell me.  But '65 may have been the most interesting of all because -- well, it wasn't more interesting than '66, nothing could be more interesting than '66.  But '65 is when we reapportioned that House.  Now that was bloody.  That was one of the most emotionally traumatic things I've ever seen happen to a group of people.   \r\n That 121 that Flournoy was talking about, most of these guys had been up there for many years.  I mean if you got into the legislature, you'd stay generally.  They were small counties, everybody knows everybody in the county next to them, and things of that nature.  They were very close friends.  And let me say this about them.  Particularly after reading Flournoy's speech, I give the impression that they were bad folks.  They weren't bad folks.  I was amazed when I got to Atlanta -- I indicate how young I was -- I mean I walked around with my mouth hanging open because these guys were so great.  People I'd read about and heard  about all my life nearly.  And they took me under their arms, they treated me like a surrogate son.  They weren't a bunch of bad guys.  \r\n I think in one of your posings to Elliot you mentioned the fact that they were rural and segregationists and all that.  That's absolutely not true.  There were a lot of really good people in that legislature.  Jamie MacKay for example.  I mean, you couldn't find a finer man than Jamie MacKay.  There were a lot of good people in there.   \r\n But they were then faced with the fact that we're going to apportion the House on  population.  We had three representatives from Muscogee county.  We had to go out and find four other people to run for the legislature.  We literally were walking the street, asking people to run for the legislature.  I mean, you can think that's a joke, and it is somewhat of an exaggeration, but not really.  I mean we'd get together and sit down, \"Well what about so-and-so?\"  \"I don't know, I don't know.\"  \"What do you think about him?\"  And we were dividing up name and calling them, saying, \"Will you please run for the legislature?\"  We went from three to seven.   \r\n But in these rural counties, you might have four counties, each of whom had one representative.  They're going to now be in a district, and they're going to have one representative.  And these guys in large measure may have been very close friends, they may have served with each other ten, twelve years.  And three of them are going to stay at home and one of them's coming back up there.  How are they going to decide?  You flip coins?  Do you say to your buddy, \"You go, I'd rather you go than me go.\"  \"Are we all going to run against each other?\"  It was really, really bad, but we got through it.   \r\n Now that was one time, Bob, and I think you were working in Governor Sander's government at that time, when it probably helped for the governor to have a very direct hand in there with George T. as the speaker of the House.  I'm not sure with all the emotional conflict in it that the House could have done it themselves.  I think that probably Carl and George T. got it done when we might have had a hard time doing it ourselves.  But anyway, that was '65.  And so we have the special election in '65.  We come back up there in '66, you know, for the regular session in '66.  Before that governor's race you were talking about.  And now we've got all of these new folks in there.  You've got a lot of old folks who are still back home.  That was one of the overlays on that governor's race in 1966 that made it even more interesting.  You also had the Jullian Bond situation in 1966.   \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Yeah, I was going to ask you about that.  You were there. \r\n \r\n JONES:  I was there.  And probably one of the votes -- I can think of two votes I made in the eight years I was in the legislature I wish I could take back.  And that was one of them, because I was one of the ones who voted to deny Jullian his seat.  Jullian and I later became -- I'm not going to say close friends, but we were friends.  And he understood, but Jullian of course, he was a young college student.  I think he was still out at Moorehouse at the time.  He had come down here -- he had gone to Quaker schools up north, his daddy was a president of some college up there.  But he was one of the prime movers in SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and they were probably ahead of the rest of the county in their opposition to the Vietnam conflict.   \r\n But Jullian had gone further.  He had made statement that he sympathized with those people who burned the draft cards and went to Canada.  That was kind of the triggering effect.  And the South has always been a little more conservative about things like that.  And so this fire storm broke out, \"We're going to deny him his seat.\"  And he was denied his seat January when we went to Atlanta in '66 because of that.  Because of that statement that he sympathized with draft card burners.   \r\n Interestingly enough, one of the new members we had from Columbus was a wonderful guy by the name of Albert Thompson, who was an African-American lawyer down there.  And Albert voted not to seat him too.  Albert was born on Fort Benning military reservation, his daddy had  been in the army, he was a career army man.  And, you know, I'm not saying I was justified to do it because Albert voted to do it too.   \r\n In retrospect, I wish I hadn't cast that vote the way I did.  The federal court said we were within our power to do it.  A few months later, the Supreme Court of the United States, 9-zip said, \"No, you weren't in your power to do it.  The man was executing his first amendment rights of freedom of speech, and you put him back in there.\"  Well, we had had the new election in '66, Jullian had run for his old seat, he got elected.  He came up there January of '67, nobody opened their mouth.  Jullian served from then on, he was still up there when I left there.  But that was something that happened in '66. \r\n Alright, now let's go to the governor's race of '66.  As you mentioned, Ellis Arnall had gotten in that race.  And he was going to run against Ernie Vandiver, back to the fact that a governor couldn't succeed himself, Ernie had now been out four years while Carl was governor.  He was going to run for governor.  Lester Maddox, who had run a surprisingly strong race against Peter Zack Geer for lieutenant governor in '62, he was in the governor's race.  Bo Callaway, who had run for Congress for my congressional district over there, Harris county -- Callaway Gardens is the immediate county to the north of Columbus.  And he was the first Republican I think elected to Congress from Georgia, since Reconstruction.  That was in '64.  Everybody was talking about, \"Bo's going to run for governor, Bo's  going to run for governor as a Republican.\"  And he did.   \r\n So you've got those guys in the race.  Jimmy Carter, who had served four years in the Senate now, from '62 to '64, you might say '63 to '65.  He was running against Bo for Congress.  I was right close to Carter, I mean his senatorial district adjoined my House district.  We were elected at the same time, and in large measure I had run against a guy who was pretty close to Homer Moore, the guy he had run against.  So we were fairly close.  And he was running for Congress and I was carrying around Columbus, and the next thing I know, when Bo gets in the governor's race, Jimmy gets out of the congressional race and into the governor's race.  He followed Bo into the governor's race.  So it was an interesting time.   \r\n Vandiver had a heart attack.  You know Garland had the heart attack in '62, now Vandiver's having one in '64, so the race is now -- Callaway is unopposed for the Republicans -- so they knew whoever was running would have to run against Callaway.  This is two years after '64 when Goldwater had carried the state.  You'd had the Voting Rights Act, you'd had the Civil Rights Act, you'd had a number of things that had happened in there.  So, a Republican was going to be a very strong candidate.  Arnall had been a great governor of the state back in the '40's.  He was kind of the wunderkind, you might say.  He won the freight rate cases against the railroads, and now that the governor's race is on one man, one vote, and not the county-unit system, he's a very strong, viable candidate.  But he was running against Maddox, Carter's in there.  Jimmy Gray from down in Albany was in there.  And it's taken off.   \r\n The Democratic primary, they had the elecction and Jimmy came in a very close third, Lester ran second, and Arnall got the most votes.  I think that a lot of Republicans, now they'd deny it --they voted for Lester.  Because they thought Lester would be easier to beat than Arnall.  And so they have the run off a couple weeks later and Lester beat Arnall.  I don't know if it was with Republican help or not.  They deny it, but the boy who had run my campaign in 1962 had been a friend of mine in high school -- Bill Amos -- he had run Callaway's campaign for Congress in '64 and he was running Callaway's campaign for governor in '66.  I knew a little bit about what was going on and I think they did raid the primary.  But that's neither here nor there.  They ended up with Maddox as the Democratic nominee.  Callaway is now the Republican nominee, so they headed into the general election.   \r\n Well, there were a lot of Democrats in the state that were very unhappy about the thing because Callaway had gotten more votes.  He carried my county something like four-to-one.  It was a bad situation.  But Arnall allowed a write-in campaign to be waged on his behalf, and he got about 60,000 if I remember right -- 50,000 or 60,000 write-in votes.  And even though Callaway had more votes than Lester, he didn't have a majority.  And the Georgia constitution provided that in the event anybody running for state-wide office did not get a majority of the vote -- not a plurality, but a majority -- the legislature selected.  So we wake up the day after the general election, the legislature has got to select who the governor's going to be.  And it was a situation.  It wasn't as bad as the three governor mess in '46, I don't guess, but it was close to it.   \r\n \r\n SHORT: What do you remember about that?  That was another very historical time.   \r\n \r\n JONES:  I was ten years old, I don't remember much about it.  But I remember we made national headlines.  That was before television news, but we were all over the papers and everybody was laughing at us and everything else.   \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Yeah. \r\n \r\n JONES:  P.T. McCutcheon, who was Ellis Arnall's executive secretary, he had a son that was in law school with me, Tim McCutcheon, and I knew Mr. McCutcheon later.  He could tell some terrible tales about.  He was the guy, I think, that got hit by the pistol or something there, anyway. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  That was a very dark day in Georgia political history.  But getting back to '66, there was thought and a lot of media members and pundits thought that Jimmy Carter was coming along so strongly toward the end of that campaign that if it had lasted another week or two he probably would have won.  You were involved in it, what do you think? \r\n \r\n JONES:  I was involved in it, but not very closely.  George T. was running for Lieutenant governor against Peter Zach.  George T. had asked me to help him in his campaign while Jimmy was still in the congressional race.  I tried to figure out a way to go to Atlanta and do it full time, but just never could.  I mean, money was always a problem.  I was just a young lawyer and had a wife teaching school to support my political habits, you might say.  By then we had four kids under five years old on the ground and there wasn't any way I could take off and do it.  I was more active, I think, in George T.'s race in '66 than I was Jimmy's, but I kept trying to help how I could.   \r\n The night of the election, the Democratic primary, my wife and I, we were in the Dinkler, which was where Carter's headquarters were.  And when we went to bed, it was kind of like Wisconsin in '76 ten years later.  We were in the runoff.  As I recall, we were number two, we were in the runoff.  And we figured, if we're in the runoff, we're going to win this thing.  And at about 2:00 in the morning, I heard somebody out screaming in the hall, woke me up.  I went out and we were out of the runoff.  Some votes had come in from down in southeast Georgia, close to the coast, and they had gone heavily for Maddox.  And we were out of the runoff. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  That period of time between the general election and the day that Maddox was elected by the legislature gave you time to really become an independent House. \r\n \r\n JONES:  That's right.  This thing had been simmering since George T. replaced George L. in January of 1963.  It had gotten stoked up higher with the Bedgood plan on the last night of the regular session in '64.  But in '66, we had been thinking about, \"You know, there's a chance we're going to have a Republican governor.\"  A lot of folks thought Callaway was going to win that race.  And we're certainly not going to let a Republican governor tell a Democratic House who their speaker is going to be.   \r\n Robin Harris who was one of the greatest guys I ever served with.  He was from Dekalb county, a wonderful man.  He was chairman of the House judiciary committee.  And the House judiciary committee was kind of a hot bed of trouble makers.  We were all lawyers, you had Elliot on there, you had Reed on there, I was on there, Sam Nunn was on there.  I don't think Sam was there in '66.  But anyway, we were concerned about it.  And so we started thinking that this would be an ideal time to try to strike while there was not going to be as much executive possibility or possibility of executive interference in this thing.  And we wake up the day after the general election and no governor's going to tell anybody in the legislature what to do because they're coming to us, hat in hand about, \"Vote for me.\"   \r\n So, there was a meeting, and we met out at Robin's house there in Decatur, right off East Ponce de Leon.  And we decided we would have us an arrangements committee.  We were going to call a caucus of the House Democratic members.  There had been a lot of Republicans elected the year before this redistricting -- the House reapportionment.  And they properly had organized them a caucus.  And they'd elected a minority leader and stuff like that -- a minority whip.  And so we said, \"We're going to have us a Democratic caucus, they've got a Republican caucus, we're going to have us a Democratic caucus.  And we're going to have a meeting.\"  The arrangements committee sent out this letter.  We didn't sign it with anybody's name, we just said, \"The arrangements committee.\"  And anyway, we had that meeting.  I think that was really before the general election, if I remember right now.   \r\n But anyway, had it at Stone Mountain.  It was after the legislative day over here at Georgia when all the legislators came over to a Georgia football game and barbecue.  And, you know, that letter got out, \"We're going to have us a Democratic caucus and we're going to discuss the election of the speaker and legislative independence.\"  So everybody that wasn't on the arrangements committee, they're calling each other, \"Who's this arrangements committee?  You going?\"  Stuff like that.  We lay low as Brer Fox did -- Brer Rabbit, one.   So it was funny, but they all showed up.  Everybody showed up at Stone Mountain that morning.  Reed has written something about that -- I haven't seen it, but you talk to Reed about it.  Everybody was in favor of it.  They said, \"Yeah, this makes sense.\"  And so an elections committee was appointed.  That's right, that was before the general election.  The elections committee was appointed to make recommendations about what we were going to do.  It wasn't really an elections committee -- it was we were going to select the Democratic nominee for speaker which would be, \"tantamount to election,\" because there were a lot more Democrats than there were Republicans.  Anyway, we met in the House of Representatives on the Sunday after the Georgia-Auburn football game.  I think it was November the 13th if I remember right.   \r\n And Robin Harris ran for speaker, George L. ran for speaker.  A guy named Bill Styce, who was a wonderful lawyer from Harris county, he was from Pennsylvania and he had come down to Fort Benning during World War II and married a gal from Harris county and came back after the war.  Dick Richardson from Savannah.  There were four candidates for speaker if I remember right.  And George L., of course, was selected to be the Democratic nominee.  George Busbee, interestingly enough, was once of the Democrats in addition to me and several others, who voted for Callaway in January.  And there was a lot of concern about -- he was selected to be the Democratic floor leader for the House.  And that's when Lester Maddox appointed Tom Murphy to be the administration floor leader.  So, you had Tom Murphy who was Lester's administration floor leader, you had George Busbee who had voted for Callaway as a Democratic floor leader, and it was an interesting situation.  But the long and the short of it is the House then and ever since has elected it's speaker.  The governor no longer tells the House who the speaker is going to be.   \r\n Now, there again, looking back, I've had second thoughts about that.  You know, no good deed goes unpunished.  And now you've got all that power that we just talked about an hour or so ago now -- about appointing every committee member, every chairman, assigning every bill, what bill is going to be called, what bill is not going to be called, stuff like that -- is concentrated in one person who is selected by a very small geographic area in the state of Georgia.  You got the governor who's elected by the whole state, you've got the lieutenant governor and the Senate that's elected by the whole state, you got the speaker of the House that's elected by one district.  And if you've got a good speaker of the House, you've got a good situation.  If you've got one though who might not be quite so good, then you've got an intolerable situation.  Because with the power he's got, he can pave every square inch of the whole district.  Nobody's going to vote out their local representative because he's speaker of the House.  You might have a situation there in perpetuity.  But anyway, so far we've stumbled through and it's working I guess.   \r\n \r\n [Audio gap] \r\n \r\n SHORT:  We've got Maddox elected.  We've got that period of time between the election -- \r\n \r\n JONES:  Maddox is nominated \r\n   \r\n SHORT:  Nominated. Yes.  The period time between the general election in '66 and the convening of the legislature in '67. \r\n \r\n JONES:  You're right.  You're right. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Where the legislature -- \r\n \r\n JONES:  See, that was about two months.   \r\n \r\n SHORT:  A lot of time.  It gave each of those candidates time to really do a lot of lobbying with the members of the General Assembly.  What do you remember about that?   \r\n \r\n JONES:  Are we running?  Well, as you had pointed out, Bob, it was two months.  I was kind of involved in the Callaway thing.  You know, it makes it sound like I'm Forrest Gump and I was involved in everything, and I don't mean it that way.  But Bill Amos, who was Callaway's AA when he was in Congress and managed his congressional race in '64 and gubernatorial race in '66, had been one of my closest friends in high school -- Columbus High School.  He was a year older than I was. And he had managed my campaign in '62.  In fact, the fact that we won that race is the reason Callaway wanted him to run his campaign in '64 and then carried him to Washington with him.   \r\n So, they wake up and here they are, they had the most votes, but they're going into a Democratic legislature that's going to have to pick them, and what are we going to do?  I was, I think, called fairly early on.  There was no way, in all respect to Governor Maddox, that I could support him.  I could never have supported the man.  When I was at Emory and at Emory Law School, he was running those full-page, on page 2 of the Atlanta Constitution or Journal ever Saturday, small type ads going on about everything in the world, and running the Pickrick and doing all those things that I just could not have supported.  And my county had gone heavily for Callaway.  I would have changed parties -- as much as I'm a yellow dog Democrat -- I would have changed parties nearly before I'd have done it -- and Charlie Weltner did, if you recall.  Charlie Weltner refused to run on the ticket with him as the nominee.   \r\n I knew I was going to be helping.  Ellis -- Lester -- I'll get it in a minute -- Elliot Levitas, who was the representative from Dekalb county and a close friend of mine, he was a law partner of Ellis Arnall who had gotten the 60,000 vote write-ins -- the 50,000 or 60,000 that denied Callaway the outright win.  He was interested in helping and he helped.  Busbee helped.  You know, later Democratic governor of the state of Georgia.  But my recollection is that George was involved with it.   \r\n We started calling folks, but it's kind of like we were preaching to the choir.  My close friends in the legislature were going to vote for Callaway.  You know, I was preaching to the choir.  But, we did.  We tried to call folks, and they were scratching around.  They were doing things.  I think that they mounted somewhat of a campaign with the business leaders of the state.  They had bank presidents calling legislators and stuff like that.  Because Callaway was a very popular guy.  Bear it in mind now, two years before Barry Goldwater carried this state heavily against Lyndon Johnson.  So they were not without resources, it was just marshaling them.   \r\n Bob Elliot, who was a long serving judge in federal court in Columbus, had been Herman Talmadge's floor leader during the two governor mess back in '46 and during his administration.  And by then -- I think Judge Elliot was appointed in '62 by Kennedy -- but I remembered that he had been Talmadge's floor leader and he had been the floor leader during that situation where they would try to resolve the two governor -- three governor, however many you want to call it -- mix up in '46.  I asked him, \"What did ya'll do?  And he referred me to the House journals, the Senate journals.  And you know what the House and Senate journal is, a voluminous book that deals in painful detail with every bill, every House, every resolution, everything that happens in the House and the Senate during the session.  And we got that thing and went back -- 'cause Bob Elliot is one of the smartest men that's ever lived.  And we figured out what he had done from a parliamentary standpoint, the motions he made.  And we knew it was an uphill battle, and we lost it eventually.  There wasn't any question we lost it, lost it badly.  The legislature was heavily Democratic, and they selected Maddox over Callaway.  But we got a lot more votes than they thought we were going to get.  And what we did -- Peter Zack Geer had been defeated by George T. Smith for lieutenant governor.   \r\n Well, in Georgia the way it operates, the legislature convenes on the second Monday in January.  And when there's been a governor's election, they are not inaugurated -- sworn in -- until Tuesday, the day after the legislature convenes.  So, on the second Monday in January of 1967, even though George L. is going to be the new speaker, George T. is still the speaker of the House.  And Peter Zack Geer, even though he's been defeated by George T. for lieutenant governor, he's still the lieutenant governor.  When you have a joint session, the lieutenant governor presides.  So, here you've got this situation.  Peter Zach, who's been defeated by George T., sitting up there besides George T., presiding over this session of the general assembly, the second Monday in January, 1967.  And we're going to select who the governor is.  A small group of us, we went to talk to Peter Zack Geer.  I kept quiet because I was too closely associated with George T., I guess. But we told him kind of what our legislative strategy was going to be.  I've heard Elliot's tape with you, and Elliot indicated that he thought P.Z. treated us kind of roughly.  My recollection is that P.Z. listened to what we had to say and I was very favorably impressed with the way he conducted the thing.  That's a 73 year-old man talking about something that happened close to 50 years ago.  I may be wrong, Elliot may be right, probably the truth is somewhere in the middle.  But I thought that Peter Zack Geer, he dealt the cards off the top of the deck with us that day.  When the day was over though, Lester Maddox was governor of the state of Georgia. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  That was only after an attempt -- I know representative Reed Harris introduced some sort of legislation to send it back to the people. \r\n \r\n JONES:  That was the whole idea, was to try to get it -- there wasn't any way they were going to vote Callaway governor.  But we were trying to get them to go back and have a rerun without any possibility of a write-in and whoever got the most votes.  That was the strategy that was adopted.  Because we knew we couldn't win directly, but maybe we could get it  indirectly.  We didn't get it either way.   \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Let's talk a minuted about the Supreme Court decision.  That case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court.  The question being, as I recall, \"Is the legislature legally empowered to elect a governor under those circumstances.\"  Or, \"Was that provision in our constitution constitutional.\" \r\n \r\n JONES:  Well, I don't remember that much about that, Bob, so I can't answer it.  But obviously it stood. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Yeah, 5-4 vote.  In fact, Justice Black ruled that the legislature had the power to elect the governor in the first place, going back to colonial days, I presume. \r\n \r\n JONES:  I was worrying about other things by then.  I wasn't involved in that lawsuit.   \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Well, let's move along.  Lester Maddox was elected.  That didn't play well with a lot of people in Georgia.  But at the end of his term he seemed to get a passing grade.   \r\n \r\n JONES:  I think that's true.  I think Lester surprised a lot of us.  I'm not going to say               -- I think that he didn't do any harm, any particular harm.  And one of the things he did that you've got to give the man credit for.  He made more appointments of blacks, of African-Americans, to positions of responsibility in the state of Georgia than I any governor had done before.  Lester did something else, though.  I think that one of the things about being a chief executive of a political situation -- be it president, or governor, or anything like that -- is to, let's say, \"show the flag.\"  To be accessible to the people.  You remember he to have the little people's day, where people could come and go through his office, or go through the mansion, or something like that.  And they could see the governor.  Lester would get out -- I think you were in his office.  I mean, he'd travel all over this state.  I mean, if you invited Lester to come somewhere, for a pig-picking or anything else, Lester was going, he was going to show up.  He was accessible to the people.  All of those hundreds of high school groups that come to the capital during the legislative session.  He was out there with every one of them having his picture taken.  And I think that is good.  The office of governor is so demanding that I think that good executives, they tend to just hole up in there and make all these big decisions and they become encapsulated.  But Lester didn't do that.  He was accessible to the people.  I think in large measure, though, you had a pretty good Senate running.  You had George L. in the House.  I think the legislature kept the state on a pretty even keel that four years when Lester rode his bicycle and got his picture taken.  But we got through it and it was alright. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  He was not an overpowering governor, was he? \r\n \r\n JONES:  I wouldn't say so.  I mean, I don't want to say anything ugly.  But you know, I don't think he did much harm.  One thing that I've never forgotten though, the departments, the various departments of state government, if they've got something they want enacted into law, the first thing they do, the carry it to the governor.  \"Governor, how about making this part of your administration package this year?\"  And you know, the governor can't take everything.  So he takes some, he doesn't take some.  But they've still got this bill they want introduced.  And so then they get out and try to find them a legislator to introduce the bill if the governor's not going to do it.  And I somehow got to where -- what we used to call the Highway Department -- now the DOT -- and Public Safety, they would use me quite a bit on some of their legislation that didn't make the A-team, let's say.  And one of them was -- the drivers' license folks wanted to implement eye exams every four or five years.  Now, we do that now.  Well, I said, \"That makes sense to me.  People who are blind shouldn't be driving.  So I introduced this bill to require over a certain age -- I'm over that age now, I might add -- that you had to have your eyes examined every five years, I think.  And we got it passed.  I mean, it's hard to argue with that thing.  Lester vetoed it.   I never will forget what he said.  He said, \"Well, I know some people that've got poor eyesight that are safer drivers than folks that've got good eyesight.\"  You can't argue with that, I'm sure that there are some out there that way.  But he was interesting. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Well, in 1970 you decided not to seek reelection.  Why? \r\n \r\n JONES:  Oh, a number of things.  I'd been up there eight years.  I never was very wealthy.  Didn't have any money to speak of.  We were doing alright -- had a law partner Lee Grogan, great guy from up in Cherokee county.  In '68 we had started growing our firm.  We had started picking up some folks.  I needed to spend more time there.  My children were 9, 8, 7, and 5.  I started having to think about financial concerns.  Because when you're in the legislature, particularly if you're an active legislator, it takes a lot of time.  And I needed to start doing that.  Carter was running for governor again.  He never stopped running after '66.  He just kept running for four years.  I wanted to try to help him.  I hadn't been able to do as much as I'd wanted to in '66 because I was tied up with George T.'s race a little bit.  So I wanted to help some more there.  So it was just a myriad of things.  And it's kind of one of those things.  You know, in the army, you either go up or get out.  And in politics it's pretty much the same.  I knew I wasn't going up, and there wasn't any sense in hanging around.   \r\n \r\n SHORT:  You were close to President Carter.   \r\n \r\n JONES:  Well, somewhat.  We were both elected at the same time, as I indicated earlier -- '62.  His senatorial district included Chattahoochee county, which is the county immediately south of Muscogee county.  We were part of that freshman class, he was in the Senate, I was in the House.  Jeanette and Rosalynn got along fairly well, he and I got along fairly well.  He helped me with some legislation when it got to the Senate, and we became fairly close.   \r\n \r\n SHORT:  He appointed you to the Board of Regents.   \r\n \r\n JONES:  Yeah, that was in '74. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  '74.  Tell us a little bit about the Board of Regents.  A lot of people don't understand what the group is and what it does.   \r\n \r\n JONES:  A lot of us regents aren't sure sometimes.  But, no, it was a governing board -- Dick Russell.  We're sitting here in the Russell library right now.  When he was governor of Georgia back in the early '30's, he reorganized state government.  Jimmy Ca \r\nrter, I think, was the next one that did it in 1971.  He put all of the state colleges under the university system.  And the Board of Regents when I was on it -- I don't know what the make-up is now, but we had 15 members.  I think it was one from each congressional district, and then you had five at large.  I don't even know how many congressmen we've got in Georgia now, but I know it's a lot more than it was back then.  But we had 15 people, and they are theoretically the ones -- the board -- who run the university system of Georgia.  Which includes your research institutions, such as the University of Georgia, Medical College of Georgia, Georgia Tech -- I don't know, Georgia State and Georgia Southern may be what they call research institutions now, but back in the '70's when I was on it, those were the three.  All of the, what we used to call four year colleges, which are now state universities, all of the junior colleges, which are now colleges.  But that's what it is.   \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Let's talk for a minute about party politics in Georgia.  We've seen a vast  change from the time that you were in the House of Representatives back in the '60's.  The Democratic party has lost a lot of ground.  Some people think that the state party is too urban, too dependent on minorities, too controlled by labor unions, and too liberal.  Do you agree with that? \r\n \r\n JONES:  Well, I can't address the state party.  I'm not that familiar with the state party.  But I think that you would hear those same criticisms from some circles, let's say, non-friendly circles, toward all Democrats, not just the state Democratic party in Georgia.  Obviously, there's been a sea change in politics in Georgia.  When do you want to start it?  I discussed back when I was getting into it, the courthouse Republicans.  Back then everybody was a Democrat.  That was in the '50' and '60's.  Then you started having all of these upheavals.  You had Brown v. Board of Education, you had the Civil Rights movements and pushes of Truman in the late '40's.  You had the Dixiecrat rebellion, I think it was in '48.  You had the other Civil Rights cases coming along.  You had the election of Kennedy in 1960.  You had more pushing, more federal court intervention in a lot of things in the South.  You had Kennedy's , in November of '63.  You had LBJ becoming president.  You had the Civil Rights Act, you had the Voting Rights Act.  You had the Goldwater/Johnson race in '68, where the South, Georgia went for Goldwater.  They'd also voted for Strom Thurmond if I recall correctly in '48, if I'm not mistaken.  I may be wrong on that.  And you've got things going.  Two years later in '66 you had Bo Callaway getting the most votes for governor. He didn't end up being the governor, but he had certainly had a plurality.  You had a growing presence of Republicans in the legislature.  And then you had the Nixon Southern strategy.  You had a lot of things that caused people in Georgia to reassess their situation as to whether they were Democrats or whether or not they were Republicans.  Now you can call it conservative versus liberal realignment, you can call it something else if you want to.  But I think that the things that you just said about, \"They're too close to this, they're too much that, and so forth,\" that's the same thing you hear on a national level as well as Georgia.   \r\n \r\n SHORT:  You mentioned Republican cross-over voting in the Maddox-Callaway race.   \r\n \r\n JONES:  I can't prove that. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Well, do you think that we out to have party registration in Georgia? \r\n \r\n JONES:  No, I really don't.  Cross-over voting is always a problem.  There were a lot of things in the legislature that I just didn't worry about a lot.  And election law was one of them.  I guess it comes from the fact  that I was from Muscogee county, Columbus.  We've always had honest elections in Columbus.  We've never had the first hint of any voter fraud or anything else in Columbus.  And it was my experience that the guys in the legislature that were always worrying about election laws, and trying to get this tinkered with, they were from the counties where they had the problems.  We didn't have that problem, and I never worried too much about it.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  So you weren't surprised in 2002 when Georgians elected a Republican governor. \r\n \r\n JONES:  No, no.  Callaway, all things considered, would have been the first one.  There was another guy from Columbus by the name of Ed Smith, who ran in 1962 for governor.  He was running for governor as a Republican.  He was killed in an automobile wreck there in Woodberry, Georgia.  He was out driving himself, been to a meeting in Atlanta, and he's in a car going home about 2:30 in the morning.  Trying to practice law the next morning and didn't have a driver.  Went to sleep and ran off the road there where 85 East and West separate in Woodberry, Georgia.  Killed himself.  You know, I think that J.R. Allen, who was from Columbus, who was a bright and rising star, but like a lot of others,  he'd started off a Democrat and he'd changed over.  I think J.R. Allen could have run for and been elected governor of the state of Georgia.  But there again, we had consolidated our city and county government in Columbus and he was out speaking around the state in favor of consolidation of city and county governments.  Had been to Rome one night, I think it was in '74, maybe '75   Flying home on a late plane, it went in, and J.R. was killed.  So, it was just a question of time, in my mind, before it happened.  Now we're sitting here, you've got a Republican governor, you've got a Republican controlled Senate, you've got a Republican controlled House.   \r\n \r\n SHORT:  And the majority is increasing every year.  How long do you think it will take for the Democrats to get their House in order and regain control of the legislature?   \r\n \r\n JONES: Well, I'm not sure they ever will.  I mean, you're asking the question.  There's a lot of demographics in it.  And you know as well as I do, a lot of times luck enters into politics.  You know, being in the right time, at the right place, and stuff like that.  But,  unless there's a -- how long was the South solid Democrat? \r\n \r\n SHORT:  One hundred and thirty-seven years. \r\n \r\n JONES:  Well, we've got a few to go, haven't we? \r\n \r\n SHORT:  What's life been for Milton Jones after public service?   \r\n \r\n JONES:  Wonderful.  No, I did go home.  I helped Carter a little bit in that first session in 1971.  But I went home April 1st of 1970 and then he appointed me to the Board of Regents in '74 and I served 'til '81.  And that was my last involvement on any official basis in public service.  I practiced law forty years.  As soon as I was able to, I retired.  I've been retired 12 years, the best 12 years of my life.  And I have been a truly blessed individual.   \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Good.  Let me ask you this question.  What do you think is your most satisfying accomplishment as a state legislator? \r\n \r\n JONES:  Well, oh Lord, Bob.  In Georgia, there was a doctrine called the time-price differential.  And what that was was the appellate courts of this state had said that if I sell you a watch for $50 and you pay me $5 a month for ten months, that that is not a loan of money, that is a time-price.  And the usury laws control only interest on loans of money.  So in effect, anything that was sold on time in the state of Georgia could be charged a time-price differential unlimited, anything.  And when you look at all the automobiles that were sold in the state of Georgia, all the refrigerators that are sold in the state of Georgia, all the revolving charge accounts that were in the state of Georgia -- this was before credit cards, this was '65, '66, '67 -- you can see that there were abuses like you could not imagine.   \r\n There was one fellow they called the Bedspread Man in Columbus.  And he'd load up his car with those Chenille bedspreads they used to make up there in Dalton.  He'd go out through the poorer sections of town -- black.  And he'd sell bedspreads.  And he'd sell bedspreads to these ladies for $2 a week, stuff like that.  And he'd get two dollars, and he'd go back the next week and collect it.  And eventually they'd miss a payment.  Would never get them paid for.  He'd take the bedspread back, put it in his car, sell it down the street.  They call it the bedspread game.  But that was an abuse.   \r\n But a particularly flagrant situation arose in the mid-60's, '65 in particular, where these people were out making second mortgages to unsophisticated borrowers.  What they would do, is they would go by and they'd tell them, \"You need a new roof.  We're going to put some shingles on there.\"  Or, \"You need some siding on your house,\" or \"you've got termites, we need to go in and do your floor and your house is going to fall in if you don't.\"  And they'd get them to sign a contract, \"We're going to fix your house for $2,000.\"  But the contract -- they'd end up paying over $5,000.  They'd put on an origination fee, they'd put on exorbitant attorney fees. They didn't pay the lawyer, they called it that.  This kind of fee, a $10 notary fee, stuff like that.  And then they'd charge them 20 or 30 percent simple interest on the loan.  A typical example would be a $2,000 job, which was probably a jacked-up price to start with, and a $5,000 payback.  And I saw it kind of as a young lawyer, when people started coming in to me, \"I'm losing my house, I'm losing my house.  What can I do?\"  And I went to the legislative counsel's office -- Veron Slatondon, Harvey Finley, and some of those great guys.  They're the legislature's lawyers.  They found a bill that the state of Florida had introduced and passed and we copied that bill ver batim.  And we got it passed.  It was a terrible fight.  We got it through the House, had trouble, but we got it through the House.  And you talk about Carter, Jimmy Carter, he owned me lock, stock and barrel after that bill, because I had a fellow over there, a great guy, good friend of mine, he was handling that bill over in the Senate.  And you know about the rules committee and how you've got to not only clear the Senate committee, but you've got to clear the Senate Rules committee to get on the rules calendar.  And it's two days before the end of the session.  It was on the Senate rules calendar, but somebody -- I won't mention his name, he was defeated for reelection that following election -- he got it off the rules calendar.  He got it removed from the rules calendar.  And Jimmy just happened to be in the rules committee and saw it.  Even though he wasn't my floor manager, he came, he hunted me down and told me, he said, \"Your second mortgage act is off of the rules committee calendar.\"  And I went back over there and I acted badly, but we got it back on and we got the thing passed.  The following year, it had been very widely received, well-received.  Probably the first piece of consumer protection that had been passed in that century, to be honest with you.  That wasn't a high priority back then.  Like environmental measures weren't a high priority either back then too when Reed started on the marshes and stuff like that.  But the next year, we got passed the automobile sales finance act, and retail installment sales.  And I'm not real proud of those bills, because in order to get them passed, we had to give them, in my opinion, exorbitant rates of return, but at least there was a limit, if you follow what I'm saying.  If I had to say anything, those would be the things I'm proudest of, because we were able to kind of bust up that racket.   \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Your biggest disappointment. \r\n \r\n JONES:  Well, I don't know.  I think probably the way that thing worked out in 1967 about Governor Maddox ending up as governor and Robin Harris not being elected speaker of the House.  I think that if we'd had Callaway and we'd had Robin Harris as speaker of the House, the bar would have been set very high for future speakers.   \r\n \r\n SHORT:  We haven't talked about the 1970 governor's race between Jimmy Carter and Carl Sanders.  What do you remember about that year? \r\n \r\n JONES:  Well, like I said, Jimmy never quit running for governor in '66.  I think he went home long enough for -- Amy was born a little later.  But he kept running.  And he travelled this state, I think day and night for four years and he really built up -- well, Jimmy was a personable guy.  It'd be hard not to like him if you got to know him and he made a lot of contact.  He was very active in Lions, if I remember.  He was just a governor, and he ran very long and very hard.  Brooks Pennington, of Pennington Green, had been very prominent in Jimmy's gubernatorial race in '66, along with Ford Spinks from down in Tifton.  They were two guys who had served in the Senate with him.  Brooks, of course, supported Governor Sanders again in '70 when he ran for reelection -- well, not reelection, but election for a second term.  But you had Hamilton Jordan closely involved in the race, you had Jody Powell, you know they were driving and doing things like that, handling press.  But you had people involved in that race like Charlie Kirbo and others in Atlanta, and it was a different race than the '66 race.  And it moved right along.  My law partner, Lee Grogan, he chaired Jimmy's campaign in Columbus that year.  I was fairly active in it. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Two schools of thought I've heard over the years about that campaign.  One was that Governor Carter ran sort of a tough, dirty campaign and the other school of thought is that everything's fair in love, war, and politics.  What is your reaction to that?   \r\n \r\n JONES:  Well, number one, I don't think it was a dirty campaign.  I would dispute that highly -- strongly.  I think Jimmy did move to the right a little bit and that caused some concern among some of us.  There were discussions about that.  But we understood and we stayed with the program, won the race.  And in his inaugural address, in his inaugural address, Jimmy Carter said, \"The time for racial segregation in Georgia is over.\" \r\n \r\n SHORT:  If you had your political life to live over again Milton, would you do anything differently? \r\n \r\n JONES:  Not run.   \r\n \r\n [Laughter] \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Did you ever think about running for a higher office? \r\n  \r\n JONES:  I think everybody thinks about running for higher office.   And there was speculation about me running for Controller General in '66 after that second mortgage situation.  Because the Atlanta newspapers were all over it and Baldy was drawing cartoons and I was the guy in the white hat and all that.  You know, you get back to it, I'm a young lawyer in my early '30's and I haven't got any money.  And you know, unfortunately, particularly in secondary races, the most folks who give you money are people you're going to end up regulating.  And then you find yourself in that situation, \"Well, if I do that, am I going to be able to do this?\"  Stuff like that.  And it just never was a real possibility to me.  If I had been older and I had been wealthy, maybe so, but I wasn't, and I didn't.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  How would you like to be remembered? \r\n \r\n JONES:  I guess that presupposes that I want to be remembered.  I'm sure there's some folks that I'd just as soon forget about me.  But I don't know.  I'm glad I did what I did.  I'm really glad I did what I did.  I wouldn't take anything for the experience.  It was one of the most educational experiences I've ever had.  And while there was a lot of heartache and disappointment and a lot bad nights and stuff like that, overall it was a wonderfully positive thing.  I've met some of the finest people I've ever known in my life.  Those ole' boys, that country boy legislature when I went down there, despite what Bob said about them, and with some truth, they were wonderful people and I made friends that'll be my friends the day I die.  Most of them are already dead, 'cause they were quite a bit older than I was.  But people like Elliot Levitas, Robin Harris, Jimmy Carter, Sam Nunn, you know.  I wouldn't take anything for the experiences I had and the friendships I made.  That's not necessarily how -- that doesn't answer your question, but I'm proud of what I did.   \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Have we forgotten anything?  Is there something else you want to talk about with us? \r\n \r\n JONES:  I'm sure that I've already talked five times longer than you wanted to listen to me, so let's just call it now.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Milton Jones, thank you very much for being our guest. \r\n \r\n JONES:  Thank you.   "},{"id":"tws_oid16_33723","title":"James Webb, 2010","collection_id":"tws_oid16","collection_title":"Crossroads interviews","dcterms_contributor":null,"dcterms_spatial":["United States, Tennessee, Shelby County, Memphis, 35.14953, -90.04898"],"dcterms_creator":null,"dc_date":["2010-03-17"],"dcterms_description":null,"dc_format":["video/mp4","application/pdf","image/jpeg"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":null,"dcterms_publisher":["Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College"],"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["https://vimeo.com/281709255"],"dcterms_subject":["Oral history","Interviews","Memphis (Tenn.)","Civil rights","Rhodes College"],"dcterms_title":["James Webb, 2010"],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Rhodes College"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://hdl.handle.net/10267/33723"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":null,"dlg_local_right":null,"dcterms_medium":["oral histories (literary works)"],"dcterms_extent":null,"dlg_subject_personal":null,"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":null},{"id":"tws_oid16_33722","title":"Anne Stokes, 2010","collection_id":"tws_oid16","collection_title":"Crossroads interviews","dcterms_contributor":null,"dcterms_spatial":["United States, Tennessee, Shelby County, Memphis, 35.14953, -90.04898"],"dcterms_creator":null,"dc_date":["2010-03-05"],"dcterms_description":null,"dc_format":["video/mp4","application/pdf","image/jpeg"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":null,"dcterms_publisher":["Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College"],"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["https://vimeo.com/278580575"],"dcterms_subject":["Oral history","Interviews","Memphis (Tenn.)","Race relations","Neighborhoods","Sanitation Workers Strike, Memphis, Tenn., 1968","Protest movements"],"dcterms_title":["Anne Stokes, 2010"],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Rhodes College"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://hdl.handle.net/10267/33722"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":null,"dlg_local_right":null,"dcterms_medium":["oral histories (literary works)"],"dcterms_extent":null,"dlg_subject_personal":null,"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":null},{"id":"gych_rogp_104","title":"Reg Murphy, 09 February 2010.","collection_id":"gych_rogp","collection_title":"Reflections on Georgia Politics oral history collection, 2006-2010","dcterms_contributor":["Short, Bob, 1932-"],"dcterms_spatial":["United States, 39.76, -98.5","United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018"],"dcterms_creator":["Murphy, John Reginald, 1934","Short, Bob, 1932"],"dc_date":["2010-02-09"],"dcterms_description":["Reg Murphy recalls growing up in Gainesville, Georgia, and attending Mercer University. He discusses working for the Macon Telegraph and covering the integration of the University of Georgia. Murphy recalls receiving a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard University for a year. Murphy recalls covering the state capitol for first the Macon Telegraph and then the Atlanta Constitution. He recalls uncovering corruption in the Griffin Administration. Murphy recalls covering events during Governor Vandiver's administration including the demise of the unit system and the Baker v. Carr reapportionment case. He recalls working with Ralph McGill and explains how he was offered the role of editor of the Atlanta Constitution. Murphy discusses Bill Hartsfield's and Ivan Allen's roles in advancing the national reputation of Atlanta and Georgia overall. He recalls the development of Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia and Dr. Martin Luther King's influence on African American political activity in Atlanta. Murphy weighs in on the Three Governors Controversy in 1944 and the tumultuous 1966 gubernatorial election that involved the United States Supreme Court. Murphy comments on the \"one man, one vote\" decision and explains its significance in Georgia history. He also discusses the importance of Atlanta as a hub for the Civil Rights Movement, recalling the actions of Ralph David Abernathy and Vernon Jordon. Murphy reflects on Jimmy Carter's campaign for governor and subsequently President. Murphy recalls being kidnapped by extremists, discusses the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and comments on the state of print journalism in America.","John Reginald \"Reg\" Murphy was born in 1934 in Gainesville, Georgia. He attended Mercer University in Macon, and worked for the Macon Telegraph. In 1955 he opened the Atlanta bureau of the Macon Telegraph. He was chosen to be a Neiman Fellow at Harvard in 1959, and in 1961 went to work for the Atlanta Constitution as political editor. He became managing editor of Atlanta magazine in 1965, and returned to the Constitution in 1968, succeeding Ralph McGill as editor. In 1975 Murphy left Georgia for the San Francisco Examiner, and in 1981 went to the Baltimore Sun. In 1996 he joined the National Geographic Society as president and chief executive. In 1999 his biography of Griffin Bell, Uncommon Sense: The Achievement of Griffin Bell was published.","Finding aid available in repository.","Interviewed by Bob Short."],"dc_format":["video/mp4"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":["eng"],"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection","http://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/sclfind/view?docId=ead/RBRL220ROGP.xml"],"dcterms_subject":["Georgia--Governor (1959-1963 : Vandiver)","Mercer University","University of Georgia","College integration--Georgia--Athens","Journalists--Georgia--Interviews","Three Governors Controversy, Georgia, 1946-1947","Political campaigns--Georgia","Journalism--United States","College integration","Journalism","Journalists","Kidnapping","Political campaigns","Politics and government","Universities and colleges--Alumni and alumnae","Georgia--Politics and government","Georgia","Georgia--Athens","United States"],"dcterms_title":["Reg Murphy, 09 February 2010."],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL220ROGP-104/ohms"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection, ROGP 104, Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, Georgia, 30602-1641."],"dlg_local_right":["Resources may be used under the guidelines described by the U.S. Copyright Office in Section 107, Title 17, United States Code (Fair use). Parties interested in production or commercial use of the resources should contact the Russell Library for a fee schedule."],"dcterms_medium":["oral histories (literary works)","interviews"],"dcterms_extent":["1 interview (96 min.) : sd., col."],"dlg_subject_personal":["Murphy, John Reginald, 1934-","Hearst, Patricia, 1954-","Carter, Jimmy, 1924-","King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968"],"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":"Reg Murphy interviewed by Bob Short \r\n2010 February 9 \r\nSt. Simons Island, GA \r\nReflections on Georgia Politics \r\nROGP-104 \r\nOriginal: video, 96 minutes \r\n \r\nsponsored by: \r\nRichard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies \r\nUniversity of Georgia Libraries \r\nand \r\nYoung Harris College \r\n \r\n BOB SHORT:  I'm Bob Short. This is Reflections on Georgia Politics, sponsored by the Duckworth Library at Young Harris College and the Richard B. Russell Library at the University of Georgia. I'd like to welcome Reg Murphy, former political reporter and editor of The Atlanta Constitution, who's covered and written about Georgia politics for many years. Welcome, Reg.  \r\n \r\n REG MURPHY:  Thank you, I'm glad to join you.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  With your permission, Reg, I'd like to divide our conversation into three parts.  \r\n  \r\n MURPHY:  Alright. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  First, your early life.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Okay. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Next, your reflections on Georgia politics. And lastly, your life after those very historical political careers. So, may we begin by talking about your experiences while growing up in north Georgia?  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Well, I was born in Hoschton, Georgia, which is one mile south of Braselton, Georgia, which is in Jackson County. And most people have never heard of Hoschton, Georgia. When I tell people that, they laugh at me. My parents moved to Gainesville, and I grew up in Gainesville, Georgia. My dad was a wholesale grocery clerk. My mom was a first-grade school teacher. I went to Gainesville High School. I played football and basketball and baseball; none of it very well, but we had a great time. And I thought that my high school years -- unlike most people, my high school years were some of the best years of my life. I had a handicap. My mother didn't have anywhere for me to live -- or to stay home while she was teaching. And so, I started school at four, and I graduated from high school at sixteen, which means that I had to date freshmen girls, not senior girls. Not my counterparts, because they were way, way beyond me in maturity. But I had a great time.  \r\n Decided to go to Mercer University, and I really wanted to go to Med school. I really would love to have been a doctor, but in those days first grade teachers and shipping clerks didn't make a lot of money. So, I worked my way through Mercer as a reporter for the Macon Telegraph. And that's kind of misleading. I didn't work my all the way through, I still lack about twenty hours getting my degree. They did take mercy on me a few years later and gave me a doctorate, but an earned degree I don't have. Loved to work for the Telegraph, and that's when I started covering Georgia politics. I covered the federal courts when the courts ordered the University of Georgia integrated. I remember at that time doing a survey, and Herman Talmadge said, \"Blood's going to run in the streets in Georgia if they implement that.\" And Judge Bootle, who had made that ruling, was steely in his determination to follow the law of the land. I don't what his personal preference was and nobody will ever know, but he was resolute in his determination that he would follow the law of the land. And that's how that all began.  \r\n Then after that, I moved to Atlanta to cover state politics for the Macon Telegraph. And then we had two newspapers, and to be the correspondent for a morning and an afternoon newspaper stretches out your day so that there are two news cycles. The first news cycle is a very difficult one, because you're starting out early in the morning for an afternoon newspaper, and then later in the day, you start another cycle for the morning newspaper the next morning. And I was a one-man bureau, so I found myself on the receiving end of a lot of editor's questions and a lot of long days. Had a great time, however. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  So, you go from the Telegraph to The Atlanta Constitution.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  With an interim period where I had a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, and that's one of the great experiences for any journalist. What you do is go to Harvard and you're responsible for completing all of the work in one course. And other than that, for the whole year you're free to monitor any subjects you want to monitor. For example, I sat in on lectures with John Kenneth Galbraith, Henry Kissinger, McGeorge Bundy, all the great people who then later -- the next year, actually -- went to Washington as part of the Kennedy Administration. So, I was on a not friendly, but knowledgeable basis with all the people who were in the Kennedy Administration. And in fact, my first coverage of presidential politics, except for Georgia campaign swings, was John Kennedy's early campaigning in New Hampshire during that year. One of my treasured photographs is of me standing with John Kennedy out in the bitter cold in New Hampshire, outside, I think, a GE plant greeting the workers. And that was a great piece of exposure for me, having until that point lived my life in the South.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Tell us about your first experiences as a political writer at the State Capitol.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Okay. When I first went to the State Capitol, I was still working for the Macon Telegraph in Atlanta, and Marvin Griffin had come into office and all of those people who came in with him. My specific instructions from the newspaper were, you see, that, \"Everybody accuses the Atlanta newspapers of lying. You go up there and just figure out what's real and just report it. Whatever it is.\" And I went to the Capitol and began to report. And I discovered that not only were they not lying, it was the politicians who were lying. And wherever you turned in the Griffin Administration, there were people who were stealing.  \r\n For example, George Whitman was the superintendent of schools in the state. Actually, that's not true. He was the chairman of the Board of Education in the state. But he also was selling a fair amount of school materials -- books and other workbooks and things -- to state school systems. And I was kind of curious about where his warehouse was and who he was selling through and what his sales' force looked like and how it was being handled, and I began to look around for the facility. Couldn't find it anywhere. Finally, found a phone number and traced it down, and his entire facility was a coin phone booth in College Park, Georgia. After that, I think he left the Board and had some other legal troubles. But that was the kind of thing that happened all the way through the Griffin Administration.  \r\n Now, having said that, Marvin Griffin could be the most charming human being I have ever seen and certainly the best storyteller. We used to go into his office for a morning -- it wasn't as formal as a news conference. But we'd go in for a talk with him in the morning, and he always greeted us the same way, \"What are you jorees up to this morning?\" And I didn't know what a joree was, and it turns out it's a small bird that hides in the bushes and peaks around the corner to see what's going on. And it was a very demeaning term, but he said it in such a funny way that nobody there took any offense to it.  \r\n He started a campaign for building rural roads, and that was a big argument. It was actually a very good program. It brought a whole lot of people access to the towns with a much easier way to get there and to facilitate farm operations too. But they were not always clean either. Jack Nelson, who worked for the Constitution, found that somebody had been paid for three and a half miles of paving down in Appling County. And he went down there and used the odometer on the car, and found that actually it was about one and a quarter miles of blacktop paving, and that they had paid for three and a half miles of paving. Those were the kinds of things that went on every single day in that administration. And at the end of that period, when we totaled it all up, 32 different state officials had been indicted and 17 of them actually served some time in jail. It truthfully was one of the corrupt times in Georgia politics. I hesitate to say that it was the most corrupt time. I don't know that. Nobody knows that. But it certainly was one of the corrupt times in Georgia politics.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  And in those days, Reg, and I'm sure you will remember this, Marvin Griffin was a very strong leader in what was known as the States' Rights Council. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  And the States' Rights Council, you know, was his front for all that segregationist effort that he went through. One of his appointees spent a lot of time and money trying to prove that somewhere up in north Georgia and Tennessee, there was some Communist conspiracy that was going to take over the South, because they had an integrated staff, I think it was, or some integrated conferences at least. I've forgotten how much money they spent, but it was an outrageous amount. And then, you know, they had an ally, Roy Harris, who lived in Augusta and had a sheet called The Augusta Courier, which always had red type on the front -- big, red, black block type. Spent most of his time exposing that and the Koinonia farms, which was a peaceful little settlement down in south Georgia that had no intention of trying to overturn the world. But it was trying to set an example for how people could live together. And so, if you put Roy Harris and Marvin Griffin and his associates -- all the same group -- segregation was the only thing that mattered in political races. And I remember Charles Pou, who was the great old political editor for the Journal, used to say, \"If you ain't for stealing, you ain't for segregation.\" They stole and they segregated. That was the kind of things that were the staple of Georgia politics.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  It was interesting, I thought, that Marvin Griffin, who was in the Talmadge camp, and Ernest Vandiver, who was in the Talmadge camp, had a big war over the rural roads business and fell apart. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  That's right. And Vandiver at that point decided he would go in a totally different direction from the Griffin people. And he began to figure out whether he could then move from lieutenant governor to the governor's office, and he had great connections, as you know. He had connections -- his wife was connected to Senator Russell's family, and he himself had built his political connections. And he came to office with a segregationist platform that said that -- his slogan was, \"No, Not One.\" Meaning no one Negro child -- as they were called then -- could pass through that door and into a white school and integrate the school.  \r\n Ernest Vandiver -- I never was sure that he believed quite what he was preaching at that point. He was really a very decent man, a very decent man. And when he announced that he was going to close the University of Georgia because Charlayne Hunter and Mr. Holmes were going to integrate the school in the next day, there was a lot of demonstrating going on. And he told me that on a deadline -- as I was reporting for the Constitution, he told me he was going to close schools. And I wrote the story. We used it as our headline the next morning, and unbeknownst to me, there then assembled out of the State Capitol -- the governor's mansion -- about 25 to 30 of his staunchest supporters. And over the course of that discussion, which included Griffin Bell, he changed his mind and the next morning, to my chagrin at that time, because I had been made to look like a fool as a reporter -- but the right thing to do -- announced the next morning that he was going to keep the schools open. They did have some skirmishes, but nothing of any real significance happened during that period. It was one of the acts of bravery in Southern politics to say, \"Wait a minute, I'm making a mistake here. I will decide the right thing to do with the help of all my friends.\" Some of whom objected vehemently, and others who really thought that he was making a courageous step in the direction towards making Georgia a modern place.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  In addition to the integration at the University of Georgia, I believe it was 1962, Vandiver got hit with two other significant and historical decisions that affected and, I think -- and I hope you'll agree -- changed Georgia politics forever. And that was the demise of the county unit system, which the Talmadges and Roy Harris had manipulated for many years. And then the Baker vs. Carr reapportionment case, which, you know -- \"One man, one vote.\"  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Right. Well, when a vote in Fulton County was worth one-hundredth of the amount of a vote in the smallest county in the state, that clearly was the most inequitable thing that could have happened in Georgia politics. And it gave control of the state to south Georgia and all the counties below Atlanta. And of course, what you heard in those days -- if they ever gave the one man, one vote to Atlanta, the block vote, which really meant that that was a code word for the black vote -- would give control of Atlanta to the blacks. What happened instead was that no black person was elected governor, the State Legislature has never been populated majority by African-Americans. The truth is it broadened the base of Georgia politics, and that probably as much as any single thing, changed Georgia politics. Well, certainly more than any other thing, because before that, the state was among the most, if not the most conservative Southern state. And then it moved to probably one of the most moderate, maybe the most moderate Southern state. And that changed the way the state was governed -- dramatically changed the way the state was governed.  \r\n And when you add in the reapportionment decision that allowed the state to change the way districts were formulated, so that there wasn't total control in every part of the state -- Democratic rule, actually, not just white, but Democratic rule in a state that was clearly going toward Republican rule. That changed a lot of different things. And in a way, it created a delegation that went to Washington to represent the state that was much more diverse and in many ways more forward looking than it had been before. Not all together, but in lots of ways a way that was significantly different. And the way you could tell that it was going in the direction of Republican conservatives instead of Democratic conservatives was that in the 1964 campaign immediately after those changes had swept through the state government, a team of Constitution reporters fanned out across the state just before the Johnson-Goldwater election. And we came back and added all these things together, and I wrote a story which said that unless there was some dramatic last minute change, Georgia will go Republican for the first time in a century. And my editors were very skeptical of that story. They didn't think Goldwater could win, and my heroes all desperately wanted the Democrats to win that year. But Goldwater won, and he won pretty heavily. I don't remember the percentages anymore, but they were substantial. And after that, you began to see a total change in the direction of state government. And became one of the stalwart states in the Republican party.  \r\n \r\n SHORT: That, of course, benefitted the more moderate Georgians. In that year -- 1962 -- Governor Carl Sanders was able to defeat Marvin Griffin. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Right. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Of whom you spoke. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Yep. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Simply because of the \"One man, one vote\" law.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Exactly, and Carl Sanders was in my view a very progressive governor for his time. He would not be considered a big liberal -- he wasn't then -- but comparatively he was a liberal. And he was able to capture the middle of the road vote that was critical. And it also gave power to the larger towns and cities in the state.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Let's get back for a minute to The Atlanta Constitution. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Okay. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  You were one of a great group of writers, Reg, including Ralph McGill and Gene Patterson and others, who worked hard to persuade Georgians to change their old South mentality by looking to the future and forgetting the past. Tell us a little bit about that period.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Well, nobody ever refers to me in the same breath as Ralph McGill. He was truly my hero. I thought he was the most courageous man I ever met. He lived through death threats all the time, and he wrote what was the most perceptive column I have ever read. The headline said, \"There Will Come a Monday.\" And what he meant by that -- and explained in the column -- was that one Monday, sometime, the Supreme Court would come down with the decision that ruled that segregation, the way it had been practiced in the United States, was unconstitutional. And he tried very hard to prepare his reader for that day. Some of them loved him and some of them hated him. There was a man somewhere out in Buckhead who paid his newspaper boy an extra fifty cents a week to clip McGill's picture out of the front-page column before he delivered his paper. And McGill was great about this. He understood what he was doing. He would write about three columns a week that were liberal by anybody's standards, but were very liberal by Georgia standards. And he'd always say, \"Okay, I've written my three. Now, I've got to go tell two stories about field trials in Waynesboro, because I've got to win them back somehow.\"  \r\n And he knew that he offended people, but he didn't delight in it. Everybody thought he delighted in it. But that's not true. He didn't delight in it. He worried about it all the time. But he was very literate and he had that sportswriters' background that gave him the ability to connect with people even when they were skeptical of what he was writing. And when I first went back to the Constitution as the editor, he was the best thing that could have happened to me, because he would take me to breakfast with them. If there was a visiting Israeli chief of intelligence, we'd go to breakfast and talk about it. If there was a presidential candidate who happened to be coming through town, he and I would go talk to the presidential candidate. And actually, he was very good at developing that kind of sources, very good. And he despaired sometimes with what he was writing about, but he wrote it. And during that period, he wrote a book called The South and the Southerner, which will always be one of the insightful books about Southern history.  \r\n And Patterson, Gene Patterson was a distinguished journalist. He'd been in London running the UPI Bureau, and he came back to Georgia and began to write a column which was lyrical. He was a true craftsman in terms of being able to write lyrically and beautifully. And he and McGill formed a partnership that lasted for several years, and it was an extremely effective force. He, more than McGill, concerned himself with Georgia politics and with the social trends and all of those things. And then there was a blow-up, and he and Jack Tarver just didn't get along, and he left. Unbeknownst to me -- I was out. I had left and I was freelancing, doing pretty well for myself. And I enjoyed being a freelancer, although I had two little girls and I drove very carefully, because if anything happened to you as a freelancer, you didn't have any other income. You break your leg and you're in big trouble.  \r\n But I was sitting at home one morning at seven o'clock, working on some piece -- I don't remember what it was now -- and the phone rang. Jack Tarver said, \"Hello.\" And he was nice, and he said, \"You ever downtown?\" And I said, \"Well, sometimes.\" And he said, \"Why don't you come by and see me today.\" And I thought, \"Okay, he wants me to come back and be the political editor again, and I don't really want to do that.\" It was a great job. I loved it, but I didn't want to do it again, because I had begged him before I left the paper, \"Let me write anything. Write sports, write fires, whatever.\" I was tired of politics. And I almost forgot to go. And I walked into his office about one-thirty, two o'clock in the afternoon, and he sat me down and he said -- after not much preliminaries -- \"Would you like to be the editor of the Constitution?\" And I thought, \"What in the world is he talking about?\" And I thought about it for a minute, and I said, \"I don't know. I really need to think about it.\" And he said, \"Well, I don't want you to think about it very long, because I really want you to do it.\" I said, \"Are you sure? Because you've had some problems with editors.\" And he said, \"I'm not particularly sure, but McGill is.\" I said, \"Well, I guess I don't have much choice, do I?\" And so, I took the job and became the editor of the Constitution. And I was a little more conservative than either McGill or Patterson. I've been always more middle of the road, but you know, you can't really compare yourself to those guys. They were giants in the journalism world.  \r\n And there were some reporters. It's important to remember that there were some reporters in those days who also were -- not advocates -- but clear-eyed reporters who did great jobs of exposing things. Jack Nelson was a terrific Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter. Charlie Pou was the political editor of the Journal who never got the acclaim that he deserved. Margaret Shannon at The Atlanta Journal was a wonderful reporter, very insightful, who later went to Washington to run a bureau for the Journal in Washington. And her insights into how the Southern delegations, and particularly the Georgia delegation, were meshing and sometimes not meshing with national politics were insightful. So, there were a lot of really quality people who were working on the front lines in those days to make politics understandable and thoughtful for Georgians.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  So your becoming editor expanded your duties with the paper. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Yeah, I spent most of my time working with the editors and editorial writers. And because part of my agreement with Tarver was that I'd write a column seven days a week, that took a lot of time. A daily column is a challenge that most people won't ever have to deal with, and nobody in journalism has to deal with anymore. Nobody tries to do that anymore. And that's a wise thing, because I doubt that there are many people in the world who have seven really important ideas a week to write about. But I did. I grinded it out for seven years, and that was about all I had. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Saturdays for remembering.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  It was sort of a McGill idea in a way. McGill always said he had to bring them back into the fold. And by accident, I decided to start writing about Saturdays for remembering, because I thought I could relate to lots of people in lots of different ways that were homey and more emotional than the other stuff. Liberals hated them. And I don't blame them, that was exactly what they ought to do. They didn't think they were important enough to be fooling around with. Some conservatives thought they were not conservative enough. But a whole lot of people did sort of remember their high school days and for their college days and for hunting and fishing, and they seemed to relate to them.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Let's get back to Georgia politics for a minute if you will. There was a time when both you and I remember that politicians treated Atlanta with a lot of jokes and certainly no attention. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Right. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  But with the passage of that bill we were talking about -- the Supreme Court decision, really -- they had to pay more attention to Atlanta. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  They did, and it was a good thing that they did pay more attention to Atlanta. The politicians who had scoffed and discounted everything that Atlanta needed to do, now had to think about it. And as a result of that, they began to be a lot more helpful to the growth of the city. Out of that came a lot of good things. For example, they began to cooperate to some extent with Bill Hartsfield, who was the mayor in Atlanta. And when the schools were integrated in Atlanta, they furnished a lot of the state troopers and a lot of the help that kept that from being as bloody as it could be. \r\n I remember the wonderful, old, African-American minister named William Holmes Borders, who used to say that the country was better off because Georgia was better off; and because the county unit system was gone, Georgia was going to be an important part of the country. You could go to his church on Sunday morning, and he was a spokesman for a peaceful integration of not just the schools, but the churches and for social life. And when I went back to the Constitution, one of the pieces he inspired me to write was that no civic clubs in Atlanta had any African-American members. And I remember saying, \"You couldn't have written that in the days before the county unit system fell.\"  \r\n Then, the campaigns shifted toward Atlanta. And by the time of that Goldwater victory in '64, it was clear that everybody had to pay attention to it. Carl Sanders had paid attention to it, and he made in my view a very good progressive governor because he did work hard to get Atlanta, Macon, Columbus, Savannah involved in politics. For example, the Atlanta school systems were starved because of the way money was allocated. They didn't get nearly as much money as the schools out in the state. They didn't get any money even for -- or not much money for -- what became the Hartsfield Airport -- the Atlanta airport that suddenly got a lot more money from the state. And a lot of other improvements happened because of that.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  You mention Mayor Hartsfield. Can we talk for a minute about the political leadership in Atlanta during that period? \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Sure can. Bill Hartsfield, in my opinion, was the person who started the road toward peaceful desegregation, by saying Atlanta was a city that's too big to hate. And it was. It was a city that knew that it was moving. Not everybody liked it, but knew that it was moving. He had a police chief named Jenkins, who was a very good police chief, and he was determined to keep order. And then, following Hartsfield, Ivan Allen came along, who I believe was one of the best urban political leaders in the country. Ivan Allen was a tremendously progressive guy. And during his time, they began that \"Forward Atlanta\" campaign. I think it was during his time. And that campaign produced all of the shift toward thinking of the South as a place to establish national company headquarters. He always wanted to bring in bigger fish than just the branch office. He loved the idea that the branch offices were moving to Atlanta, but he really thought that he could be more ambitious than that. And as a result, Atlanta had a growth spurt unlike anything I've ever seen. I left kind of in the middle of it. I moved in the middle of it. But during that time to the late '60s and early '70s, when the rest of the world was in turmoil because of the Vietnam War, Atlanta was growing economically on almost an everyday basis. There was a new announcement of something new economically happening in Atlanta that was a result of the Atlanta political leadership.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  During that period -- boom period, I call it -- certainly Georgia and Atlanta was one of the most lucrative spots, I would think -- I would say, for business in the country. Do you think that was because of the new people who were moving into the state, or because of the drastic change that we had made in our politics? \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  It was a combination of the in migration and the politics. But the politics that were changing it were more important than anything else, I think. For example, Georgia Tech went from being a very good technical school to being a true great school. And its business management groups and its innovative groups were enhanced dramatically by the fact that it was then getting some state support. The University of Georgia was beginning to be a much better place. What people had always called a great party school was moving toward becoming a good research university. Those were things that were significantly important.  \r\n And during that period of time, other good things were happening too. Some people didn't call it good, but Martin Luther King came along and made peace with the Atlanta leadership, and began to promote things. Morehouse College began to be an important producer of middle-class and leadership African-Americans. The other schools at that point were struggling -- the other historically black schools were struggling, but they also were producing some middle-class and upper-class people. And that combination created an incredible petrie dish of how one finds economic growth. And as a result of that, the city went through a building boom that was unprecedented in the South, and its old rivals, like Birmingham, were outgrown just dramatically. They were left in the dust by this Atlanta transformation that most of us didn't really understand at the moment how important and significant it would be to the future of the state. The future of the state was more or less determined by that growth spurt.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  You mentioned Dr. Borders. Prior to 1964, I guess in the Kennedy election, weren't the majority of the African-American leadership in Atlanta Republicans?  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Absolutely. The Republican delegation to the national conventions prior to 1964 were composed of blacks and whites. And in 1964, Dr. Borders and Dr. King and other leaders like that -- Andrew Young, other people -- brought into the Democratic Party a lot of the African-Americans. That year, going to the Johnson -- not inauguration -- convention, they were a significant number of the people who went to that convention. And they then got a majority of the black vote, but by no means an overwhelming amount of it. Only in the '64 election, I think, did that vote flip. I'm not sure that's right, that may not be right. But a large number of people changed parties. And that was because the Republicans had gotten a lot more conservative and the Democrats had opened up the doors. And because Atlanta then had a vote, as opposed to the time of the county unit system when Atlanta didn't have a vote and black folk were just totally unimportant in Georgia elections.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Governor Vandiver is said to have played a role in the Kennedy election when he helped Robert Kennedy get John F. Kennedy out of jail. Do you remember that story? Is that a true story?  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  I knew Robert Kennedy reasonably well. And Robert Kennedy interceded with President Kennedy to get Dr. King out of jail, and who else interceded in that was Griffin Bell. Griffin Bell then was the chief of staff to Ernest Vandiver, and was about to become the Georgia campaign manager for the Kennedy campaign in Georgia. And between them, Vandiver and Griffin Bell were the people who convinced President Kennedy to intervene. And all of this was very sub rosa at that moment. Nobody was aware of it until -- give him credit -- Charles Pou at The Atlanta Journal broke that story. And there was great disgruntlement with him for breaking that story, but it's true that that's what happened.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Dr. King was in jail in DeKalb County on a traffic violation. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Which was the most trumped up, outrageous, foolish arrest anybody had ever heard of. And everybody knew it was just a trumped up charade. It was disgusting. Made no sense.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Reg, we Georgians have had great success in making fools of ourselves in politics, in the eyes of the nation in 1946, when we had three governors, in 1966, when we couldn't elect a governor and had to have the Supreme Court to tell us how. What kind of record is that? \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  It's about as bad a political record as you can have. And it tells you about as much about how the leadership in this state, how awful it was, as anything ever could. You know, Talmadge, Arnall, and Thompson were all trying to figure out to change the locks on the door at the governor's office. It was the worst kind of politics, and everybody in the country, I guess, was mesmerized by it. I don't really remember being conscious of it. I mean, I knew about it, but I wasn't really reporting at that point. But it was just sort of this stupid kind of thing.  \r\n But all that went back, you know, to the Talmadge era. Gene Talmadge started all the stuff with his campaigns, like, \"Yes, it's true that I stole, but I stole for you.\" And then his wool-hat boys climbing in the trees and yelling, \"You tell them, Gene.\" He'd say, \"I'm coming to that.\" His three-dollar tag and, you know, the squire of Sugar Creek foolishness, all of that. And it was great drama. And it was just lousy leadership, but that's how it was.  \r\n And then, Herman came along. Herman took up right where his father left off with terrible, terrible tirades about segregation and things like that and blood running in the streets. And you know, according to both court records and legend, he may have had more to drink and did more women chasing than just about anybody. His wife certainly thought so anyway, and left him. \r\n And then you move along and you get to Marvin Griffin. And you get to the corruption of the Griffin years and you get to all of that, and it just built up a case where nobody could make all of this work. And it had to impede growth in Atlanta. Atlanta being situated where it was, at the crossroads of all the rails and all of the airlines and everything else, had to grow, but they managed to keep a damper on it for a very long period of time, because the rest of the country thought that Georgians were just complete idiots. Which never was true. There were plenty of very smart people, but a lot of them were congregated in areas where they had no political power at all. So, it was an impasse that only the Supreme Court could have broken.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Well, in '46, you say you weren't reporting it, but that was one of the incidents in government where the guy who got the most votes lost. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  That's true. And every single person in America who was thinking about it, said, \"How in the world can that be? What are those people doing? What are they thinking about? What kind of elections are they having?\" That also was a time when there was really a very wide spread of vote fraud, very widespread. Down in Telfair County, they actually went out and got names off tombstones and registered those people to vote, and cast votes for them. George Goodwin won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing that. The joke used to be that they had more votes than they had pine trees in some of those counties. There was no accountability for it at all. And nobody ever was punished for it.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Yeah. Those votes, which were alleged to be alphabetically cast, got Herman Talmadge in the race for governor that he won when he was appointed by the Legislature. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Right. Exactly right. And all of those votes -- remember, they kind of held out all the votes in several south Georgia counties until they knew where -- for two or three days, until they knew that they would then be important votes to be cast in the election. And some of the ballot boxes disappeared and never were found. They were probably at the bottom of some abandoned well or something like that. I don't know where they were, but nobody could ever find them. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  That was the county unit days.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Yep. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  I remember reading Roy Harris, who said that he could change the outcome of an election in more than thirty-nine Georgia counties, even after the polls had closed.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  That's right. I had forgotten that. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  It used to be said that all you needed to become governor of Georgia was fifty thousand dollars and Roy Harris.  \r\n \r\n` MURPHY:  That's right. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  That's the way our politics was at the time. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  That's right. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Now Reg, if you will, let's move ahead to 1966, when ironically the guy who got the most votes in the governor's race lost.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  You know, when you think about it, that's sort of the heritage of Georgia politics. The heritage is that we did everything backward for a long period of time. And that one didn't make any sense at all, or to me it didn't make any sense at all. How that one happened I still don't understand. Maybe somebody else will clarify. You know, what would really make history would be for somebody to go back and redo that race and trace all of the ins and outs of that political campaign, because Bo Callaway clearly won that election. Didn't he? \r\n \r\n SHORT:  He did. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  And how they decided to overturn it in the legislature still is -- I mean, I sort of know the history, but the result was bizarre. And if you think about Lester Maddox and about what he represented in those days, he was the most peculiar combination of politician I've ever been around. He chased people down the street with his pickaxe -- axe handle, I mean -- and yet he had some fairly humanitarian ideas. He did some stuff that I respected, like he threw open the governor's mansion every once in a while, had people in. They don't do that anymore. He would talk to various and sundry groups that disagreed with him. He fought with Zell Miller every day, but they weren't really all that far apart on some things. He didn't know how to deal with the Legislature. That's not true, he did know how to deal with the Legislature, because they elected him. But he wasn't very effective with them after that. And yet, when you look back on it, he was pretty -- I remember one time, I wrote a column about something, I don't remember what it was anymore, and he wouldn't allow the paper to be brought into the Capitol anymore. And Ben Fortson, who was the secretary of state, got himself a bucket and a rope, and somebody would put a paper downstairs and he'd bring the paper up with his rope and his bucket. And those were the zany kinds of things that used to happen in Georgia politics. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Well, you've covered many, many significant stories over the Capitol over the years. Which are most imbedded in your memory? \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  The Supreme Court decision about the one man, one vote. I remember it came down at about two o'clock in the afternoon one day. I guess it was a Monday. And I spent from then until the time -- whatever the deadline was, probably 8:30, nine o'clock at night -- trying to piece together all the ramifications of what that was going to mean. And I haven't read that story -- I don't read stories like that anymore, but that I remember was pretty comprehensive coverage we did at that point. And I figured it was the most significant, long-lasting, far-reaching decision that we were going to have in Georgia politics maybe ever. Looking back on it, I think it may have been the most significant, epic change of era in Georgia history.  \r\n  \r\n SHORT:  Let's talk for a minute about the effect of civil rights movement on politics. Most of the news during that period emanated from Atlanta, because the civil rights' leaders were located in Atlanta. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Right.  Well, when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was formed in Atlanta it brought together people who didn't necessarily all live there at the beginning, who all moved there. And the Southern Christian Leadership Conference became a formidable force in politics. And it was implemented -- people forget this now, but it was rather supplemented by the fact of some other organizations being there. I remember the Urban League was located directly across the street from the Constitution. And Vernon Jordan, who then was not the famous Vernon Jordan he is today, had an office up on the third floor, and he was running, I think, the Urban League at that point. And my office was on about the same level as his, and in those days we didn't live in hermetically sealed buildings, so we could raise the windows. And he would raise a window on his side and yell across the street, \"Reg, you want to go to lunch today?\" And I'd go to lunch with him, and we'd talk about all the civil rights movements that were going on. And the civil rights movement included some firebrands. Ralph David Abernathy was one of them. Lots of other people joined in all of that.  \r\n And then they began to fan out into the smaller communities. A memorable one was in Crawfordville, Georgia. They started this in an effort to integrate the schools in Crawfordville, and the school system made an arrangement so that they could transport all the white children to the next county by school bus. But wouldn't let any black kids get on the bus. And so, the state troopers out there were tackling these young high school kids like they were playing tackle football to keep them off of the buses. It was just terrible. I went down there and I was covering the story, and that was the kind of thing that was a spark that created all kinds of furor. Dr. King came down there, and Andy Young came down there, and there was a red brick church about a mile outside town where all the African-Americans gathered to listen to Dr. King speak. And he spoke. And at the end, they decided that they would march into Crawfordville. And Crawfordville was a little town -- hometown of the vice president of the Confederacy, of course. And they began to march, and it was about mile, a moonlit night on a black top road. Along the way, in the shadows, because the moon was very bright and the trees were casting big shadows, the state troopers found three guys with guns waiting in the shadows. Nothing happened as a result of them finding those three people. Andy Young led them. Dr. King went back to Atlanta and they had a rally on the court house square. And as a reporter, I remember I was in one of those telephone booths that used to be on court house squares that were wooden and I was in there trying to dictate a story back to the paper. And a bunch of rednecks began to tilt the phone booth back and forth, slamming me from one side to the other when I was trying to get the story written. Those were the kinds of things that changed the perception of America about what was going on down here, and brought all of the demonstrators who eventually would go to Selma for the march and that would cost Dr. King his life down in Memphis.  \r\n But by then there was a cadre of younger people who carried on that fight. It was perhaps the biggest clash between two cultures that this country has ever seen. The culture of white supremacy and the growing culture of black explosion of anger was the one thing that I sometimes thought would blow this country apart. Because after Dr. King was assassinated, those riots in the cities all across America almost tore the place apart. And for the next week for Life Magazine I covered the slow march through Atlanta of Dr. King on the case line, and took the film from all of the photographers. And there were worldwide photographers. I had a huge bag of film. And there was a pool from everybody. And I took it back to New York and we had it developed and produced some of the most dramatic photography anybody's ever seen, and that sealed the fate of the segregationists in the South. Those images were stronger than anybody can now remember. But there was a photograph in the church of Mrs. King with a black manteau over her face, but her face visible through it that ran on the cover of Life Magazine that was the epitome of grace in a world that had just been torn apart. And it resolved the country to move forward and to rid itself of segregation.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  You were around when Jimmy Carter mounted his great campaign, first for governor and then for president. Tell us about that.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Okay. Well, Jimmy Carter had been in the Legislature, and I will tell you that he was not my favorite state senator. We had discussions. And he decided that he would run for governor and he decided that he would run against Carl Sanders. And he thought that he could figure a way to beat Carl Sanders. I always believed he decided to run because he saw it as a stepping stone to bigger things. But the way he ran the campaign, you would have believed that he didn't have ideas about bigger things. First of all, in that campaign he began to call Carl Sanders \"Cufflinks Carl,\" because Carl was a nicely dressed man who probably should not have been wearing cufflinks, because Georgia folks don't like that. And that resonated with a lot of people. Then, in the last stages of that campaign, things got kind of tough. Sanders had become a part owner of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team. And there was a photograph of him with his arm around one of the black players. And they were drinking, I guess, some champagne after they had won some kind of a title, I don't know what one. And that then was circulated all over the state, and the Carter people claimed that they didn't have anything to do with it, but it wasn't clear that anybody else had anything to do with it. It was pretty clear where it came from.  \r\n Then, with two or three weeks to go in that campaign, Carter went to Montgomery, Alabama, and asked George Wallace for his support and endorsement in the campaign. And Wallace was the symbol of the people who stood in the schoolhouse door to stop any desegregation. Then, in the last two or three days of the campaign, Carl Sanders was trying to talk about some kind of progressive things, and Jimmy Carter visited five of those segregationist academies -- those private schools that were set up to avoid desegregation. And his last visit prior to election day ended up at Roy Harris' house, the man who claimed he could swing thirty-seven counties in the old county unit days, because he was a really rabid segregationist. And that's how Carter ended the campaign. And it just overwhelmed the electoral process. And he won. He won pretty well.  \r\n And two weeks later, TIME Magazine published a very important piece. And the cover of the piece was a photograph of Jimmy Carter and it called him, \"The New Face of the South.\" As if he had run a very progressive, forward-looking campaign -- to the astonishment of just about everybody. And that was his stepping stone. And then he forecast for all the rest of us -- previewed for all the rest of us -- of what his governorship and his presidency would be about. It was micromanagement of an awful lot of things. Part of what he tried to do was a government reorganization that I thought was pretty good. He wanted to streamline some things and he wanted to make some things work better. But his budgeting process, it wasn't zero-based budgeting, it was sort of, \"Let's see where we're going here.\" And he argued about everything, just created all kinds of dissension within the Legislature.  \r\n And in the middle of his term, he began to lose popularity in the state, a fair amount of popularity. And at the end of that administration, the polls showed that he could not be reelected. He decided that he would run for president. And the day he announced, I wrote what was the most famous column headline I'd ever written, or ever will write. It said, \"Jimmy Carter is Running for What?\" -- with a question mark. And I made fun of his campaign, because I didn't think there was anyway in the world he could win. And then I realized he was going to win, because I had known all the national political reporters from covering campaigns with them. And they would come by my house and they would tell me, you know, how proactive he'd been and how progressive he'd been and how he would like to be the most -- they thought he'd make a great president. The New York Times decided that it was going to profile one race by one candidate; on a weekly basis it would tell the story of how the campaign was going. And it chose Jimmy Carter as its subject for that series that it ran, so that every once a week -- I think it was on Monday -- Jimmy Carter was featured, and his campaign was featured -- what he was doing in the campaign. And it got a man who wasn't all that well-known in the country to be well-known over the course of the summer. And he won the primaries.  \r\n And then he went into the presidency, and he was very fortunate. Gerald Ford had pardoned President Nixon, and Gerald Ford unhappily had stumbled and fallen coming out of an airplane -- coming down the steps from an airplane. And everybody made fun of it, about how he stumbled all the time and how he was a clutz. Carter took advantage of that, and he got elected. He ran a good, good presidential campaign, a really good campaign. They were very tightly organized by then. They were awfully young and they had a lot of enthusiasm. And he became president. And a lot of Georgians moved to Washington as a part of that administration. Some of them left after a period of time, because they didn't like how things were going. But a lot of them stayed and remained after his presidency. But the same kind of alienation took place in the presidency that took place in Georgia politics. They used to say, and I don't know if this is true or not, but they used to say that one of the things he did in the mornings in the White House was decide who'd have access to the tennis courts that day. I don't know if he did that or not, but that was the running joke. And then of course he lost forty-nine states to Ronald Reagan. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  You were a good analyst of presidential politics. In fact, you wrote a book entitled Southern Strategy, back in the Nixon days.  \r\n \r\n MURHPY:  Yeah. I tried to do a thing state by state of how people were beginning to change, and how Nixon was playing both sides of the political road in trying to use a Southern strategy that was not strictly based on race. But his civil rights groups had toned down dramatically what had been happening under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. And he and his associates in the White House did that. I wrote that book in conjunction with Hal Gulliver, who then was the associate editor of the Constitution and a real scholar of Southern politics. Between the two of us, we took those states and analyzed them pretty well. And some parts of it now wouldn't read very realistically, because they're kind of out of date. \r\n But one of my favorite stories about that was Jim Folsom, who then was the governor of Alabama. And he and a silver-haired governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia were meeting in the Southern Governor's Conference. And they went out on the Navy boat one day, because the Navy wanted to show them something out in the Norfolk harbor. And they were meeting out there, and they wanted to show them how one of those planes could take off from the back of the aircraft carrier. And unhappily, the plane took off, got out about three or four hundred feet over the blue waters of the Atlantic and it nose dived. The pilot ejected. It got up in the air, but didn't get it up far enough for the parachute to really be effective. It came down and he hit the water with a splat like that. Plane fell into the water, crashed. Jim Folsom turned to this aristocratic Virginia governor, nudged him in the ribs, and said, \"If that ain't a show, I'll kiss your ass.\" Never seen anything quite like Jim Folsom. He literally would lie down on the State House grounds and take a nap every once in awhile. He was a funny, funny man. Anyhow, all of those people were beginning to try to change their politics. And Nixon was not helping them at all, and they were trying to understand where the South was going to go after this turmoil of the civil rights movement.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Well, as editor of the Constitution, I'm sure you met many unusual characters, including one that was not very pleasant.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Oh, I think you might be talking about the colonel. Yeah, you're right. One day, I was sitting in my office and the phone rang -- or my secretary came in and said, \"There's a man on the phone. He needs to talk to you about some donation.\" In those days, editors of newspapers did help people make charitable contributions. And the man said that he had two or three hundred thousand dollars in gallons of fuel oil that he'd like to contribute to some charity. Would I help him find a charity? He said he was changing out of one business and into another business. I thought, \"I don't know.\" But I said, \"Yeah, I'll look into it.\" And I went down and asked our legal guys if there was any real tax benefits as he claimed, and what to make of that. And they said, \"Yeah, that's plausible. He probably could.\" So, I called around. I called you and the Rabun Gap School, and I called the Egleston Children's Hospital and somewhere else, and sort of began to allocate some of the fuel oil to people.  \r\n He was supposed to come by one night and pick me up to take me down to the lawyer's office so I could sign some papers, he said. But he didn't come by that night. And he came by the next night, and when he walked into the house, it was clear to me that I didn't want that man in my house. He was very nervous, a big male, red face; obviously very nervous. And I had an eight-year-old upstairs doing her homework, and I needed to get him out of there. So, I went out and got into the car with him to go sign some papers at his lawyer's office. Instead of him taking me to a lawyer's office, we went out and he was driving, and he pulled a gun and he laid it across his elbow where he was driving. And he said, \"You've been kidnapped.\" And I said, \"I don't have any money.\" He said, \"No, newspaper does, but that's not what I'm after. We are going to straighten out this lying, leftist press in America.\" And I said, \"Well, I don't know how you're going to do that.\"  \r\n But he made me put some tape over my eyes, and said, \"Get out.\" And he came around and led me to the trunk of the car. Bound my hands and my feet behind me, so that I was a bowed position, and put me in the trunk of the car. And for most of the next forty-nine hours, I was in the trunk of the car. And every once in a while, he'd take me out and I'd have to make a tape. And that's how I communicated with the office. At the end of that period of time, he demanded 700 thousand dollars from the newspaper. And lots of people joked later that they never thought Jack Tarver would pay seven hundred thousand dollars for me, but he did. And there were a lot of FBI people standing around when Jim Minter, who then was the managing editor of the Constitution, delivered a suitcase full of money. I got into the car, he made me get into the trunk, but then through the -- you can talk between the front seat and the trunk of the car, very hot back there by the way. And I thought, you know, the way I left, the FBI's got to pick him up now. This is easy. They've seen him, they know what he looks like, they've got helicopters overhead, they've got guys out in the field chasing horses -- pretending to, when they were really observing the exchange. And damned if they didn't lose the car when night came.  \r\n And then we drove somewhere, and he stopped the car and came over and got out, and said, \"Get out of there.\" And he untied me. I was standing there and he said, \"Don't move.\" And drove off. And I thought, \"Hmm, this is not going to be good. This is where I die. Somebody's going to come along and I'll end up in a ditch.\" Instead, nothing happened, and I went into a Ramada Inn. And I said, \"Give me a room.\" And the guy, of course, knew who I was by then. I said, \"I'm not coming out until I hear a voice outside that tells me there's somebody out there I know.\" And FBI came out and brought somebody out. They took me down to the office. We identified him from photographs, They went out to his house and picked him up. And they recovered all the money. They said he was the only one involved. But they found twelve thousand dollars worth of marked bills in his wife's wallet. So, she probably knew something about it.  \r\n And we went to court. And the court convicted him. And he got forty to fifty years. And to everybody's amazement, an Appeals Court overturned the ruling. They said there'd been too much pre-trial publicity, all of which he'd asked for and demanded. And we had to go down to Key West of all places and have another trial, and they convicted him again. He got exactly the same -- forty to fifty years of prison time. And I think he served nine of them. And I haven't seen him since. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  You haven't heard from him, huh? \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  No. Long story, sorry. \r\n  \r\n SHORT:  After leaving Atlanta, you went to, I think, San Francisco. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  I went to San Francisco.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Yeah. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Where Patty Hearst had been kidnapped. And two weeks after I got there -- I think it was two weeks -- they picked her up on the street in San Francisco, wandering along, and she went down to the Redwood City Jail outside San Francisco. Her father was in New York, and he asked me to go down there and sit with her until he could get a plane and get there. I went out there, and she didn't want to talk to me at all. She was mad at everybody and she certainly didn't want to talk to me. And then we went through that long trial, and her father and mother were in terrific pain all during that period of time. Awful time. However, she has rehabilitated herself and she has done extremely well. She's a mother and serves on the Board of Hearst Corporation and is a very responsible person.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  And then to Baltimore.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Yeah, went to Baltimore, the most antiquated newspaper operation I'd ever seen in my life. They still were the dullest, grayest type you've ever seen. And they had a morning and an afternoon newspaper, and neither of them was doing very well against the Hearst newspaper in Baltimore -- The Journal American. But ultimately we prevailed and had a good time. One of my proud times was to have an afternoon where we got two Pulitzer Prizes in one year. And it all became a very successful operation. After awhile, we sold it to the Times Mirror Company, which owned the L.A. Times and some other papers, and it was based in Los Angeles. And I went on to their newspaper -- on their executive committee, and did that for awhile. And then I decided that I really wanted to get out of the newspaper business and I retired, I thought. I took off for a period of time, and went to the National Geographic for five years.  \r\n \r\n SHORT;  And then you retired again. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  I tried to retire again. I haven't been able to do it yet, but I'm going to.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Let me ask you this question about your profession. \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Yes. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  How is technology changing journalism? \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  In the big cities it's ruining it. The days when newspapers could afford the investigative reporting that they traditionally did are gone. Most of the advertising has gone. Most of the support that they had claims to have gone to the Internet or to cable television. Most people are getting a lot of their news these days from  blogs, which have very little reason to be totally accurate. The community just no longer supports newspapers the way they did, and if they do, they read it on the Internet. And the truth is that newspapers all made a terrible, terrible decision when they decided to give away their news from the Internet instead of sell it. And now they're having a very hard time trying to figure out a way to make people pay for what they've become accustomed to getting for free. And I don't have a lot of hope for some of the big city newspapers. Now, small town newspapers are doing a lot better, because there is no other source of news in a small town. And more importantly, there's no other way for the merchants to market except through advertising in the newspapers. And they will last for a longer period of time, but the technology has absolutely outrun the days when newspapers were the vital force. They used to be the best franchise in town, and in most places they are not anymore. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Let me ask you this, Reg, do you think that web journalism meets the standards that we're accustomed to in the print media? \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  No. It doesn't come close. There is not a Jack Nelson to dig into things. There is not a Charlie Pou to dig into things. There is not a James Reston who can talk authoritatively about Washington in The New York Times on a frequent basis. There is not anybody who is pointing out how many errors and rumors and misconceptions that both the blogs and the television talk shows -- the cable television talk shows -- are creating. And consequently, what you see is you see a complete impasse in Congress. It's just totally blocked. You see an incredible amount of anger in the public, because they've heard all these crosscurrents about \"Is Obama -- was he really born in Honolulu?\" Of course he was. But you know, you get all these crazy theories running around that aggravate people -- different kinds of people. Democracy does not work unless there is a common body of factual knowledge from which people can make decisions. And we don't have that anymore. Now, were newspapers flawed in the past? Absolutely. All of them were flawed. But compared to the amount of misinformation that's being spewed around the country now, it's not even close. And I despair sometimes -- not despair, because we will find a way out of it. But for right now I despair at the kinds of information that people are trying to deal with. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Do you think newspapers will ever be profitable again?  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  I can't imagine how they will be, because they have two problems that -- they have three problems that other people don't have. They've got heavy capital costs from building plants and modernizing. They've got heavy costs for newsprint that -- the air is free and the newsprint is not. And they have transportation problems of delivery that technology is going to have a hard time overcoming. Yes, you can deliver it over the Internet, but it would take forever to get it done. And sorting it out would be very hard to do. So, I think there will be a way to put it back together, but in the form that you and I think of newsprint -- papers that we can hold in our hands and read whenever we want to read them -- I don't see much future for that. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Well Reg, it's been a very insightful conversation, and I deeply appreciate it.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  It's fun for me to go back and think through those things. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Is there anything we've forgotten? \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Well, I probably have forgotten more than you have, but I don't think we've forgotten a lot. We've ranged over a lot of subject matter. \r\n \r\n SHORT:  A long period of time.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Yes, sir. I've enjoyed it.  \r\n \r\n SHORT:  Well, on behalf of the Duckworth Library at Young Harris College and the Russell Library at the University of Georgia, I want to thank you for being our guest.  \r\n \r\n MURPHY:  Well, thank you sir. I appreciate it. "},{"id":"ffc_crlsa_p16000coll5-127","title":"David Nolan Talk on St. Augustine Civil Rights History","collection_id":"ffc_crlsa","collection_title":"Civil Rights Library of St. Augustine","dcterms_contributor":["Nolan, David"],"dcterms_spatial":["United States, Florida, 28.75054, -82.5001"],"dcterms_creator":null,"dc_date":["2010"],"dcterms_description":["This is a talk delivered by historian David Nolan that outlines the wide variety of primary sources he found and used to assemble a history of the St. Augustine civil rights movement. He also tells stories from the movement and ends the talk with a Q \u0026 A session.","St. Augustine Four -- St. Augustine Record -- Monson Motor Lodge -- St. Augustine Downtown Plaza -- Woolworth's -- Ponce de Leon Hotel -- Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge -- Elk's Rest -- Arrest of Martin Luther King -- Arrest of Mary Peabody -- Assault on Andrew Young during Night March -- Mass Arrest of Rabbis -- Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- Integration of Monson Pool"],"dc_format":["video/mp4"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":null,"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/CNE/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":null,"dcterms_subject":["Civil rights--United States--Florida"],"dcterms_title":["David Nolan Talk on St. Augustine Civil Rights History"],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Proctor Library"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://civilrights.flagler.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p16000coll5/id/127"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":null,"dlg_local_right":["Flagler College is not the copyright owner for this item, nor can the College provide a copy of this item. Please contact the contributing organization to obtain a copy and permission to reproduce this item."],"dcterms_medium":["video recordings (physical artifacts)"],"dcterms_extent":["00:48:04"],"dlg_subject_personal":["King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968","Stuart, Virgil","Davis, L. O.","Dresner, Israel","Brock, James, 1922-2007","Abernathy, Ralph, 1926-1990","Williams, Hosea, 1926-2000","Young, Andrew, 1932-","Twine, Henry","Boyte, Harry G., 1911-","Martin, Fred","Peabody, Mary E. (Mary Elizabeth), 1891-1981","Hayling, Robert Bagner","Price, Janie","Johnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines), 1908-1973"],"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":null},{"id":"dhs_activists_834","title":"Laretta Torrence, December 13th, 2009","collection_id":"dhs_activists","collection_title":"Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward","dcterms_contributor":null,"dcterms_spatial":["United States, Michigan, Wayne County, Detroit, 42.33143, -83.04575"],"dcterms_creator":null,"dc_date":["2009-12-13"],"dcterms_description":["In this interview, Laretta Torrence talks about her life and growing up in a Detroit neighborhood."],"dc_format":["video/mp4","text/html"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":["eng"],"dcterms_publisher":["Detroit, Mich. : Detroit Historical Society"],"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":null,"dcterms_subject":["Race riots--Michigan--Detroit","Civil rights movements--Michigan--Detroit","Nineteen sixty-seven, A.D."],"dcterms_title":["Laretta Torrence, December 13th, 2009"],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage","Text"],"dcterms_provenance":["Detroit Historical Society"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/items/show/834"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":null,"dlg_local_right":["Detroit Historical Society"],"dcterms_medium":["oral histories (literary works)"],"dcterms_extent":null,"dlg_subject_personal":null,"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":null},{"id":"gych_rogp_089","title":"Matt Towery, 16 October 2009.","collection_id":"gych_rogp","collection_title":"Reflections on Georgia Politics oral history collection, 2006-2010","dcterms_contributor":["Short, Bob, 1932-"],"dcterms_spatial":["United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018"],"dcterms_creator":["Towery, Matt A., 1959","Short, Bob, 1932"],"dc_date":["2009-10-16"],"dcterms_description":["Finding aid available in repository.","Matt Towery discusses his early life including the influence of the Civil War on his family's history. He recalls attending Pace University and the origin of his friendship with Lester Maddox. Towery recalls being an unofficial page for Lieutenant Governor Maddox. He recalls attending the University of Georgia and how that influenced his political career. Towery recalls meeting Jimmy Carter and his tumultuous relationship with Lester Maddox. He weighs in on Maddox's reputation as a racist. Towery discusses meeting Burt Lance, Mack Mattingly, and Newt Gingrich. He recalls his experience with the Conservative Opportunity Society and the Contract with America. He recalls the friendship between Mattingly and Gingrich. Towery discusses his early frustration with the Republican party and the formation of the Campaign for Georgia's future. He also recalls his failed campaign for lieutenant governor and his subsequent friendship with Johnny Isakson. Towery also discusses his relationship with Zell Miller and weighs in on the state flag issue. He recalls helping Guy Millner prepare for debate against Zell Miller in 1994. Towery recalls Newt Gingrich's resignation from Congress and his personal experience working in legislature, at a law firm, and at the family printing company. He also comments on Sarah Palin's presence on the Republican ticket in 2008 and on party politics in Georgia.","Interviewed by Bob Short.","Matthew Towery was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1959. While still in elementary school he became an unofficial page for Governor Lester Maddox and continued in an official capacity during Maddox's term as lieutenant governor. He attended the University of Georgia, and in 1980 became a speech writer in Mack Mattingly's successful run for senate. He received a degree in foreign affairs at Cambridge University in England and graduated from Stetson University Law School in Florida. In 1989 with the encouragement of Newt Gingrich, Towery started the Campaign for Georgia's Future, and the next year ran an unsuccessful campaign for lieutenant governor. In 1992, he served as Gingrich's campaign chairman for his successful race for the U.S. House of Representatives. Towery won a seat in the Georgia House of Representatives, making him the first Republican to preside over the Democratic House. He left politics in 1997. He was CEO of Color Graphics, a printing company, and sold it in 1997. He then served as chairman and CEO of InsiderAdvantage.com."],"dc_format":["video/mp4"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":["eng"],"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection","http://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/sclfind/view?docId=ead/RBRL220ROGP.xml"],"dcterms_subject":["Georgia--General Assembly--House of Representatives","Republican Party (Ga.)","Political campaigns--Georgia","Legislators--Georgia","Conservatism--Georgia","Conservatism","Legislators","Political campaigns","Race relations","Georgia--Race relations","Georgia"],"dcterms_title":["Matt Towery, 16 October 2009."],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL220ROGP-089/ohms"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection, ROGP 089, Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, Georgia, 30602-1641."],"dlg_local_right":["Resources may be used under the guidelines described by the U.S. Copyright Office in Section 107, Title 17, United States Code (Fair use). Parties interested in production or commercial use of the resources should contact the Russell Library for a fee schedule."],"dcterms_medium":["oral histories (literary works)","interviews"],"dcterms_extent":["1 interview (101 min.) : sd., col."],"dlg_subject_personal":["Maddox, Lester, 1915-2003","Gingrich, Newt","Towery, Matt A., 1959-","Miller, Zell, 1932-2018","Mattingly, Mack, 1931-"],"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":null},{"id":"gych_rogp_088","title":"Wilie Bolden, 07 October 2009.","collection_id":"gych_rogp","collection_title":"Reflections on Georgia Politics oral history collection, 2006-2010","dcterms_contributor":["Short, Bob, 1932-"],"dcterms_spatial":["United States, 39.76, -98.5","United States, Florida, 28.75054, -82.5001","United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018"],"dcterms_creator":["Short, Bob, 1932","Bolden, Willie, 1938"],"dc_date":["2009-10-07"],"dcterms_description":["Bolden discusses his early years and his work as a civil rights activist. He provides an overview of his activity with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Poor People's Campaign, and the Summer Community Organization for Political Education (SCOPE). Specifically, he addresses his work with voter registration drives in Albany, Georgia, the efforts to integrate hotels and restaurants in St. Augustine, Florida, and his role as 'wagon master' for the Poor People's Campaign. Other topics include the events of Bloody Sunday and his relationship with civil rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., and Hosea Williams.","Willie Bolden was born in Sumter, South Carolina on December 7, 1938. He was raised in Savannah, Georgia. Bolden served in the U.S. Marines. Inspired by Hosea Williams and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He was the \"Wagon Master\" for the Mule Train on the Poor People's Campaign, preparing cities for Dr. King's arrival. Bolden was also active in Williams' Summer Community Organization for Political Education (SCOPE), a program designed to recruit white students to help with the movement. In 1972, he earned a master's degree in education from Harvard University. He served with the labor movement from 1973 to 1979. He then worked as the director of personnel for the Atlanta Public Library until 1983. Afterwards, Bolden began serving as pastor of the Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta.","Finding aid available in repository.","Interviewed by Bob Short."],"dc_format":["video/mp4"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":["eng"],"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection","http://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/sclfind/view?docId=ead/RBRL220ROGP.xml"],"dcterms_subject":["Southern Christian Leadership Conference","Poor People's Campaign","Civil rights movements--United States","Civil rights movements--Georgia","Race relations","Voter registration--Georgia--Albany","Civil rights movements","Voter registration","Georgia","Georgia--Albany","United States"],"dcterms_title":["Wilie Bolden, 07 October 2009."],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL220ROGP-088/ohms"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection, ROGP 088, Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, Georgia, 30602-1641."],"dlg_local_right":["Resources may be used under the guidelines described by the U.S. Copyright Office in Section 107, Title 17, United States Code (Fair use). Parties interested in production or commercial use of the resources should contact the Russell Library for a fee schedule."],"dcterms_medium":["oral histories (literary works)","interviews"],"dcterms_extent":["1 interview (81 min.) : sound, color."],"dlg_subject_personal":["Bolden, Willie, 1938-","King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968","Williams, Hosea, 1926-2000"],"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":"Willie Bolden  interviewed by Bob Short \r\n2009 November 7 \r\nAtlanta, Georgia \r\nReflections on Georgia Politics \r\nROGP-020 \r\nOriginal: video, 81 minutes \r\n \r\nsponsored by: \r\nRichard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies \r\nUniversity of Georgia Libraries \r\nand \r\nYoung Harris College \r\n \r\nDate of Transcription:  November 17, 2009 \r\n \r\nBOB SHORT:  Im Bob Short.  This is Reflections on Georgia Politics sponsored by Young Harris College and the University of Georgia Library.  Our guest is Reverend Willie Bolden, who lived through many battles during the Civil Rights Movements alongside Dr. King, an educator, active member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a well known citizen of Atlanta.  Welcome, Reverend Bolden. \r\n \r\nWILLIE BOLDEN:  Thank you. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You were born in South Carolina but made your way to Atlanta through Savannah. \r\n \r\nBOLDEN:  Right.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Tell us about your early life. \r\n \r\nBOLDEN:  Okay.  And just before starting, I would also like to just for emphasis say that Im the pastor of the Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church here in Atlanta, 498 English Avenue. \r\nI was born, like you said, in Sumter, South Carolina.  My parents decided that they did not want me to grow up on a farm and decided to move to Savannah.  When they moved there I was three years old.  I understand from my mom that my dad came first and got a job and then three months later after he found some place to stay, he sent for her and for me and thats how we ended up in Savannah, Georgia.   \r\nI was educated in Savannah.  I developed my Christian beliefs in Savannah.  I grew up in St. Phillip A.M.E. Church. Its now Martin Luther King Boulevard, but when I was a young boy it was West Broad Street.  And its still there.  One of the largest, if not the largest A.M.E. church in Savannah.     \r\nMy involvement in the movement in Savannah came into play -- believe it or not, I was an ex-Marine and I came home and got a job on the waterfront as a longshoreman.  And I said to myself, \"Self, theres got to be a better way to make a living than working on the waterfront.\"  But I didnt know exactly what that would be.  So I ended up being an assistant bell captain at one of the two plush hotels.  In my young days now, there were only two plush hotels in Savannah.  The DeSoto Hilton, and its still there on Oglethorpe Street, and the Manger Hotel.  Well, as the assistant bell captain I made money every day.  So I had money every day.  And my second job was shooting pool.  I was a nine ball player.  And not just your average nine ball player.  I was a real good nine ball player.  As a matter of fact, when I see these tournaments on television today I say, \"Man, if they had that back when I was a young boy Id probably be a millionaire now.\"  \r\nSo that was my other way of making money.  But to get involved the movement, every day at 12:00 -- you could set your watch by it -- Hosea Williams would march downtown.  There was a park right across the street from the hotel where I work.  And there is an Indian Chief statue by the name of Tomochichi.  And Hosea would march two or three hundred people every day, Monday through Friday, and where he got these folks from, I couldnt even imagine.  But he had them.  And he would climb up on Tomochichi and he would talk about the white power structure downtown.  And I said one or two things, \"Either this man is crazy or hes one hell of a organizer.\"  Come to find out he was both.   \r\n Very good friend of mine, but some of the things that Hosea did, it was unbelievable.  But I found out that they were going to try to integrate the hotel where I worked.  And my job, given to me by the innkeeper, was when the demonstrators come downtown you lock the door.  And thats what I did.  But when I found out they were coming this particular day, I left the door unlocked and went downstairs.  And when I did, the group came in, led by Ben Clark, who was one heck of a organizer, along with some other folk, and they just took over the lobby because they would not let them in the restaurant, nor would they let them check in to the hotel.  When they were all arrested then I was summoned to the innkeepers office and terminated that same day.  Now I said, \"Oh, man, you mean to tell me I lost my job.  Man.\"  \r\nBut I lived to find out that that was the best thing that could ever happen to me.  And I say that because that same innkeeper who fired me, before it was over, because I got involved with Hosea and the Chatham County Crusade for Voters and we integrated the hotels and motels and the restaurants in Savannah, and that same hotel where I was fired from, Hoseas wife, Juanita Williams and Ben Clark and myself integrated that hotel.  And I insisted on the innkeeper who fired me to check me in.  \r\n And of course we didnt sleep all night.  We kept in touch with each other.  I wish we had had cell phones back then but cell phones were not the thing.  We could just call from room to room to make sure that everybody was all right.  I slept with the chair up against the door, not only all the other locks, to make sure that nobody could come in.  Didnt feel comfortable sleeping.  I think we all went home when we checked out the next day and went to bed and got some sleep.  But I enjoyed being able to check into that hotel that terminated me.   \r\nNow, how I met Dr. King.  I met Dr. King in a pool room.  The pool room was called Charlie Browns Pool Room on West Broad Street.  All of that now is torn down.  West Broad Street -- Martin Luther King Jr., the street today is nothing like it was when I was a boy coming up.  You had clubs from Broad Street to 37th street in Savannah.  I mean nice clubs.  Because you see, you had the Air Force base there and the Army base just a few miles away.  Ft. Stewart.  All of the soldiers came to Savannah on liberty.  And at the end of Montgomery Street you had Hunter Air Force Base, so all the airmen would come to town.  So, they had to have some place for them to go and so they had a lot of clubs.   \r\nSo Hosea had invited Dr. King to come to Savannah.  And this particular day I was in the pool room playing nine ball and Hosea and his group, along with Dr. King, came in.  And Dr.  King said, \"Brother, you just give me a few minutes; I promise you I wont be long.  I just want to talk to you for a few minutes.\"  Well, right about the time he was asking for our attention I was getting ready to bank the eight ball across side, play the nine ball in the corner, and get paid.  And I didnt want to hear nothing about what this guy was talking about, you know.  So he walked over to me, he said, \"Whats your name?\"  I said \"Whats your name?\"  He say \"Im Martin Luther King, Jr.\"  I say \"Im Willie Bolden.\"  He said, \"I promise you, Im not going to take long.  Just give me a few minutes of your time.\"   \r\nSo I very arrogantly took my pool stick and they had benches around the wall, because if you werent playing you had to sit on the bench out of the way.  So I went over and sat on the bench with my pool stick in front of me and he was talking.  I act like I wasnt listening but I was listening.  And finally, he got through and he said, \"Thank you, guys, man, I really appreciate your time.\"  Well, he invited everybody to come to a mass rally at St. Philip Church that night because he was going to be speaking.  And so when he and Hosea and the crew left I got back over the table, I banked the eight ball cross side, I played the nine in the corner, I got paid.   \r\nSo, later on that night I was home.  Man, Bob, my pockets was swolled up like they had the mumps.  I mean I had a good day in the pool room, right?  So I went home that night to take my bath.  And we didnt have showers like we have today.  I took my bath in a number 310 tub.  Some of the people wholl be listening to this tape would not even know what a number 310 tub is, but thats what we used to wash clothes and everything back during those days.  So I took my bath in my number 310 tub and got dressed up for the evening.  And while I was in the tub, it was strange, because I could hear Dr. King talking about how we were beating each other out of the little bit of money that we had.  When, in fact, the man who was really robbing us was several blocks down the street at City Hall and at the County Commission and in the County Commission Chambers and sitting up in these suites.  And I said, \"You know, I think Ill go hear that guy tonight and see what else hes got to talk about.\" \r\nBut I didnt want the boys to know that I was going to go to the church.  So when I got ready to go, I lived on the corner of Anderson and Burroughs, I walked down Anderson Street to Montgomery Street, which is the street past West Broad.  Then walked up Montgomery Street and back to West Broad Street so I could get to St. Philip Church which sat on West Broad and Hall Street.  And I went in there, people were all -- I know the pastor of that church wished that people were there every Sunday like that --  people were all over the place.  I mean in the rafters, up in the balcony, all around,  standing all around.  I said \"Jesus Christ, all these folks.\"   \r\nSo I just kind of leaned back on the wall and I was listening.  And I watched this guy Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  He had everybody in the palm of his hand.  At will, he picked folk up out of the pew and sat them down at will.  I had never heard nobody speak like that before.  And Im learning on the wall and all of the sudden chill bumps start coming on me.  And I said to myself, \"Self, a man is not supposed to make another man feel the way this man is making me feel.  Thats just not supposed to be.\"  And when he finished, folks started lining up around the wall to go shake his hand.  And I went and got in line and when I walked up to him and I stretched my hand out to shake his hand he stretched his hands out and when our hands met it felt like I had cotton in my hand.  I was scared to give him a real firm confident shake.  I just squeezed his hand just a little bit.   \r\nBut the thing that got me, Bob, was this:  he say, \"Willie, Im so glad you came.\"  Now, I dont know how many folk this man had met, but how could he remember my little ol' Willie name?  And I must admit that it made me feel pretty good, right?  A guy like this remembering me.  About three weeks later Hosea told me Dr. King wanted me to come to Atlanta.  I said \"For what?\"  \"Well, he might want you to talk about working with him.\"  I said, \"Now, Hosea, thats the non-violent movement.  I know yours is non-violent, too, but you know, we dont have folks spitting on us and we dont have folk slapping and hitting on us because we dont have that kind of violent movement.  Only thing happening to us in Savannah was we got locked up, okay? \" And I said, \"Now, Hosea, you know Im an ex-Marine and if somebody spit on me, if they have a lip when its all over with, its going to be a miracle.  Beause Im not letting anybody, I dont care who it is, spit on me.  And Lord knows, you know I aint going to let nobody hit me and I not hit them back.  So, you tell Dr. King that, you know, I cant handle that non-violent stuff.\"  He said, \"Well, I tell you what, Bolden\" -- cause he always called me Bolden -- \"you tell Dr. King yourself.\"  He gave me a flight check, what they used back then.  All I had to do was go out there and sign my name to it and give it to em and get on the plane and go to Atlanta and when I got ready to come back take another check, sign on it, and come back to Atlanta.  He gave me one for going, one for coming. \r\nI came to Atlanta, met with Dr. King at 334 Auburn Avenue.  Thats where the National SCLC Headquarters was located, right on the corner of Hilliard and Auburn Avenue.  His office wasnt nowhere as large as this office is.  I mean his office really was like a little closet, had a very small desk and his chair and had books all around naturally, and one small sofa over on the wall.  And I met with him and he told me that hed like for me to come work with him.  And all that stuff I told Hosea, I could not get it out of my mouth to tell him.  I dont know why.  As a matter of fact, Ill be quite honest with you, I was a bit nervous sitting in there with him.  And I remember him asking me, he said, \"Do you have a Bible?\"  And I said, \"Yes, I have a Bible.\"  And he gave me -- and I still have it -- a book on Mahatma Gandhi, the master of non-violence.  And he said to me, \"Willie\" -- he always called me Willie -- he said, \"Willie, were going to turn this country from upside down to right side up with two books:  one, the Holy Bible and two, Mahatma Gandhi.  Read and study both of them.\"   \r\nIt was three years before I went back home.  I had to have my mom pack up my stuff and send it to me on the Greyhound bus.  Thats how I got involved in the Civil Rights Movement from Savannah, Georgia.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  What was your first experience in the movement after you joined SCLC? \r\n \r\nBOLDEN:  Now, my first experience was to go into town.  Andy Young -- well, at that time, before Andy came it was Wyatt Tee Walker.  He was the executive director.  He and Andy, they all worked closely together.  But primarily, my job was wherever Dr. King was going into a movement, my job was to go in and make sure that the people knew he was coming.  I had to get out, make sure that thousands of leaflets would be distributed, that churches would be notified, that the people in the community knew that he was coming.  My job was to get the town ready for Dr. King.  And I did that in several cities.  That was my primary job.  But I felt like I had more to offer than just making sure that some leaflets and stuff got put out.  You know, I felt like I was a leader in my own right.  I mean even back home in Savannah I was a leader, you know.  And I felt that I had much more to offer.   \r\nAnd I remember saying that in a meeting, I said, \"You know, I can do a lot more than just make sure theres some leaflets.  But anybody can go to town and put out some leaflets.\"  And thats when they assigned me to Hosea.  And Hosea started me with voter registration in Albany, Georgia.  And I went to Albany and I stayed in Albany over a year on voter registrations.   \r\nI had several run-ins with one of the meanest police chiefs youd want to meet by the name of Pritchett.  He locked me up two or three times.  And I remember on one occasion I took some people down to the courthouse to get registered and they wanted us to leave and I told the folk we werent going to leave.  And I was standing up on the -- it had a little, I guess youd call it an edge, going up the steps to the courthouse.  And I was standing up on that because the people could see me as I talked to them.  And he slapped me off the edge on top of a car and I guess he thought that I was going to get up and leave, but fortunately, I didnt hurt myself.  Did more damage to that car than I did myself.  And I got up and went back and stood right back up on that same stump and kept on talking and the people never left.  So he had his folk to lock me up.  And I stayed in jail a couple of days and a lawyer by the name of C.B. King, Slater Kings brother, was the one who came and defended me.  And the guy who went on my bond was a black business man there who owned a beauty supply company called Chapman Beauty Supply.  And he was the one that went on my bond and got me out of jail.  And C.B. King was the one who represented me in court.  And if my memory serves me correctly, I was fined something like $100 for failing to obey a police officer.  But we registered hundreds and hundreds of voters in Albany during my stay there at that time.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Dr. King was also arrested in Albany wasnt he? \r\n \r\nBOLDEN:  Oh yeah, he was arrested in Albany.  J.T. Johnson, there were a lot of folk from the movement who were locked up in Albany.  And C.B. King, the one who represented us, even today the federal courthouse in Albany, Georgia is named after attorney C.B. King, in Albany, Georgia.  I went down.  The wife and those and invited me to come down to the ceremony.  And its downtown Albany.  C.B. King Federal Building.  So you see a lot came out of  what we did that the average American dont even know about.  They may have heard the name but I doubt if anybody, well I wouldn't say anybody, but there are very few people outside of Albany would know that the guy who stood our bonds and fought for us in the courtroom had the federal courthouse named after him.  And he also ran for governor.  He was a guy before his time.  He was a brilliant lawyer.  A brilliant, brilliant lawyer. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  So what happened after Albany? \r\n \r\nBOLDEN:  After Albany I think my next move was Social Circle, a little town about 30, 40, maybe a little more than 40 miles east of Atlanta.  There was a white teacher and a black teacher who became friends.  Both were females.  And they were terminated, both of them, because they would not sever their relationship and they supported each other, and they were good teachers.  But you know, when they want to find a way to terminate you they will find a way.  So, they found a way and terminated them.  They brought it to SCLC, so I was assigned to Social Circle to see what could we do to get their jobs back.  \r\nSo I went in and started organizing the community along with some other staff from SCLC.  And we stayed there in Social Circle over a good year, because we pulled kids out of school.  We closed the schools down in Social Circle.  And we were marching every day.  The state patrol, they had as many as 20 to 25 state patrols assigned -- they would follow me -- I thought they were my escorts because everywhere I went there were one or two state patrols behind my car.  They knew my car.  They knew when I left.  They would follow me from  Social Circle back to Atlanta.  And they would stop out there on 20, and when my car headed back to Social Circle they would pick me up and follow me.  Well, I didnt mind that because I said \"As long as the state patrol is following me then I dont have to worry about the Ku Klux Klan following me.\"  So, I say \"They dont know it but they are really doing something to help me.\"  So I almost wanted to call them and say look, \"Im getting ready to leave\", so they could come behind me and follow me.   \r\nBut we stayed there for about a year and that particular city received at the SCLC National Convention, they received the Affiliate of the Year Award because of what was going on.  Because not only did it affect Social Circle but it affected many of the other little cities around, like Lincolnton and Washington, all the way over to Monroe.  The movement just started spreading like throwing a rock in the water and you see the ripples going out.  So, it was a catalyst for a lot of other movements in and around Social Circle.  As a matter of fact, thats where I was when Dr. King was assassinated.  I was meeting with the leader and the treasurer and the leadership of the Social Circle Movement at the presidents house when it came over the TV that Dr. King had just been shot.  And I said \"man.\" I mean everybody just stopped. I mean we couldnt do or say anything.   \r\nAnd then they showed a picture.  I shall never forget it.  They showed a picture of Dr. King speaking somewhere and it was like you saw a halo over his head.  And I said then to the group, I said, \"Hes dead yall.  Hes dead.\"  Not knowing that he really was dead.  Because the news was hes been shot.  And sure enough he died.  And I remember getting in my car going to Atlanta, trying to get a airplane so I could go to Memphis and they had cancelled all flights to Memphis, Tennessee.  And I remember calling the office and speaking to Dora McDonald, who was Dr. Kings secretary, and said, \"Dora, I got to get to Memphis.  I got to get to Memphis.  I got to get\" -- she said, \"Willie, they have locked.  They closed down everything.\"  I said \"Well, Im going to drive.\"  She said, \"No, dont drive.  You just need to come on to the office.\"  And so, instead -- Ill never forget.  It was pouring down rain.  I mean it was raining like cats and dogs.  And I remember driving on back to Atlanta to the SCLC office that night.   \r\nBut Social Circle was quite a movement.  And then after Social Circle I went to Pike County in Georgia because they had terminated Dr. Glover, D.F. Glover, who served for many years in Atlanta on the Board of Education as an elected official.  They terminated him.  And the reason they terminated him was because they were going to integrate the schools and Dr. Glover was the principal of the only black high school there.  Pike County Mechanical something Industrial High School.  So, they terminated him because they were going to merge the black high school in with the Pike County High School, which was the white high school.  Now, heres a guy who had been in education almost 15 years longer than the principal at the white high school.  Not only that, he had a doctorate in education.  He had come up through ranks.  He had taught.  He was department chair.  His experience was 100 times more greater than the guy who was there, but rather than make him the principal of that school, they did not renew his contract.  And when they did not renew his contract he got in touch with SCLC and they sent me there.   \r\nAnd I went and we met with them and Im saying, \"On what basis do you have not to renew Dr. Glover contract?\"  And they just played with words.  I said \"You terminated the man.  You fired him.\"  \"No, we didnt fire him.  We just didnt renew his contract.\"  \"Well, if you didnt renew his contract you got to have a reason.  You just cant arbitrarily and capriciously not renew someones contract and not give them a reason why.\" \"Well, we just didnt renew his contract.\"  Thats all they would say.   \r\nSo, what I did, we started organizing the community, organizing the schools.  I pulled all the kids out of school, and we marched every single day in that town for about a month.  Every day.  And we saw where our marching -- we would go downtown to the courthouse, give big speeches -- we saw where we had to up the ante a little bit as we would call it.  So we started marching out to the superintendents house.  And we marched out to the superintendents house.  He lived out on the outskirts of Zebulon.  So we marched out to his house during the day.  And then a student came up to me one day and said, \"Reverend Bolden, maybe we need to do it at night.\"  And I said, \"you know, I never really thought about that.  Thats a good idea.\"  So, we marched out there a couple nights.  But then that got to be a little dangerous because they started throwing bricks and bottles and several people got hurt.   \r\nAnd thats when I invited A.D. King, the brother of Dr. King.  He came to Pike County and he led a march and spoke.  But they never did renew Dr. Glover's contract, but we felt like we won because what they tried to do was to keep the high school students who were qualified to graduate that year not to graduate.  They didnt want them to graduate.  So I got a guy in Savannah -- you probably heard of him -- the only guy I know picket more than Hosea.  His name was Reverend Joseph Boone, Joseph Boone.  I went to him and talked about it and we organized a graduation class for the students who met all of the criterias to graduate.  But the county didnt want to give them their diploma.  So we held our own graduation, gave them our own diplomas, and Bob, every one of them we helped get in college.  Every one of them went on to college and are doing quite well even today.  Okay?  \r\nSo we felt like that was a victory.  Now, the other thing that happened in Pike County was we closed down a canning company.  This canning company had about a four or five million dollar contract with the federal government to make pimentos and bell peppers and all kinds of stuff for the federal government.  And what we did, we organized the picketers with the students.  We picketed the company and when that seemed like it wasnt going to work we started organizing the workers who were the parents of the students that we were trying to help.  And when we convinced them of what we were doing, they came out of the canning company, and as a result, the canning company lost their contract with the federal government.  And they sued me personally for $1.5 million.  I went to Macon, the federal court, and I said to the guy who sued me, \"You know, you would have scared the hell out of me if you had sued me for a $100, but a million five.  Where am I going to get it?  The best thing you can get is me.  Do you want me?\"   And they finally dropped that case.  But that company lost somewhere between three and five million dollar contract with the federal government.  So we felt like we had a victory in Pike County because we were able to get those students into college.   \r\nThen later I was assigned to Marks, Mississippi.  As I told you earlier, thats the only city I ever saw Dr. King literally cry.  And he cried because he witnessed a third world city right here in America.  We were always talking about going to Africa and going here and going there, the third world.  Well, we had one right here in America, a Third World city called Marks, Mississippi.  At that time, it was the poorest county in the nation.  Listed as the poorest county in the nation.  Kids seven, eight, nine, eleven, twelve years old walking around with pot belly stomachs.  You would think that they were there because they were eating too much.  The truth of the matter is they were dying from starvation.  Their teeth just rotting out.  It was nothing to see a ten-, eleven-, twelve-year-old boy or girl walking around with just raggedy teeth or no teeth.  You could almost just reach there and pull a tooth out with your fingers because of no medical care.   \r\nWell, right about that time the Poor People's Campaign was being organized.  And I was asked if I would lead the mule train.  Hosea gave me this assignment to bring the mule train from Marks, Mississippi to Washington, D.C.  Took us 52 days to do it.  I had 16 wagons and about 175 men, women, and children on there.  We left out of Marks, Mississippi.  The  governor of Mississippi directed the state patrol to close down one side of Highway 20 so we could travel through Mississippi.  Got to Alabama, the governor instructed the highway patrol, \"close down one side of Highway 20, 20 East\" so we could continue our journey to Washington.  Got to Georgia, Tallapoosa, Georgia, Governor Lester Maddox was the governor.  A kindergarten drop out.  I almost said a high school drop out but I couldnt give him that much credit.  A kindergarten drop out, who was our governor, came out and met us as we were ready to enter into Georgia and said to me, \"These wagons and mules will not go down 20.\"   \r\nI said, \"Mr. Governor, the governor of Mississippi allowed us to come down 20, the governor of Alabama allowed us to come down 20.  Now you mean to tell me my governor in my home state will not allow us to continue our journey.\"  He said, \"I dont care what Mississippi did.  I dont care what Alabama did.  Im telling you whats going to happen in Georgia.\"  And I said, \"Mr. Governor, its obvious that you dont know me very well.  Oh, were going down 20 one way or the other.  Were going down 20.  He got in his car and left.\"  I understand later on he ordered for me to be arrested.  They came and locked me up, took me to jail.  Andrew Marsette, one of my helpers on the march who knew how to organize, organized the mules and wagons off of 20 and brought them all in downtown Tallapoosa to the jailhouse and said \"were not leaving until Willie Bolden is out of jail.\"  They kept me in jail about six hours and they turned me loose.   \r\nAnd guess what?  We spent the night there, got up the next morning, and we went down 20 East, came off at Ashby Street, which is Joseph E. Lowery right now, to Hunter Street, which is Martin Luther King.  Took a right on Hunter Street to Chestnut, which is James P. Brawley Drive.  Well, Dr. Ralph David Abernathy's West Hunter Street Baptist Church sits right on the corner, at that time.  And we  parked the mules and the wagons over at Clark College football field.  And thats where we spent the time until we got ready to go to Washington.  Dr. Abernathy and the restaurant across the street fed us.   \r\nIt was strange because one of the guys who owned one of the restaurants across the street was a number man.  Okay?  And he had this nice restaurant.  And he found out what we had gone through.  He fed everybody on that trip a steak, baked potato with all the trimmings, all of us on that trip.  I think we stayed in Atlanta a couple of days and then we loaded up the mules, the wagons, put the people on buses, loaded up the mules and wagons on horse drawn buggies, I guess youd call em, and the wagon and we took them to Washington, outside of Washington, and we reassembled everything, the mules, the wagons, put all the people on it, and then we went across the bridge into Resurrection City.  And I must admit, and I think I told you earlier, a few tears came to my eyes when we saw all the folk.  Because they knew we were coming.  And they were out there to meet us.  And they were just cheering us on, you know.  Cheering us on.  And the other folk on the wagon, they were cheering us on.   \r\nAnd I told you earlier, and I didnt put it in here, but I was given a white horse with a saddle.  Never rode a horse before in my life.  But I rode that horse that was given to me as the wagon master.  They called me the wagon master.  And the guy said \"if youre the wagon master you got to act like a wagon master.  You got to ride like a wagon master.\"  And I remember him saying like that movie that came on back during the day, \"Rawhide,\" \"youre going to have to say, Get em up!  Move em out!\"  And I would get up every morning after wed have breakfast and got ourselves together, I would go up to the first mule drawn wagon and Id look and the guys who were helping me would let me know that everybody was ready, and I say, \"Get em up!  Move em out!\" Oh, it was fun.  And the weather wasnt always conducive.  We ran into a lot of bad weather.  But we made it.  But we made it.   \r\nAnd then later on I was assigned to St. Augustine, Florida.  That was quite a task there.  In St. Augustine we were trying to integrate the hotels, motels, and restaurants.  And these movements that Im talking about may not go in sequence but at least youll know what they are because in St. Augustine it was in 1964.  And everyone knows -- if you dont know Ill tell you -- the Poor Peoples Campaign took place in 1968.  Thats when we had Resurrection City in Washington, D.C.   \r\nBut in St. Augustine, as I stated earlier, we were trying to integrate the hotel, motels, and restaurants.  And we were beaten twice a day, because it was twice a day that we would march downtown, march out on the beach, and they would be there ready to jump on us.  And on the weekend they would import the Klan from Florida, Jacksonville, Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama.  They would have the Klan to come over and they would be waiting for us at the beaches.  So when we got to the beaches and we got out  and they would wait until we got out in the water and then they would come in and jump on us.  And the strange thing about it, the state patrol would be standing up on the banks and they would see them out there and wouldnt do a thing.  Just allowed them to come and beat us.   \r\nBut let me give you just a little bit of information about St. Augustine and then we can move on.  For those of you who may not be aware, Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama put the 1964 Civil Rights bill on President Lyndon Baines Johnsons desk because of the movements and activities in Birmingham and in Montgomery.  Theres no question about that.  They were the ones who put it on the desk.  He took it and put it in his drawer.  But it was the  movement in St. Augustine, Florida in 1964: those beatings that I just told you about, a man at the Munson Motel throwing acid in the pool and then the next day when we went back and had a six foot alligator in the pool.  We would go in the restaurant and they would bring the coffee and then just pour mounds and mounds of sugar in it.  Or we would order food and they would come back with salt just stacked up and pepper stacked up on the food to the point where you couldnt eat it.   \r\nBut it was during St. Augustine, Floridas movement that Dr. Kings house was shot up.  A family out of New York allowed him to stay in the house in St. Augustine while we were there.  And they literally shot that house up trying to kill him and anybody else who was in there with him.  And because of that movement, Lyndon Baines Johnson took the 1964 Civil Rights bill out, put it on his desk and signed it.  Thats how we got that. \r\nMarion, Alabama.  The night Jimmy Lee Jackson got killed, Dr. King was supposed to go to Marion, Alabama that night because we had just found out that James Orange was arrested and beaten in Marion, Alabama.  He couldnt go.  So he sent me and about five other guys.  I think it was Henry Brown Lee, Big Lester Hankerson, Jimmy Lee Wells, myself, and one other person.  I cant think of who that person is.  But we went there.  We had a big mass rally that night.  And I spoke.  And we were getting ready to march out of the church to  march down to the courthouse and then eventually over to the jail where they had James Orange.  But when we got there the media was all over the place.  And the sheriff and all his folk were there.  But before we could really get the march on the way outside the sheriff summons one of his henchmen to come and grab me.  And he grabbed me up by my jeans and carried me over to the sheriff and the sheriff said, \"Whats your name, nigger?\"  And before I could say anything he took his pistol and stuck it in my mouth and cocked the trigger back and said, \"If you breathe, nigger, Ill blow your so and so brains out.\"   \r\nNow here I am looking at him and Im trying to say to myself, \"Self, dont breathe.\"  And Im just looking at him and hes looking at me and hes calling Dr. King all kind of names.  \"Dr.  Coon\" and \"you one of these outside agitators who came into town and upset my negro  my niggers.\"  What -- he didnt call them niggers.  \"Niggerettes\"   \"and upset my niggerettes.\"  \"I ought to blow your so and so brains out.\"  And he finally snapped it out and when he did the end of the barrel of his pistol hit my teeth and cracked it.  And then he hit me in the head, busted my  head, and then say, \"Lock your so and so ass up.\"  And they jumped on the marchers and thats the night Jimmy Lee Jackson was killed, trying to protect his mother.  And they took me to jail, along with many others, and as we got to the jail they were taking us upstairs we could see blood all over the floor, going up the steps where they had not only beaten James Orange but they had beaten some other folks who went to jail with him.  So, Marion, Alabama was a tough movement.   \r\nAnd of course, the march on Washington I was fresh out of jail in Savannah.  I had been in jail for about five days.  Hosea had been in jail 55 days.  He refused to come out.  But I came out of jail and helped organized the group that went to Washington, D.C. during the march on Washington.  And of course, as I stated earlier, the mule train was a part of the Poor Peoples Campaign in 1968 when Dr. Abernathy organized Resurrection City in Washington, D.C.   \r\nThen we had a program called SCOPE, S-C-O-P-E.   It stands for  Summer Community Organization for Political Education.  That was another one of Hoseas projects.  That was his baby.  He created it.  And that program was designed specifically for us who worked with him to go north, northwest, in the west to recruit specifically white students to come south to work on voter registration.  Because what was happening in the south was those of us who were of the same hue that the folks were out on the plantation, for some reason or another - I wouldnt say they didnt trust us - but they were a little skeptical about going downtown with us because they felt like we werent able to protect them.  But if the white students would come and say, \"Bob, my name is Susan; Im from the University of Pennsylvania and Im down here working on voter registration, and what were doing, were traveling throughout the county trying to register blacks\" -- we werent saying African Americans then, we were saying blacks -- \"who are not registered to vote, because we know that you have taxation without representation.  We know that you are the last hired but the first fired.  We know that you dont have the jobs that others have.  And with voter registration, we can change that.  So, Id like to take you down to register.\"  And believe it or not, they would go.  They would go on down there.   \r\nAnd we knew that and found that out from the few whites who were working with us in SCLC.  Guys like Al Lango and Willy Leventhal.  They were white guys who worked with us.  And they were getting folks and taken them.  So, Hosea said, \"Well, lets see if we can get the white students from the north, the west, the Midwest to come down to help us with this.\"  And we did.  And we got thousands of them to come.  And we went out in Alabama, in Mississippi, in Florida, in Georgia, and began to register black voters.  And thats when the black voting power really started kicking off.  It was those kind of campaigns that help us, along with Selma, to get the Voters Right Act.  Because once we got the voting right act out of Selma, it made it a bit more easier for us to get blacks registered.  And I say all the time, no Selma, Alabama, no President Barack Obama.  No Selma, Alabama, no Maynard Holbrook Jackson, mayor of the city of Atlanta.  No Selma, no Andrew Young, United States Congressman.  No Selma, no Andy Young, United Nations.  No Selma, no Andy Young, mayor.  No Selma, no Shirley Franklin, Mayor of the city of Atlanta.   \r\nAnd then you can just take it outside of Atlanta and just go all over the world.  We had less than 300 black elected officials nationwide, if we had that many, in 1965.  Today we got over 10,000.  And thats all attributed to Selma, Alabama and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which Im glad to say I was on it, both times.  The first time, March the 7th, and seven days later, March the 14th.  I was there.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:   Well, tell us about it.  What was it like on the bridge on Bloody Sunday?     \r\n \r\nBOLDEN:  Okay.  I had been assigned there along with some other SCLC staff members to organize voter registration in Selma.  I think it was about four or five of us.  And at the same time, SNCC was there also working on voter registration.  After Bloody Sunday, we had people coming in and Bloody Sunday was when we attempted the first time to go across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The sheriff and his posse and state patrol, they beat us back across the bridge.  Now, Dr. King -- youre right -- was not much in favor of the march at first because he wanted to try some other techniques before we march.  But Hosea Williams convinced Dr. King that the march was the best thing for us to do.  So, Dr. King acquiesced and said, \"okay, well march.\"  But the ones who led the march was, the first time was Hosea, John, they were the leaders of the march across the bridge.  And thats when they jumped on us and beat us up and pushed us back across the bridge.  Then we regrouped and went back and thats when everybody -- I mean people came from all over the world.  Because they saw what happened on that first march and all of our sympathizers came.   \r\nAnd prior to that, we had had not only the killing of Jimmy Lee Jackson in Marion, but we had two whites killed right there in Selma.  One was a priest, whose name escapes me at the moment.  I was trying to think about it as I talked, but the name just wont come to me, and another one.  So it was kind of touch and go.  But on that second march we took out across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and we were  protected all the way to Montgomery.  Along the way we had all kinds of celebrities who came and supported us.  Again, Harry Bellafonte, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul \u0026 Mary, Sidney Poitier.  We had all kind of folk who had helped the movement along to come and be with us.  And of course, you know, we reach Montgomery, Alabama, and Dr. King gave the big speech on the steps and someone might ask, \"then what happened after that?\"  What happened after that was SCLC started Voter Registration Campaigns all across the country.  All across the country.   \r\nAnd even some small towns we started voter registration.  You take in Selma, Alabama, where there was not one black elected official.  There are now.  And so, not only did we target large cities, but we targeted small cities.  If you remember, Carl Stokes in Cleveland, Ohio, the first black mayor of a major city.  And right after him in Gary, Indiana, Hatcher in Gary, Indiana where SCLC played a major role in getting both of those guys because Dr. King sent staff in to help them on their campaign.  So all these cities where you see blacks serving in elected positions, they have to thank the Selma Movement.  And those who suffered being beaten, and even after we got the 1965 Voters Right Act, there were still some cities, and not all of them small cities, where we had a problem getting blacks registered to vote by the administration, by political, by the power structure of those cities, because they knew that once we got blacks registered then we were going to also turn them out to vote and that meant that, hey, they might get caught up in that wheel. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Mississippi.  You led some marches in Mississippi.  \r\n \r\nBOLDEN:  Well my biggest march in Mississippi was Marks.  And the next one would be Grenada, Mississippi.  Grenada, Mississippi was a violent movement.  Again, and thats why I try to tell young people today.  We were always able to get a movement going and get it started with the young people back then.  We would go into a town and get the young people ready and then after a while we would get the adults.  But the young people were the ones who really started the movement.  And in Grenada, that movement got to be really violent.  As a matter of fact, on one occasion, when the Klan jumped on us and beat us up, we were getting ready to march downtown.  I saw with my eyes a guy take his foot and put it between the crotch of a young boy and took his foot, I mean took his foot by his hand and twisted and broke his leg in two places.  I mean how could somebody take a child and put your foot between their crotch and take your hand and twist and break it in two places?   \r\nAnd there were several people who got hurt that day.  And we went to the hospital in Grenada, Mississippi, and guess what?  They wouldnt wait on us.  They wouldnt wait on us.  They said \"Get out of here.  We cant do anything.\"  Thats when I found out about an all black town on the outskirts of Grenada called Mound Bayou.  I had never heard of Mound Bayou.  Its an all black city, elected officials, everything, all black.  Had their own hospital.  And thats where we had to take these injured folk in order for them to get the services they needed for the injuries that they had.  Grenada was pretty tough.  But weathered the storm.  We weathered the storm.  \r\n \r\nSHORT:  If you were asked what future generation should know about the Civil Rights Movement, particularly during the 60's and 70's, what would you say?  \r\n \r\nBOLDEN:  What they need to know about the Civil Rights Movement?  They need to know that what they are enjoying today came at a heavy price.  A lot of people whom they dont know died.  A lot of people whom they do not know have mental and physical conditions today as a result of the Civil Rights Movement of the 60's in order for them to enjoy what they are enjoying today.  And they ought not take what they are enjoying lightly.  I would say to young people, today the question should be what is it that I can do to make sure that this country does not revert back to the 40's, 50's, and 60's.   \r\nAnd then get involved.  Get involved with something.  Get involved with some organization.  Do some volunteer work.  I worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for nine years and the most I ever made was $25 every two weeks.  I was never hungry.  I was never naked.  I was never outdoors where I didnt choose to be on my own.  Because the people who we were helping made sure that we had what we needed.  So you ought to get involved. \r\nSecondly, get an education.  Go to school.  When I came to Atlanta in 1961 there were 125,000 students in the Atlanta public school system.  They have less than 55,000 now.  And the dropout rate among blacks in high schools are higher today than it was in 1961.  In 1961 when I came to Atlanta they had one black elected official on the Atlanta Board of Education.  Now we have six.  The superintendent in 1961 was white.  The superintendent in 2009 is black.  But yet, we have more students dropping out of school in 2009 than we had in 1961.  Somethings wrong with that picture.  Somethings wrong.   \r\nAnd we need young people to get involved so we can make sure that whatevers wrong gets straightened out.  John Lewis and Julian Bond and Dr. King and Dr. Abernathy and Hosea and Andy and C.T. and Fred Shuttlesworth and Willie Bolden and James Orange and Leon Hall and Lester Hankerson, we were young men.  You know, we werent old.  We're old now.  But we were young men when we started out in the Civil Rights Movement.  And thats what we need now.  We need young men. I mean kids are smarter today than my two and a half year old granddaughter came to me the other day and I stretched out in the chair and I felt a charley horse coming in the back of my neck and she got up and came over to me and she said, Papa,  whats the  matter?  Whats the  matter, Papa?  And she went over to her mama and said, Lotion, lotion, and mama put a little lotion on her hand and she came back over to rub  Papas leg.  Two and a half years old.  Kids are much smarter today.  But are they using it?   \r\nWe texting.  And we cant write a full sentence because we text shorthand.  Instead of saying Y-O-U, you just put U so you can get a lot of words in there.  And as a results, when you sit down to get ready to write youre writing just like that -- U.  So cant nobody understand what youre writing. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  What do you think are the most important issues facing African- Americans today? \r\n \r\nBOLDEN:  Education and health.  Education, health, and parental involvement.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  What can we do -- \r\n \r\nBOLDEN:  When I was a young man I could not come to my mothers table with no t-shirt on.  In my mamas house, when me and my daddy came to the table we had to have a shirt on.  And the shirt had to be tucked in my pants.  I never saw my daddy in my mamas house with his hat on.  Always took it off before he came in the house.  But I see folks today sitting up in restaurants, the daddy got his hat on backwards, the son got his hat on backwards, the daughter got her hat on backwards.  We have to -- and I know they call it old school but some things we shouldnt throw away.  Some things we should maintain.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Is there a single spokesman for African-Americans today -- \r\n \r\nBOLDEN:  No. \r\n \r\nSHORT: -- as Dr. King was in his day? \r\n \r\nBOLDEN:  No, and I dont think there ever will be another single spokesman for the black community.  And I think maybe the closest person to it today would be our president.  But I cant think of any one civil rights leader who can be identified as the spokesman for the black community.  Now many of them are speaking out on issues that we certainly have some concerns.  Brother Al Sharpton and even Jesse Jackson is a spokesman in his own right.  The National Urban League.  We have a lot of spokesman now, but dont think we will ever have a single spokesman like we had during Dr. King.   \r\nI also think that one of the reason we have a problem in getting the masses of people to get involved like we did in the 60's -- remember, in the 60s nobody had nothing.  Nobody had anything.  You didnt have nothing to lose.  You had everything to gain.  But today folk are living in $3-400,000 homes; they dont want to lose that.  Theyre driving Bentley, Rolls Royce, Mercedes; they dont want to lose that.  Theyre wearing Armani instead of J.C. Penney.  They dont want to lose that.  So, they are ready to send you a few dollars so you can do it, but in terms of them doing it, theyre not going to do that.  But in the 60's, didnt nobody have anything.  So, it was much easier to organize the masses of folk because we all were in the same shape.  Even with the churches, you know, you got the mega churches, with exception of maybe one, you dont see them on the picket line.  They will speak out and theyll write you a check.  But what you really need is their bodies, you see. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  The SCLC is in existence today.  What now is its main focus? \r\n \r\nBOLDEN:  Well, I wish I could tell you that.  I cant tell you what their main focus is.  I think right now SCLC, because it is trying to get a president, and its hard for SCLC to get focused right now because they dont have a leader.  But I think once the leader has been selected and that leader gets his or her cabinet in place and then they can do what Dr. King and Reverend Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth and others do what they did.  But I just dont think they are really focused right now, and really focused.   \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Well I appreciate you being with us.  Id like to ask you one final question. \r\n \r\nBOLDEN:  Okay. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Have we overlooked anything in your career that youd like to mention? \r\n \r\nBOLDEN:  Well, no, except I always make it clear that I worked with Dr. King and I loved him and I could have taken that bullet for him -- I really mean it -- some folks say it and just because it sounds good.  But if I could have taken that bullet for Dr. King I would have taken it.  I loved him that much.   \r\nBut my real hero, my real hero -- I have two.  And they are my mother and my father.  My mother gave me the fight thats in me because thats the way she was.  My mom was president of PTA in my elementary school and then when I got promoted to middle school, they called it junior high back then, she was elected president of the PTA.  And the elementary school would not let her resign.  So she ended up being president of the elementary school PTA and the junior high PTA because she was a fighter.  She was a organizer.  She liked to get things done.  My dad, on the other hand, I got my work ethics from.  My daddy taught me the importance of having a job, working, taking care of your family.  He taught me about time.  He said if youre on time youre late.  If youre on time youre late.   \r\nSo I always have a problem, even at the church where I left and the church here, our Sunday morning worship service starts at 11:00.  Im not coming in the pulpit at 11 or five after 11.  Im there before 11.  Im there while the deacons are having devotion so when they finish and turn it over to me well have a smooth transition.  We can move on.  Like today, I knew I was supposed to meet you at 11:00.  I left home early enough in case I ran into traffic and had to detour where I could be here.  I think I got here what?  About 10:35, 10:30, 10:35. \r\n \r\nSHORT: Yeah, you were early.   \r\n \r\nBOLDEN: Yeah. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  You were early.  \r\n \r\nBOLDEN:  Because I got all that from daddy.  He was my hero.  Thats the only thing that I would like to add in here, that because of my relationship with my mother and father, I am what I am today.  Dr. King and those just -- and Hosea and Andy and those just helped put the icing on it.  But when I was in the raw it was my mother and father who chiseled me and got me ready.  And when Dr. King and them got me all they had to do was say lets go; I was ready.  Yeah. \r\n \r\nSHORT:  Okay.  Willie Bolden, thank you very, very much.   \r\n \r\nBOLDEN:  Thank you.  And I certainly hope that this interview will be enlightening and help those who will watch it.  Because what you have seen and heard today is authentic.  I didnt get it off the Internet and I didnt read a book.  Everything that I talked about today I witnessed it with my own eyes, and I was there.  And again, thank you, Bob. \r\n[END OF RECORDING] \r\n \r\n \r\n \r\n       "},{"id":"gych_rogp_086","title":"Lonnie King, 28 September 2009.","collection_id":"gych_rogp","collection_title":"Reflections on Georgia Politics oral history collection, 2006-2010","dcterms_contributor":["Short, Bob, 1932-"],"dcterms_spatial":["United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018"],"dcterms_creator":["King, Lonnie","Short, Bob, 1932"],"dc_date":["2009-09-28"],"dcterms_description":["Lonnie King discusses growing up in Arlington, Georgia. He recalls experiencing racism from a young age and his parents' secret participation in NAACP activities. King reflects on his time in the Navy and the racism he experienced there. King recalls his friendship with Julian Bond and participating in the Greensboro sit-ins. He explains how the idea to write \"An Appeal for Human Rights\" came up and the circumstances surrounding its publication. King discusses the difficulty of recruiting and training nonviolent students. King explains how the Appeal took a different approach to civil rights than the NAACP and describes how the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was founded and organized. King explains his friendship with Martin Luther King, Jr., and SNCC's relationship with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King reflects on a situation where he and Martin Luther King, Jr. were arrested for protesting at Rich's Department Store. He describes how the Kennedys' involvement in the arrest influenced African American voting nationwide. King also describes several class action lawsuits that were significant to the Civil Rights Movement. King discusses the crippled education system in some areas heavily populated by African Americans and explains the importance of programs such as Teach for America. He also recalls the circumstances surrounding Freedom Rides. King recalls several problems experienced within SNCC and the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement.","Lonnie King was born in Arlington, Georgia. He was raised in Atlanta and served in the U.S. Navy. He left the Navy in 1957, returned to Atlanta, and earned his degree from Morehouse College. In 1960 he was present at the founding of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Shaw University. On March 9, 1960, King and SNCC published An Appeal for Human Rights as an advertisement in various Atlanta newspapers. A critical document of the Civil Rights Movement, the Appeal called for complete racial desegregation by peaceful and nonviolent means. King has taught at Georgia State University.","Finding aid available in repository.","Interviewed by Bob Short."],"dc_format":["video/mp4"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":["eng"],"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection","http://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/sclfind/view?docId=ead/RBRL220ROGP.xml"],"dcterms_subject":["National Association for the Advancement of Colored People","Southern Christian Leadership Conference","Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (U.S.)","Civil rights movements--Georgia","Civil rights demonstrations--Georgia","Freedom Rides, 1961","Education--Georgia","Civil rights demonstrations","Civil rights movements","Education","Georgia"],"dcterms_title":["Lonnie King, 28 September 2009."],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL220ROGP-086/ohms"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection, ROGP 086, Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, Georgia, 30602-1641."],"dlg_local_right":["Resources may be used under the guidelines described by the U.S. Copyright Office in Section 107, Title 17, United States Code (Fair use). Parties interested in production or commercial use of the resources should contact the Russell Library for a fee schedule."],"dcterms_medium":["oral histories (literary works)","interviews"],"dcterms_extent":["1 interview (93 min.) : sd., col."],"dlg_subject_personal":["King, Lonnie C., 1936-","Bond, Julian, 1940-2015","King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968"],"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":null},{"id":"gych_rogp_087","title":"Tom Houck, 28 September 2009.","collection_id":"gych_rogp","collection_title":"Reflections on Georgia Politics oral history collection, 2006-2010","dcterms_contributor":["Short, Bob, 1932-"],"dcterms_spatial":["United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018"],"dcterms_creator":["Houck, Thomas, 1947","Short, Bob, 1932"],"dc_date":["2009-09-28"],"dcterms_description":["Tom Houck discusses growing up in Boston before moving to Atlanta to work in the Civil Rights Movement and in television. He recalls meeting Martin Luther King, Jr., at the Selma to Montgomery March. Houck recalls his work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and explains the organization's purpose and people. He discusses answering Martin Luther King's mail for the SCLC, having dinner at the King house, and becoming the Kings' driver. Houck recalls several personal stories relating to the King family. Houck recalls Dr. Martin Luther King loving to read, swim, and play the lottery. He discusses Coretta King's involvement with the civil rights movement and mentions her fundraising work for the SCLC. Houck discusses demonstrations such as open housing demonstrations, the Poor People's campaign, and store picketing. He recalls that Dr. Martin Luther King, Sr., did not participate in politics but was friendly with Georgia governors. Houck explains how Maddox's election made many activists uncomfortable. He recalls being arrested 18 to 20 times in the course of his activism. Houck discusses Zell Miller's involvement with civil rights and his recollections of Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young. Thid interview takes place at Manuel's Tavern and Houck explains who Manuel Malouf was and the history of the tavern. Houck recalls Zell Miller's campaign for lieutenant governor and comments on his friendship with both candidates. He weighs in on whether the civil rights movement is dead. Houck describes how he got into talk radio and television as a political commentator and comments on the state of party politics in Georgia.","Thomas Houck was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 21, 1947. He dropped out of high school at age 15 and joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to work under Hosea Williams. In 1965, he met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at a meeting of the SCLC, and in 1966 he came to Atlanta and became the King family's personal driver. Later, he became an organizer for the SCLC, and was active in numerous demonstrations and marches. He filed a court case, Houck and Williams vs. Birmingham-Jefferson County, which led to the desegregation of Southern jails. Houck went on to help campaign for various Atlanta mayors and governors, including Maynard Jackson and Zell Miller, and started doing commentary for WGST Radio. He then went on to host various politically-oriented radio and television shows, retiring from full time broadcasting in 2001.","Finding aid available in repository.","Interviewed by Bob Short."],"dc_format":["video/mp4"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":["eng"],"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection","http://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/sclfind/view?docId=ead/RBRL220ROGP.xml"],"dcterms_subject":["Southern Christian Leadership Conference","Civil rights demonstrations--Georgia","Civil rights movements--Georgia","Civil rights--Georgia","Political campaigns--Georgia","Civil rights","Civil rights demonstrations","Civil rights movements","Political campaigns","Georgia"],"dcterms_title":["Tom Houck, 28 September 2009."],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL220ROGP-087/ohms"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":["Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection, ROGP 087, Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, Georgia, 30602-1641."],"dlg_local_right":["Resources may be used under the guidelines described by the U.S. Copyright Office in Section 107, Title 17, United States Code (Fair use). Parties interested in production or commercial use of the resources should contact the Russell Library for a fee schedule."],"dcterms_medium":["oral histories (literary works)","interviews"],"dcterms_extent":["1 interview (87 min.) : sd., col."],"dlg_subject_personal":["Houck, Thomas, 1947-","Jackson, Maynard, 1938-2003","Shipp, Bill, 1933-","King, Coretta Scott, 1927-2006","Miller, Zell, 1932-2018","King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968"],"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":null},{"id":"tws_oid16_33720","title":"Desiree Robinson, 2009","collection_id":"tws_oid16","collection_title":"Crossroads interviews","dcterms_contributor":null,"dcterms_spatial":["United States, Tennessee, Shelby County, Memphis, 35.14953, -90.04898"],"dcterms_creator":null,"dc_date":["2009-09-09"],"dcterms_description":null,"dc_format":["video/mp4","application/pdf","image/jpeg"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":null,"dcterms_publisher":["Memphis, Tenn. : Rhodes College"],"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":["https://vimeo.com/280264198"],"dcterms_subject":["Oral history","Interviews","Memphis (Tenn.)","Race relations","Neighborhoods"],"dcterms_title":["Desiree Robinson, 2009"],"dcterms_type":["MovingImage"],"dcterms_provenance":["Rhodes College"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://hdl.handle.net/10267/33720"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":null,"dlg_local_right":null,"dcterms_medium":["oral histories (literary works)"],"dcterms_extent":null,"dlg_subject_personal":null,"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":null},{"id":"gych_rogp_085","title":"Tyrone Brooks, 02 September 2009.","collection_id":"gych_rogp","collection_title":"Reflections on Georgia Politics oral history collection, 2006-2010","dcterms_contributor":["Short, Bob, 1932-"],"dcterms_spatial":["United States, 39.76, -98.5","United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018"],"dcterms_creator":["Brooks, Tyrone, 1945","Short, Bob, 1932"],"dc_date":["2009-09-02"],"dcterms_description":["Tyrone Brooks discusses his family and childhood in Warrenton, Georgia, and his early start in civil rights activism. He recalls meeting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and picketing segregated businesses. Brooks recalls his work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and friendship with Hosea Williams and Ralph David Abernathy. He comments on the Montgomery bus boycott, the inception of the SCLC, and Dr. King's teachings based on Ghandi's non-violent civil disobedience. Brooks discusses the SCLS's relationship with other civil rights organization such as the NAACP and the planned sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. Brooks discusses his friendship with Lonnie King, a student civil rights activist. He recalls being arrested over sixty times in the course of civil rights protests and his participation in the Poor People's Campaign. Brooks recalls fasting in a Washington, D.C., prison. Brooks recalls his experience with Bloody Sunday in Selma and its influence on politics in the South. He also discusses how the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act changed Southern politics. Brooks discusses the importance of SCLS's need to adapt to present-day issues such as education and economic development. Brooks explains how he became interested in the politics, his campaign for State House, and his time in legislature. He discusses his involvement with the changing of the state flag, judiciary reform, and the Moore's Ford Bridge lynching case.","Tyrone L. Brooks was born in Washington, Georgia, on October 10, 1945. He grew up in Warrenton, and at age fifteen volunteered with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Brooks attended Howard University, Atlanta University, and the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government. In 1967, he became a full-time staffer at SCLC. In 1980, he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives as a Democrat. He has sat on numerous committees, including Economic Development and Tourism, Governmental Affairs and Retirement, and Appropriations. 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