Lester Maddox

During his ownership of the Pickrick, Maddox, a Democrat, failed in two bids for mayor of Atlanta. In 1957, he lost to incumbent William B. Hartsfield, for whom the Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport is named. Hartsfield had pursued a more moderate approach to racial matters. In 1961, Maddox lost to Ivan Allen, Jr., with whom he split the white vote. Allen's ability to garner virtually all of the black vote provided his margin of victory.

In 1962, Maddox ran for Lieutenant Governor of Georgia as a Democrat, against Peter Zack Geer, a candidate with whom he shared segregationist and states' rights views. In an effort to differentiate themselves from each other, each attempted to paint the other as an extremist. Geer won the race, 55–45%, but Maddox gained attention across the state.

In the following years, Maddox proclaimed himself a "Society of Liberty" martyr intent on opposing an awesome central government which thwarted states' rights and gave special protection to minority groups. He was recognized by his rimless eyeglasses, dome-shaped forehead, bald head, and nervous energy. It was said of Maddox, "We have a populist revolution in its truest sense moving here. White people who work with their hands see in Lester Maddox a man of their own kind and are fighting to elect him [as governor]."[11] Time magazine termed Maddox a "strident racist"; Newsweek viewed him as a "backwoods demagogue out in the boondocks". According to one account, the former restaurateur's appeal transcended race to embrace a right-wing brand of "populism", picturing government, rather than big business, as the villain.[11]

When Maddox sought the Democratic nomination for governor in 1966, his principal primary opponent was former Governor Ellis Arnall. That election was still in the era of Democratic Party dominance in Georgia, when winning the Democratic primary was tantamount to election. There was no Republican primary at the time, but there were voters who identified with the Republican Party. Republicans cast ballots in the open Democratic primary election, and some chose the candidate they believed would most likely lose the general election to their nominee, Howard "Bo" Callaway. In the primary, Arnall won a plurality of the popular vote, but he was denied the required majority. Maddox, the second-place candidate, entered the runoff election against Arnall. State Senator Jimmy Carter, later the U.S. President, finished in a strong third place. Again, some Republicans voted in the Democratic primary runoff. Arnall barely campaigned in the runoff, and Maddox emerged victorious, 443,055 to 373,004.[12]

Maddox quipped that he had been nominated despite having "no money, no politicians, no television, no newspapers, no Martin Luther King, no Lyndon Johnson, and we made it!" He joked further that President Johnson had been "the best campaign manager I've got even if he did put me out of business", a reference to the closing of the Pickrick Restaurant to avoid desegregation. On winning the runoff, the Baptist Maddox, who neither smoked nor drank alcohol, described God as his "campaign manager".[13]

Stunned Arnall supporters announced a write-in candidacy for the general election, insisting that Georgians must have the option of a moderate Democrat beside the conservatives Maddox and Callaway. In his general election campaign, Maddox equated the Callaway Republicans to the American Civil War and the 1864 March to the Sea waged in Georgia by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman. He criticized the Callaway family textile mill, which he alleged had kept wages at $10 a week in Troup County. Maddox said that Callaway was unable to relate to farmers, small businessmen, and the unemployed: "He would be a lot better off if he knew about people as well as dollars." Maddox said that Callaway Gardens had hired off-duty police officers to maintain segregation at the tourist park in Pine Mountain, but a superior court judge verified that Callaway had an open admission policy at the facility.[14]

The first Republican governor elected in Georgia since the close of Reconstruction, Callaway won a plurality in the general election, and Maddox finished second. More than 52,000 wrote in Arnall's name.

Under the election rules then in effect, the state legislature was required to elect one of the two candidates with the highest number of votes, which meant that the lawmakers could not consider Arnall. With the legislature overwhelmingly dominated by Democrats, all of whom had been required to sign a Democratic loyalty oath, Maddox became governor.[15]

Maddox campaigned hard for states' rights and maintained a segregationist stance while in office. Upon the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., he denied the slain civil rights leader the honor of lying in state in the Georgia state capitol[16] after being told by undercover agents in the Atlanta Police Department that there was a planned storming of the state capitol by participants in the crowd of mourners. No evidence has ever emerged that this was anything more than a rumor; the undercover agents provided no evidence for it other than their statement.[17] As a precaution, Maddox stationed 160 state troopers to surround the capitol.[18] Regardless, the funeral procession, attended by tens of thousands; was entirely peaceful.[16] In 1968, Maddox endorsed the former Democrat George Wallace, the then pro-segregation American Independent Party candidate in the 1968 presidential election.[16]

When he was asked what might be done to improve the abysmal conditions in Georgia prisons, Maddox replied that what was really needed was a better class of prisoner.[19] Maddox's chief of staff was Zell Miller, who went on to serve two terms as governor in the 1990s and as Paul Coverdell's successor in the U.S. Senate.

Maddox received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Bob Jones University in 1969.[20]

In 1968, a small Atlanta repertory company produced a play entitled Red, White and Maddox. The play ridiculed Maddox and imagined him winning the 1972 U.S. presidential election, then starting a war with the Soviet Union. The show came to Broadway, and ran for forty-one performances at the Cort Theatre before closing.[21] Maddox was a supporter of the Vietnam War because of his anti-communist views, and he often told Georgia about the threats of communism and communist and socialist influences.[22]

In the 1966 campaign, the Savannah Morning News forecast that a Governor Maddox would "tell off the federal government forty times a day, but four years after his inauguration, he would have accomplished little else".[23] Once in office, however, Maddox accomplished the following:

• According to a letter written by Maddox in 1999, Maddox "left the Office of Governor with a favorable poll rating of above 84 percent and won the Office of Lieutenant Governor in a landslide vote of more than 73 percent, which remains the greatest percentage of votes for any governor or lieutenant governor against a Republican opponent in a Georgia general election".[5]
• Maddox was favorably influenced by Murray M. Silver, Esq., General Counsel of the Georgia Department of Labor, and Commissioner Sam Caldwell to hire blacks and to approve legislation affecting unemployment insurance of automobile workers within the state.[24]
• Maddox appointed more blacks to government positions than did all past Georgia governors combined.[25]
• Maddox integrated the Georgia State Patrol.[26]
• Maddox integrated the lines of farmer's markets throughout the state, and also urged state troopers to address blacks as Mr. or Ms. instead of derogatory terms like "nigger".[26]

Years after Maddox's gubernatorial term ended, Republican Benjamin B. Blackburn described Maddox as a "far better governor than his critics will ever admit". Then a former U.S. representative, Blackburn noted that no claim of corruption arose against Maddox, whose administration was characterized by economic development and the appointment of African Americans to state executive positions.[27]

Under the Georgia constitution of 1945, Maddox was prohibited from running for a second consecutive term. He therefore waged his second bid for lieutenant governor, the first having resulted in defeat to Peter Zack Geer in 1962. Although Maddox was elected as a Democratic candidate at the same time as Jimmy Carter's election as governor, the two were not running mates; in Georgia, particularly in that era of Democratic dominance, the winners of the primary elections went on to easy victories in the general elections without campaigning together as an official ticket or as running mates. Carter and Maddox found little common ground during their four years of service, often publicly feuding with each other.

Shortly after that election, Maddox appeared as a guest on The Dick Cavett Show on December 18, 1970. During a commercial break, fellow guest and former football player Jim Brown asked Maddox if he had "any trouble with the white bigots because of all the things you did for blacks". On the air, Cavett substituted the word "admirers" in place of "bigots", enraging Maddox. After demanding an apology from Cavett, and getting a carefully worded form of it, following further conversation, Maddox still walked off the show. Making light of the incident during a subsequent appearance by Maddox, Cavett walked off this time, and Maddox applauded.[28]

Maddox ran again for governor in 1974 but lost in the Democratic primary to George Busbee. Maddox called the campaign against Busbee "the worst thing I have ever been involved in". Busbee then handily defeated Republican Ronnie Thompson, the first Republican Mayor of Macon, who had hoped to have faced Maddox in the fall campaign. Thompson called Maddox "a counterfeit conservative" and challenged the outgoing lieutenant governor to a debate. Maddox's former chief of staff Zell Miller was successful in his own bid to succeed Maddox as lieutenant governor.

When Carter ran for President in 1976, Maddox ran against him as the nominee of Wallace's former American Independent Party, saying that his former rival was "the most dishonest man I ever met". The remark was similar to a statement once uttered by Barry Goldwater about U.S. President Richard Nixon. Maddox and running mate William Dyke, the former mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, received 170,274 votes in the election (less than 1% of the vote)[29] and no electoral votes.

With his political career seemingly over and with massive debts stemming from his 1974 gubernatorial bid, Maddox began a short-lived nightclub comedy career in 1977 with an African American musician, Bobby Lee Fears, who had worked as a busboy in his restaurant.[30][note 1] Fears had served time in prison for a drug offense before Maddox, as lieutenant governor, was able to assist him in obtaining a pardon. Calling themselves "The Governor and the Dishwasher," the duo performed comedy bits built around musical numbers with Maddox on harmonica and Fears on guitar.[31]

After Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down in 1983, with U.S. Representative Larry McDonald aboard, a special election was held to fill his seat in Congress. Lester Maddox stated his intention to run for the seat if McDonald's wife, Kathy McDonald, did not.[32] But Kathy McDonald decided to run, and Maddox stayed out of the race; however, she lost to Democrat George "Buddy" Darden.

Maddox had been using drugs from a Bahamian cancer clinic to treat his prostate cancer. In July 1985, he revealed that the clinic had been shut down by Bahamian officials after its drugs had been found to be contaminated with the AIDS virus.[33] Maddox underwent testing, and two months later announced that he was free of the virus.[34]

Maddox made one final unsuccessful bid for governor in 1990, then underwent heart surgery the following year. In the 1990 Democratic primary for governor, Maddox finished with about three percent of the vote.[35] He remained a visible figure in his home community of Cobb County for the remainder of his life. In 1992 and 1996, Maddox crossed party lines and endorsed unsuccessful populist Republican Pat Buchanan for the presidency. His last public speech was in Atlanta in 2001 at the annual national conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens. The CCC, of which Maddox was a charter member, is considered by the Southern Poverty Law Center[36] and the Anti-Defamation League to be a white supremacist group.

On June 25, 2003, after a fall while recuperating from intestinal surgery in an Atlanta hospice, Maddox died of complications from pneumonia and prostate cancer. His wife, Virginia, who had nursed him through five life-threatening illnesses, died in 1997, leaving Maddox brokenhearted.[37] The couple had four children: daughter and son in-law Linda (1938–2011) and Don Densmore; daughter and son in-law Virginia "Ginny" and George Carnes; son and daughter-in-law Lester Maddox, Jr., and Jean Maddox, and son and daughter-in-law, Larry and Anna Maddox. Lester and Virginia Maddox are both interred at Arlington Memorial Park in Sandy Springs in northern Fulton County, Georgia. Due to a successful business career, Maddox was relatively wealthy when he died.[37]