Savannah Girl Scouts take aim at legacy of segregationist

SAVANNAH, Ga. — The bridge that carries Highway 17 into Savannah is hard to miss: Its H-shaped towers are among the tallest structures for miles. But many people in the city would like never to lay eyes again on the green and white signs that say the span honors the segregationist former Gov. Eugene Talmadge.

Residents of Savannah have been trying for decades to get the state to rename it, only to see their efforts sputter and die in the backrooms and boardrooms of Atlanta, the capital.

But this year is different, and state lawmakers could vote in the coming weeks to give the bridge a less controversial name.

And it all may be because of two new factors in the equation: a bit of legal detective work and the Girl Scouts, hundreds of whom are planning to descend on the Capitol this week to argue that the bridge should celebrate Juliette Gordon Low, the Savannah native who founded their organization.

The Scouts will hold a milkand-cookies reception at the Capitol on Tuesday, when Ron Stephens, a Republican state representative from Savannah, is expected to introduce a proposal to name the bridge for Low.

In a region known for painful battles over monuments to controversial historical figures, even the persuasive power of Tagalongs and Thin Mints might not win the day, though, except for a recently uncovered quirk of history.

It seems that lawyers have found no proof in state records that the formalities of naming the bridge were ever completed. So, technically, it may not have been the Eugene Talmadge Memorial Bridge in the first place.

Talmadge’s white supremacist views and staunch segregationism make for a troubling legacy. For example, he vowed to purge the state university system of any employee who supported “Negroes in the same schools with white folks in Georgia,” a stand that helped cost the state’s white colleges their accreditation.

He staged an electoral comeback with a pledge to restore allwhite primary elections. He used martial law to wage political turf battles, and he was implicated in corruption.

None of that stopped the state from naming a bridge over the Savannah River for Talmadge, a Democrat, in the 1950s, when his son Herman Talmadge was governor.

By the 1980s, that cantilevertruss bridge was posing problems for large new container ships headed for the Port of Savannah.

So the state replaced it in 1991 with the cable-stayed bridge that appears in so many postcards and snapshots today — and kept on using the Talmadge name, perhaps out of no more than habit.