A year of political change

Modern Georgia was born when a group of maverick lawmakers won election to the state Senate during the tumultuous years of the civil rights era. Staff writer Bill Torpy narrates their fitful journey.

2013-03-17 - By Bill Torpy btorpy@ajc.com

Jimmy Carter would become the most famous of Georgia’s new senators from 1963. But that year, he was just one in a group of maverick lawmakers.

eroy R. Johnson took a breath and strode into the chamber of the Georgia Senate. The tall, thin bespectacled man knew all eyes were on him, so he had to project an aura of quiet, dignified confidence.

Before walking in, he noted the “colored” and “white” bathrooms. Glancing up from his aisle seat, he saw his wife and 12-year-old son sitting in the gallery, where a year earlier state troopers stood guard, ready to evict black citizens bold enough to demand entry.

When Johnson, Georgia’s first black legislator in more than 50 years (90 in the Senate), won his election two months earlier, he walked into black-owned diners and received standing ovations. But on this day, Jan. 14, 1963, there were no cheers or, as he feared, outright hostility. Mostly, it was a silent indifference.

It was a time of seismic change and stubborn resistance in the South. The day before, a black professor and his wife visiting from South Africa had been turned away from worshipping at St. Mark Methodist Church in Atlanta. And controversy was simmering in Atlanta over a barricade the city built on Peyton Road to keep blacks out of the adjoining white neighborhood.

The air was filled with excitement and dread. Leading up to opening day of the session, terms like “new era” and “new-style Senate” appeared frequently in newspapers, referring not only to Johnson’s presence in the Legislature but a recently reapportioned Senate that would change Georgia politics to its core. CBS News sent a film crew to witness the transformation.

Johnson, a 34-year-old lawyer and former schoolteacher, had run a “devastatingly methodical” campaign to win his seat, Ebony magazine noted. As a college student, he decided that paying admission to sit in the “colored”

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balcony at theaters was admitting that white people were better than him, so he stopped doing it. As a senator, he saw himself as an emissary to acquaint white elected officials with an unfamiliar perspective — a black man as their equal.

“Many have never had contact with Negroes aside from janitors and maids,” Johnson told a reporter that day.

But the night before the session, young legislators had been issued a warning. “The world press will be there taking pictures,” a veteran politician told the newcomers. “Politically, you better not have your picture taken with Leroy Johnson.”

So largely, Johnson spent the day alone.

2Shift of power

The legislative session that opened in 1963 came two years before federal passage of the Voting Rights Act, which would finally eliminate barriers such as literacy tests and poll taxes designed to deter blacks from registering to vote. The act also would establish the principle of “preclearance,” which charged the U.S. Department of Justice with approving changes to voting regulations in Georgia and eight other mostly Southern states. Currently, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering overturning that provision.

In 1963, the stage was set for racial conflict. Violent, often bloody confrontations between civil rights demonstrators and police were erupting across the South, most notably in neighboring Alabama where news reports broadcast images of baton-wielding police bludgeoning defenseless protesters.

Yet in Georgia, the courts upended the political system that had allowed rigid segregationism to flourish and gave voters the chance to reset the dynamic in the Legislature.

Before 1963, Georgia’s governmental structure was ruled by the county unit system, a scheme that inordinately gave rural regions political sway over Atlanta.

The county unit system was set up as sort of an electoral college that rigged statewide races in favor of rural counties. That system apportioned state legislators to represent acres, not people, giving rural areas a huge advantage. For instance, before the system was thrown out, the 8th Senate district, near Tifton, which had three sparsely populated counties totalling 22,000 residents, had one senator. Fulton County, with 560,000 resi- Leroy R. Johnson, at his Atlanta law office, was the first black state senator in Georgia in 90 years. dents, also had just one senator.

A number of judicial rulings in 1962 doomed the county unit system. And the U.S. Supreme Court, in a landmark decision written as the 1963 Senate was in session, upheld those decisions, ultimately ruling the system unconstitutional and coining the phrase “one person-one vote.”

The courts ordered that Senate districts be reapportioned to reflect populations, a move that afforded cities and minorities more power.

In 1963, Johnson was one of seven senators representing Fulton County.

Commenting on the historic shift of power, Eugene Patterson, the Atlanta Constitution’s crusading editor, penned a column headlined: “A Great South is Arriving.”

“Whatever happened to that way of life which the Ku Klux Klan politicians so recently were desecrating with their embrace? It died within 24 hours when the courts cut the county unit tap root,” Patterson wrote.

He opined that education and progressive politics would open Atlanta and the state to research facilities, high-wage industry and new investment.

“As America grows, the South will more than match her,” an optimistic Patterson wrote.

Johnson was different from his fellow senators because of his race. But, in another way, he fit right in. By one account, all but five of the 54 senators were freshmen, having won races in court-ordered elections the previous fall. Those senators — especially the new crop of young, ambitious men — were more representative of Georgia’s demographics than ever before and were embarking on a journey that would forge the state’s future.

3Political mavericks

Walking into the chamber on that opening day 50 years ago was a legislative body composed of city dwellers, country boys who bucked the system, a sprinkling of liberals and even a couple Republicans.

Zell Miller was a secondterm senator. The 30-yearold ex-Marine sergeant with a mountain twang wore a flattop haircut and horn rim glasses, making him appear like the college professor he was.

He was one of the few senators with experience, which instantly made him an adviser to the freshmen. It was common knowledge at the Capitol that Miller, who didn’t mind picking fights with Atlanta politicians to win points back home, was an ambitious fellow going somewhere.

Bobby Rowan, at 27 the youngest senator in the chamber, was one of nine children born to a farmer in the south Georgia town of Enigma. All went to college. All were progressive for their time.

Since childhood, Rowan worked alongside blacks on his father’s farm. His father invited them to lunch inside his home, an activity that raised eyebrows in rural Berrien County, southeast of Tifton.

Rowan, unlike many of his rural contemporaries, didn’t rue the end of the county unit system. The way he saw it, the change allowed a hard-working guy without political connections a fighting shot in politics.

James Wesberry, a 28-yearold Atlanta accountant, had earned a reputation — and enemies — as part of a task force digging up corruption across Georgia.

A blunt-speaking son of a well-known minister, he was the forerunner of an archetype still held in low-esteem by many colleagues at the Capitol: the trouble-making Atlanta liberal. Wesberry earned the enmity of rural Georgia’s power brokers by telling an audience, “We’ll never get good government in Georgia until we put 100 House mem- bers back behind the plow.”

But perhaps the most famous incoming freshman was Jimmy Carter, an engineer, peanut farmer and fertilizer business owner from Plains.

Carter, 38, realized the court-ordered reapportionment gave him a shot at squeezing past the county bosses and into the Senate. Chairman of the Sumter County school board, Carter was politically motivated by concerns that segregationists would close public schools if courts ordered them integrated.

He actually lost the election, but he complained loudly about election fraud. He said ballots in Quitman County were cast in a cardboard box, and the county boss hovered nearby encouraging support for Carter’s opponent. All told, 333 votes were cast, but 420 ballots were found in the box.

The Atlanta Journal covered the story and discovered the dead and imprisoned often voted in Quitman. Carter went to court, the cardboard box ballots were thrown out and Carter was declared the winner. Nevertheless, he was worried walking into the Senate chambers, wondering whether he would be sworn in or not. The peanut farmer broke into his familiar smile when the lieutenant governor asked him to raise his hand to be sworn in.

Carter threw himself into his new role. Accustomed to

farmers’ hours, he walked to the Capitol every day at 7 a.m. to read each bill he would vote on that day, and he switched hotels to get away from his boisterous contemporaries. Carter’s work ethic endeared himself to many, but others considered him an interloper who used the courts to steal the election.

The face of all this change was the incoming governor, 37-year-old Carl Sanders, a handsome, urbane former state senator from Augusta. The previous year, the Kennedyesque candidate mounted a seemingly quixotic challenge to Marvin Griffin, a former governor and hard-nosed segregationist known for his rural ties and corrupt administration.

Sanders hammered away at corruption but tip-toed around race. A practical man, Sanders had to get elected, so the candidate summed up his stance on the era’s overriding issue: “I’m a segregationist but not a damn fool.”

Sanders won, getting nearly 60 percent of the vote, and he saw the opportunity to modernize the state. He built numerous new schools, hired teachers and appointed the first woman to head a major state department, the welfare bureau.

More so, he was determined to defuse the powder keg of court-ordered integration. Not only was it the right thing to do, it was good for business.

Street fighting simply chased away potential businesses and industries.

“This is a new Georgia. This is a new day, a new era,” Sanders told the cheering throngs shivering outside the Capitol on inauguration day. Then he slipped in a bit of Lincoln. “I hold malice towards none, and I hope no one holds malice towards me.”

Johnson, smoking a pipe and looking professorial, sat in the front row taking in the address.

And Lester Maddox, infamous at the time for running failed political campaigns and chasing black diners from his restaurant, hired an airplane to fly over the ceremony with a banner.

“Eat segregated,” it sneered.

Persistence pays off

4In the session’s early days, Johnson often spent his time in isolation. He would enter the cafeteria, sit down and quickly clear out a table or even a section.

In the corridors, he’d see a colleague and say, “Hello, senator.”

“Ugh,” was often the response.

At a legislative luncheon early in the session, Rowan

“Many have never had contact with Negroes aside from janitors and maids.”

Leroy R. Johnson Comment made to a reporter during his first day in the Senate.

watched Johnson sitting off to the back eating by himself until fellow Atlantan Wesberry sat down to join him.

A month into the session, Johnson reflected on his journey to a reporter. “It’s a lonely road,” he said.

Expectations, pressures and demands came from all sides. The newspaper noted that Johnson looked troubled as he “walked a lonely wire,” trying to not look like a rabble-rouser to white senators or subservient to black supporters.

At the Capitol, Johnson got the signs taken off the “colored” and “white” bathrooms and integrated the cafeteria and drivers’ license lines, and he did it not by calling the press or staging a sit-in. He did it by discreetly calling the young governor who resisted bad publicity.

He also won over unwelcoming legislators with a lowkey persistence and a touch of humor.

“We didn’t know to say ‘Negro’ back then,” Carter recalled. He said Johnson would point to his his knee. “We’d say ‘knee’ and then he’d add ‘grow.’ “

As the session progressed, Johnson became a national figure. Ebony magazine called him “a dramatic symbol of the rebirth of the Negro as a political force in the South.”

He spoke at colleges and churches, encouraging young, educated blacks to “Go South, young man,” where there was opportunity, and they were needed for the cause.

But senators are measured by passing legislation, not making speeches and the lonely Atlanta politician hadn’t done much of the former.

Ultimately, it was practicality that won the day for Johnson. One day, late in the session, Johnson walked into a Senate committee meeting late. Two bills were stuck in the committee, each a vote short of being sent to the Senate floor.

When he walked in, senators who had never spoken to him jumped up and asked for his vote.

Earlier, Johnson had introduced two bills that had been, in his words, “sent to the cemetery room.” So he struck a deal. If his two bills were res- urrected and sent to the Senate floor, he would support their bills.

The deal was made with a handshake. He left the meeting “Instead of the black senator, Leroy Johnson, who they hadn’t spoken to all session, they saw a vote walking into the room,” said Johnson last month, recalling that day. “I got the recognition of being a senator rather than being a black man who had been elected to the Senate.”

Johnson, elderly now and seated in his office surrounded by photos of him with presidents, leaned back while reliving that day and smiled. It was the moment he knew he had arrived. And, he added, so had Georgia.