Tom Turnipseed was a ‘reformed racist’ after backing Wallace

Tom Turnipseed, who after working on the presidential campaign of the segregationist George C. Wallace in 1968 took a 180-degree turn and became a champion of civil rights, died March 6 at his home in Columbia, South Carolina. He was 83.

His wife, Judith Davis Turnipseed, said the cause was chronic respiratory failure.

In 1968 when Wallace, the former governor of Alabama, was the American Independent Party candidate for president, Turnipseed, a South Carolina lawyer, was the campaign’s executive director.

“I liked him,” Turnipseed explained in an interview for Tom Brokaw’s book “Boom! Voices of the Sixties” (2007). “He was standing up for the South.”

But on the campaign trail, Turnipseed’s thinking began to change, setting the stage for him to become, as he often described himself, a “reformed racist.”

“What turned me off was not Wallace, but the crowds,” he told The New York Times in 1978. Wallace, he saw, was tapping into something ugly, not just in the South but among white, blue-collar supporters in the North.

Turnipseed often mentioned one moment that made a stark impression. He was in Webster, Massachusetts, arranging to use a Polish American club’s building there for a campaign event. Club officials were such Wallace fans that they told him he could use it at no charge. Then, he said, the club manager asked him to affirm that, if elected, Wallace would line up all the black people the man used a racial epithet and shoot them.

“I realized the man was serious,” he said in an interview for the PBS series “Eyes on the Prize.”

“And,” he continued, “it kind of got to me.”

After the 1968 election, in which Wallace won 13% of the popular vote, Turnipseed established a law practice in Columbia, South Carolina, and worked on civil rights and other progressive causes. He was part of a coalition seeking utility rate reform in the early 1970s, an experience that he said further solidified his change of heart. Utilities were charging higher rates to low-volume residential users, many of whom were black.

“The rate hike hearings offered an opportunity to bridge the divide between poor blacks and whites,” Turnipseed told The Easley Progress of South Carolina in 2010. “Our successful coalition helped me realize how prejudiced I had been against black people.”

Turnipseed also served four years as a state senator, from 1976-80, and ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1980 and state attorney general in 1998.

In recent interviews, he was often asked to compare the tactics and emotions of Wallace’s 1968 campaign with those of President Donald Trump during his run for president in 2016.

“Both of them,” he told Buzzfeed in 2016, “use a lot of the same kind of scare tactics and fear.”

Turnipseed was born on Aug. 27, 1936, in Mobile, Alabama. His father, George, was an entomologist, and his mother, Ruby (Bell) Turnipseed, worked for the post office. A grandfather, he told Brokaw, was a wizard in the Ku Klux Klan.

“When he asked his father about his grandfather’s role in the Klan,” Brokaw wrote, “he was told, ‘There used to be a lot of good people in the Klan, and they did a lot of good.’ He was about 7 at the time, and he failed to ask exactly how his father defined ‘good.’”

Turnipseed often spoke of the false picture he grew up with, thanks to things like history books with pictures of slave children depicted as dancing and singing.

“Our concept of black folks back in those days was like Uncle Remus and Old Black Joe,” he said.

Wallace, he said, would play to the lie of an idyllic South.

“George Wallace would make people feel proud of their heritage,” he said. “And this heritage itself is one of terrible, terrible racism.”

Turnipseed, who served in the Army from 1955-57, went to Lees-mcrae College in North Carolina on a football scholarship, then transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, receiving an undergraduate degree there in 1962 and a law degree in 1964. While a the university he met Judy Davis; they married in 1963.

Turnipseed first came to Wallace’s attention when he was working in South Carolina on a campaign to gain tax-exempt status for all-white academies, where families could send their children to avoid court-ordered school integration.

“We never admitted the race factor,” he told Brokaw. “We claimed we were interested in a lower teacher-pupil ratio but the real reason was all racist.”

After his change of heart, Turnipseed was a member of the national board of the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action; was founding chairman of the Citizens’ Local Environmental Action Network, a South Carolina advocacy group that worked on issues like dealing with toxic waste; and had talk radio programs on various stations.

In the mid-1990s his firm was among those that helped the Macedonia Baptist Church of South Carolina sue the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and some of its leaders for burning its building in 1995. The suit resulted in a multimilliondollar award that, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, transformed the KKK chapter “from one of the most active Klan groups in the nation to a defunct organization.”

Race-based intolerance in the South wasn’t just a white-black issue to Turnipseed. In 1985, when President Ronald Reagan sought more aid for the right-wing Contras in Nicaragua, Turnipseed wrote an opinion article in The Times saying that Reagan was playing on long-standing Southern fears.

“I grew up in Alabama, Virginia and the Carolinas, and remember how us good ol’ boys enjoyed making racial slurs against Hispanics,” he wrote. “The Southern white power structure has vigorously supported most of the nation’s military interventions in Central America, and deep in the boardrooms and backrooms of the white Southern establishment lies a fear of dark-skinned hordes swarming across the Rio Grande and forming a political coalition with Jesse Jackson and his even darker-skinned soul brothers, together with various white scalawags.”

In addition to his wife, Turnipseed is survived by a son, Jeff; a daughter, Jeny Mathis; and four grandchildren.

In the 1990s Turnipseed was among those calling on South Carolina to stop flying the Confederate battle flag over the Capitol dome. (The flag was moved elsewhere in 2000.) In an interview in the 2004 book “Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys! South Carolina and the Confederate Flag” by K. Michael Prince, he explained why.

“It’s a lost cause,” he said of the flag and the war it represented. “It was the dumbest, biggest mistake in the history of this country, and we made it! We can’t own up to making the biggest mistake ever made. And we’re still making it.”