Lester Maddox, Segregationist and Georgia Governor, Dies at 87
Slight of stature, Mr. Maddox was direct and outspoken in the defense of his convictions, which he wrapped in a states' rights banner. These included the view that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites, that integration was a Communist plot, that segregation was somewhere justified in Scripture and that a federal mandate to integrate schools was was "ungodly, un-Christian and un-American."
The Times reported that Martin Luther King, Jr. said he was ashamed to be from Georgia when Maddox was elected governor. Now that Maddox is dead, let us hope that the past which he represented can be laid to rest also.