George Romney pushed an aggressive civil rights agenda
::snip::ANN ARBOR, Mich. - In 1963, an explosive year in the quest for civil rights, George Romney appeared unannounced in the mostly white suburb of Grosse Pointe and marched to the front of an anti-segregation demonstration to stand beside black leaders. Letters from startled constituents poured into the office of the first-term Michigan governor, whose son Mitt was then 16. Supporters who had helped him win his narrow victory the previous November said his actions made him "a double-crosser" and a "Judas to the people that voted for you." Their diatribes were sprinkled with warnings that they would work against him: "You are a ’dead duck’ for 1964," one detractor typed above a newspaper photograph of a shirt-sleeved Romney walking shoulder to shoulder with civil rights activists. The elder Romney pressed ahead with an aggressive civil rights agenda that ultimately put him at odds with the leaders of his party. He refused to back Barry Goldwater as the 1964 Republican presidential nominee because, he told Goldwater in a letter, he was alarmed by indications that Goldwater’s strategists "proposed to make an all-out push for the Southern white segregationist vote" and "exploit the so-called ’white backlash’ in the North." George Romney began pushing reforms to end discrimination toward minorities in housing soon after taking office in 1963 - work that would lead to his highly controversial effort to integrate the nation’s white suburbs as President Richard Nixon’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development. He launched his own 1968 presidential run after a 19-day tour of the ghettos of 17 cities, turning a spotlight on the decay and overcrowding that had contributed to riots in Detroit and elsewhere.
What about all the many Romney's who were not running for President?