The bottom line was that Lester wanted to keep his Pickrick restaurant white as the driven snow.The ax handle incident happened the weekend of the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and attracted national notoriety.
Maddox contended that it wasn't about racism but about the Feds forcing a private business owner to knuckle under to their illegal mandates.
I contend that it was STILL about racism.
But maybe I am just a cynical kind of guy!
I don't think it was racism, as that word is correctly defined. Maddox never believed that black people were inferior to white people, or that they should be mistreated or exterminated. However, he was a segregationist, who believed that the races were happier living apart. Obviously that view has been discredited by modern received wisdom, but remember that he was born in 1915 and that was what just about everybody believed then.
If he had truly been a racist, I don't think he would have had as many black friends as he did. That word is thrown around way too freely nowadays, and misuse of the word makes it hard to distinguish between otherwise decent people who happen to disagree on racial policy issues, and the REAL racists. If you've ever met a real one, you'd never call Maddox one. He's too much of a gentleman.