Which reminds me of another pair of people that need to be distinguished - Billy McKinney and Hosea Williams. McKinney is a mean racist - lots of folks were afraid of him when he was in power, but nobody ever liked him much (he may be the only Georgia legislator ever to pull out a knife and threaten to cut another representative in the well of the House!) The Rev. Hosea, on the other hand, was a good man at heart and everybody always liked him no matter how outrageous he was. His verbal fireworks are the mirror image of Maddox's - he loved to rabble rouse and raise hell, but when it came right down to it he always had a helping hand for everybody, white or black. He fed the hungry at his Thanksgiving dinner for years, he would literally give his last dollar to a panhandler. Sadly, he had a drinking problem that sometimes got the better of him, but I would always have a welcome and a kind word for the Reverend. I wouldn't cross the street to see McKinney or give him the time of day.
It's just so easy to write off everybody who was raised in the South in the early part of the 20th century as "evil racists" unless they come clean at a show trial after "re-education" and renounce their lives. It's especially easy if you don't know them, and can just condemn them out of hand as cardboard caricatures, easy targets of cheap hate. It's harder to make distinctions, but it is just.
There was much good in Maddox, despite his wrong-headed views, and people who actually met him and talked with him - white and black - realized that his views were entirely theoretical and when it came to practical reality he had a helping hand for everybody. None of the racial horrors predicted by Atlanta liberals happened during his administration - in fact he appointed the first black to statewide office, and appointed more blacks than any of the supposedly liberal governors before him had ever managed to do.
There is an old saying:
In the North, they love the race and hate the individual.
In the South they hate the race and love the individual.
My father (born in 1919) was a lot like Lester.
Back in the late Sixties, when I was the long-haired liberal Meathead to his Archie Bunker, I would ask him, "What about Charlie Williams?"....and he'd say, "Well he's different". "What about Larry Hyde, and Marcus Wilson, and Leslie Stokes?"....."Well they're different too."
Heck.... ALL the black folks he knew were different. :-)
And its a fact....it was the Stokley Carmichaels and H. Rap Browns and the Huey Newtons that he was really talking about.
You see it today here on FR.
"I'm not a racist...I love Thomas Sowell and Condi Rice....it's Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson I can't stand.
Does that make me a racist?"
To the liberal media.....it does!
(Just ask Lester)