Lester Maddox 1916-2003

Lester Maddox who became Governor of Georgia on a segregationist platform in 1966 died yesterday. Here is his main claim to fame (or rather infamy):

Mr. Maddox first came to national attention in 1964, after he violated the newly signed federal Civil Rights Act by refusing to serve three black Georgia Tech students at his Pickrick Restaurant. The Pickrick was noted for the quality of its fried chicken and for its reasonable prices, but Mr. Maddox was determined that no black should experience the ambience that he had reserved exclusively for whites.

When the three black men tried to buy some of his chicken in July 1964, Mr. Maddox waved a pistol at them and said: “You no good dirty devils! You dirty Communists!”

[…]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 “ungodly, un-Christian and un-American.”