While North Carolina was adopting the Pearsall Plan and reelecting Governor Hodges in 1956, Alabama was adding Amendment 111 to its constitution, which exempted the state from the responsibility for educating its children. The amendment was described clearly as segregationist in newspaper articles at the time. “This is the intent and purpose of this amendment. (It) will prevent any child in Alabama being compelled by Alabama law to attend a mixed school,” said F. E. Lund, then the president of Alabama College at Montevallo, in an August 25, 1956, story in the Montgomery Advertiser. In the same story, former State Superintendent of Education W. J. Terry said passage of the amendment was needed so “we can make sure that Alabama’s public school system will continue to function in every county of our state on the segregated basis which has always been maintained.” The amendment was recommended by a legislative committee established in 1953 to study ways to maintain school segregation. In an August 26, 1956, article in the Advertiser, state Senator Albert Boutwell of Jefferson County said the amendment would allow the legislature to abolish a public school system to avoid a court order to integrate a school. Another article quoted then-Lieutenant Governor Guy Hardwick as saying the amendment gave the people of Alabama an opportunity to answer the U.S. Supreme Court and “the radicals of the north.”
North Carolina’s Pearsall plan finally approved by voters in 1956 was chameleon-hued. It provided comfort for segregationists and realists alike, but its very centrist sensibility put Hodges in no-man’s-land between hostile extremes—outspoken racists such as Beverly Lake and liberals such as Jonathan Daniels at the News and Observer. The most ungovernable rhetoric came from Lake, who fumed all the way through an integrated meeting on the Pearsall plan called by the governor, and seemed to regard the NAACP as a personal affront. A few days after the meeting, Lake told the Asheboro Lions Club: “We shall fight the NAACP county by county, city by city, and if need be school by school and classroom by classroom to preserve our public schools as long as possible, while organizing and establishing other methods of educating our children.”
It was the language of “Massive Resistance” preached by the courtly scion of the Virginia political machine, the gentleman farmer, newspaper publisher, and U. S. Senator Harry F. Byrd Jr. It was the bitter-end resistance that would be waged by the handsome young Alabama governor John Patterson, a year after North Carolina adopted its moderate Pearsall Plan. In his 1958 campaign, Patterson courted the Ku Klux Klan and won its formal endorsement in his victory over a then-statesmanlike George Wallace. On election night Wallace pledged to intimates that he would “never be out-nigguhed again,” and he wasn’t. Patterson, soon after his election, assembled constitutional lawyers who advised a campaign of delaying tactics—a chief element of which was to drive the NAACP underground.
Alabama and North Carolina presented a duel between reason and emotion: a thoughtfully articulated vision opposed to a clutch of inarticulate feelings—resentment, insecurity, and anger. Alabama’s constant harangues against the government of the United States and hysterical posturing in opposition to its laws would infect the state with a kind of psychosis. This verbal Niagara of fear seemed consciously designed to create mass dementia: A belief that our nation’s government was malevolent, infected by alien ideology bent on crushing long-held values, forcing obedience to unnatural associations and patterns of daily life. Molded by such behavior and speech, the minds of too many Alabamians were conditioned to believe they were doomed to a perpetual Pickett’s charge against a hated enemy, and forever fated to be crushed by it—a predestined defeat to be borne with sullen resignation.
North Carolina governors Luther Hodges and Terry Sanford were bookends of statesmanship on either side of George Wallace’s energetic manipulation of popular anxiety and indignation. The chronology was: 1954—Brown v. Board; 1956—Pearsall Plan, Alabama’s Segregation Amendment 111, and Hodges reelected; 1958—Patterson wins with Klan support and tries to banish the NAACP; 1960—Sanford beats educated racist Lake; 1962—Wallace wages defiant segregationist campaign and wins. We are left to wonder whether Patterson and Wallace could have led against the pull of popular agitation and followed the path of prudence and progress exemplified by Carolina leaders. At any rate, a self-confident Governor Hodges, two years after Brown, presented the Pearsall Plan to North Carolina voters. It was approved by 80 percent and carried all one hundred counties. Hodges that year won the Democratic nomination (tantamount to election in those days) with more than 400,000 votes to his closest rival’s 29,000. In the fall of 1957, schools in Charlotte, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem were quietly, voluntarily integrated.
In February of 1957, Governor Hodges gave a budget speech to the General Assembly unlike any heard by the Alabama Legislature in my lifetime. His vision was:
I see a land of thriving industry in well-planned small towns and medium-sized cities, without the slum conditions, the polluted air, and the unmanageable congestion of the typical American industrial center. This is a land where all workers are landowners and homeowners, rather than modern-day cliff dwellers, cramped in gloomy rented flats and furnished rooms; a land with prospering farms no longer dependent on a one-or-two-crop market. I see in every community well constructed, modernly equipped and modernly run schools, supported by enthusiastic people who demand nothing less than the best for all children. This is a land where all citizens have sufficient economic opportunity and education to enjoy the best in life. And in this land, looking out over all, there are towers of colleges and universities—for it is an enlightened land—and the spires of many churches—for it is a moral land.
This is the vision, the North Carolina dream. It is not an unattainable thing. We have a great heritage of courage and faith and hard work. We have the people and the resources to turn this dream into reality. You and I, in the years remaining to us, can only lead our state a little way, but if we do that, and hand over to those who come after us the courage and faith which were given us, then, God willing, this vision of North Carolina will become her destiny.
Alabama saw no similarly inspiring vision. It saw a young governor conditioned by the culture in which he was raised, Patterson, wrestling with the NAACP, and the needy, crafty little wizard, George Wallace, booming defiance while behind the screen he was on his knees before a federal judge. When ordered to turn over voting records to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in 1959, the public saw and heard stage-managed defiance, but as Dan Carter recounts in his biography of Wallace, under the cover of darkness late at night Wallace slunk into Judge Frank Johnson’s home. Mrs. Johnson, awakened by the doorbell, heard Wallace plead, “Judge, my ass is in a crack. I need some help.”
The wizard’s machine worked wonders. The fighting little judge secretly arranged to surrender the voting records while dominating the headlines with a blazing anti-government grand jury statement that Wallace crafted and personally typed. The wizard won the 1962 governor’s race and turned the state into his own Land of Oz. It started with an inaugural address in which he said the federal government encourages the “false doctrine of communistic amalgamation” and “encourages everything degenerate and base.” The most memorable rhetorical flourish, of course, was: “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say: Segregation today, Segregation tomorrow . . . Segregation forever!”
The gauntlet thrown by Wallace got a lot of wear—most famously when he threw it at the feet of U.S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach at the University of Alabama to prevent enrollment of a young black woman and man, Vivian Malone and James Hood. That was another Wallace-produced classic: Defiant special effects, which masked the planned and scripted end—surrender. And the medieval glove he flung “at the feet of tyranny” was pretty beat up by thousands of school buses running over it en route to integrated schools. There was no magic in it, only an invitation to a preordained defeat—as tragic as Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg and stupid as the charge of the Light Brigade into the Russian artillery in the Crimea. Nothing was left after Wallace’s rhetorical fireworks but the ash of pointless defiance.
Meanwhile dull, old, commonsensical North Carolina was methodically building the fabulous fountain in the Research Triangle that in time would spew high-salaried jobs by the thousands, and raise towers of nationally ranked research universities. The benefits would prove larger than economic development. It