In Love with Defeat. H. Brandt Ayers
the state an infusion of ideas and vision that raised North Carolina business, education and government leadership to a new, more global plateau.
On the surface, the Lake-Sanford campaign did not seem to threaten the ancient regime of segregation into which every Southerner living at the time had been born. Both men spoke in favor of segregation, but Lake opposed the Pearsall Plan and was race-obsessed, threatening “to drive the NAACP from North Carolina.” Sanford assured voters he, too, was against integration but defined Lake as reckless, someone who would let the barbarians through the gates. In a crucial television interview during the runoff, Sanford faced the WRAL cameras and said of Lake: “He is injecting a false issue on integration and it is false because I am, and he knows I am, opposed to integration. The difference is that I know how to handle it, and he doesn’t . . . Professor Lake yells about mixing of the races, about NAACP domination, and is appealing to blind prejudice for the pure and simple purpose of getting himself a few votes.” Then Sanford drew the bright line between recklessness and reason. “Professor Lake has put us in a perilous, dangerous position. His talk is not going to stop anything but his reckless words could start something we can’t stop . . . And though we don’t like it, the Supreme Court has the last word. He is inviting the Supreme Court to step into North Carolina.”
In the anxious climate of the time, Sanford could not allow himself to say what was on his mind—and in his heart. He knew that segregation was finished and believed it was right that it should be. That would become clear in yet another juxtaposition of crazy Alabama and calm Carolina. Four days after Wallace’s inaugural, Governor Sanford announced his statewide Good Neighbor Councils to create equal opportunity for black citizens. He told the audience at Chapel Hill’s Carolina Inn: “We cannot rely on law alone because much depends upon each individual’s sense of fair play . . . We can do this. We should do this. We will do it because it is honest and fair for us to give all men and women their best chance in life.” Alabamians aren’t any different from North Carolinians—our blood is coded with the same wild Highland Scotch, rebellious Irish and tribal African genes. We might have responded to a sensible, local-choice integration plan. Our legislators surely would have thrilled to visions such as those of Hodges and Sanford. We didn’t, because shortsighted, hotheaded leaders manipulated us. Must it be said that we got the leaders we deserve? Surely not.
The significance of those events was not clear to the young, expatriate Alabama reporter, but everything about Sanford just sounded and felt right. In later years, I thought of him as a model. In fact, the night before he died I spoke to the Alabama Political Science Association on a “Tale of Two States” in which Terry shone as a statesman. On learning of his death, I was struck with an eerie connection my family had with North Carolina statesmen. Dad had been in the audience in Birmingham when Governor Aycock began his speech, “I have always spoken of education . . .” A shocked audience then saw him slump to the floor, having just uttered his own epitaph.
Though North Carolina’s democratic oligarchy has produced a line of solid and sensible governors, not all of its public men belonged in a statuary hall of statesmanship. Neither has its story been one of perpetual placidity, undisturbed by the winds of controversy. The state had suffered strikes, labor upheavals of violence by unions and the National Guard. A wave of passive resistance—deeply disturbing to its white citizens—rippled through the state in February of 1960, the lunch counter sit-ins by black students that began in Greensboro and moved to Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Durham, and Fayetteville, reaching Raleigh on Wednesday, February 10. The neatly dressed, quiet black students first sat in at the downtown Woolworth’s lunch counter, which promptly closed as did counters at the other stores visited by the student demonstrators. They were heckled by white teenagers, but there was no real violence. The most violent act was by a red-faced man who raked his lighted cigar across a young woman’s sweater. He then stared at her, arms folded, unaware that embers had landed in the crook of his arm. A thin stream of smoke curled from his burning sleeve. The sit-ins worried moderates in the Sanford camp, fearing that the campaign would inflame racial feelings and help Lake.
North Carolinians were not immune to racial appeals. The revered former president of UNC, Frank Porter Graham, had been defeated in a U.S. Senate campaign by A. Willis Smith, whose campaign exploited racial prejudice, including doctored photographs of Mrs. Graham dancing with a black man. Young Jesse Helms got his start in Tarheel politics by writing advertisements for the Smith campaign and has gone on to earn a place in the pantheon of bigotry. In a phrase credited to Helms, the initials UNC, which Dr. Graham had raised to the first rank of state universities, stood for the “University of Negroes and Communists.” A candidate for mayor of Durham, later chancellor of UNC and acting president of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Paul Hardin, claimed Helms referred to him on the air as “a nigger-loving Communist sympathizer.” (No tapes exist to validate the claim.) Young Jesse, who had the brassy bigotry of a John Birch believer, ripened into a courtly caricature of old-fashioned manners and prejudices.
What made Helms so hard to read or predict is that he was an anachronism: cussedly, proudly out of sync with his times—a man stranded by the turbulent river of history on the other side of the canyon—left behind in an Old South tradition with many charms and a great evil. He could be a character out of the 1970s TV series, The Waltons, about a large, likable white rural Virginia family during the Depression. He is Grandpa Walton with courtly concern for the sensitivities of the little old ladies of the UDC.
He appealed to Tar Heels who yearn for the simple values of Walton’s Mountain—life as it is remembered rather than the cruelties of life as it was lived in the Depression South. His appeal to the prejudices of his home state was mellow, Old South condescension: One must be polite to the “coloreds,” but they should know their place and station in life. Helms kept winning because he was only a faded, brown, daguerreotype demagogue—not dangerous as Wallace was. He connected with voters because he honestly believed that the vanished civilization he represented was superior to anything and everything that has happened from the 1950s forward. His likeness will not be found in the pantheon of statesmen, but he deserves a place in the museum of national antiquities.
Now, reviewing those years from the distance of forty-plus years, I am of course amused at my own innocent astigmatism, I shake my head in wonder that a state which could produce Luther Hodges and Terry Sanford also regularly elected Jesse Helms (though Tarheels had the good sense to ship him off to the attic of Washington like a goofy uncle). But more importantly, I am struck by the significance of Sanford’s and Hodges’s leadership. Terry was a model of effective and moral governance, and later an admired friend. He elevated what Hodges saw as industrial trade schools into a system of comprehensive community colleges, wedding academics and skills for the modern workforce. It was his Commission on Education Beyond the High School that laid out a sixteen-college higher education system finally implemented by his friend, Governor Bob Scott. “It was a monumental piece of work,” former UNC President Bill Friday said in a letter to me, “ . . . Terry was really the architect and visionary when it came to reorganizing public higher education.” Hodges had the advantage of being in office for most of two terms in a then one-term state. On balance, it is fair to say that he would have to rank a nose ahead of Sanford in the state’s history. Add up his accomplishments: the Pearsall Plan that saved public schools and broke the back of the race issue in the state, the beginnings of a community college system—and the Midas touch of the Research Triangle Park. A half-century of Alabama governors could claim only one accomplishment of similar significance, an overbuilt, unplanned and disoriented trade school and junior college system.
In terms of personal and professional moment, my one noteworthy journalistic achievement was revealing the plight of migrant labor in North Carolina in the wake of Edward R. Murrow’s “Harvest of Shame” broadcast on CBS. However, there were moments in the 1960 campaign with multi-tiered significance. The first televised presidential debates affected the work of local reporters, and gave me a chance for a memorable encounter with the plainspoken former President Harry Truman. During the third debate Vice President Nixon took advantage of a question to criticize Truman’s language during the campaign. Senator Kennedy’s response was: “I really don’t think anything I could say to President Truman that is going to cause him at the age of seventy-six to change his particular speaking manner. Perhaps Mrs. Truman can, but I don’t think I can.” The next