Lester Maddox Quotes
Why would we have different races if God meant us to be alike and associate with each other?
Maddox, Lester. Speaking Out: The Autobiography of Lester Garfield Maddox. Doubleday, 1975.
It is hard to tell what was the basis for Marti’s famous statement. We know now from modern DNA analysis and the human genome that we are all a single race but that was not known then. Many contemporaries thought he was speaking metaphorically, spiritually or religiously. In the view of Christ, there was only man. However, this was one of the first statements of this truth which at the time was not believed by almost everyone.
This was a bomb-shell statement at the time. Advocates for equality and desegregation usually tried to avoid this issue and Black leaders in particular were afraid of a backlash if they included this issue in the argument for equality. Du Bois did not run from the issue. His position was used by segregation leaders to show what “evils” would befall the nation if segregation was ended. See {586739}.
He was silent regarding the Indian men who were living with and married to white women. The double standard operated even to issues of blood purity. His view at the time is remarkably consonant with those of right wing fundamentalists at the time and today, the Nazi’s of Germany, and other non Indians.
The population was an amalgam of Spaniards, Englishmen and other Europeans, Blacks originally brought over as slaves from Africa, and indigenous people from many different tribes.
Lester Garfield Maddox Sr. was an American politician who served as the 75th Governor of the U.S. state of Georgia from 1967 to 1971. A populist Democrat, Maddox came to prominence as a staunch segregationist when he refused to serve Black customers in his Atlanta restaurant, the Pickrick, in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He later served as Lieutenant Governor during the period when Jimmy Carter was Governor.
