Nation: Out of the Smoke House

Spot radio commercials proclaimed that a vote against Marvin Griffin was a vote for Negroes next door and on the playing fields of Georgia. Ex-Governor Griffin, running for a return trip to Atlanta, assured an audience that there was only one way to handle integrationist “agitators.” Said he: “There ain’t but one thing to do and that is to cut down a blackjack sapling and brain ’em and nip ’em in the bud.” Griffin hastily added that he didn’t mean to be taken literally—but obviously, in some circles, he was. For as Griffin let out all the segregationist stops in the closing days of one of Georgia’s bitterest, dirtiest Democratic primary campaigns, racial violence popped out like the pox: night riders prowled the state, there were shotgun incidents in Dallas, Leesburg and Dawson, and two Negro churches were burned to the ground.

But for Griffin, it was all to no avail. Georgians last week turned down his candidacy by a margin that must have made the state’s Ku-Kluxers turn as white as their sheets. The winner, by a vote of 462,065 to 305.777, and next Governor of Georgia, was State Senator Carl Sanders, 37.

A personable, good-looking fellow. Sanders had been described as too “suave”‘ for Georgia’s political tastes. But in running against Griffin, he took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, loosened his tie and invaded the cotton lands (his wife Betty was once Georgia’s “First Maid of Cotton”). He promised to try “to maintain Georgia’s traditional separation.” But he also pledged that “violence in any form will not be tolerated.”

More than anything else, Sanders struck at the corruption in state government that had existed in Griffin’s previous term (TIME, Aug. 24). Cried he: “The name and reputation Marvin Griffin gave our state during his administration made us the laughing stock of the nation, and it would again if he ever were given the opportunity to do so.” Cried Sanders on television: “We caught old Marvin in the chicken house once, and we’re not going to give him the keys to the smoke house again.” The voters agreed.