Civil Rights: White Tears in Georgia

Trembling with rage, balding, bespectacled Atlanta Restaurateur Lester Maddox stood in the doorway of his Pickrick fried-chicken spot one day last week and screamed at two Negroes: "You no-good dirty devils! You've just put 66 people out of a job! You dirty Communists!" With that, Segregationist Maddox announced, "We're closed for good." Then, tears streaming down his cheeks, he stepped outside, and by way of explaining how segregation was really the will of God, began reading the Ten Commandments to a crowd of sympathetic whites.

Maddox's stand was the upshot of the first major challenge to the hotly disputed public-accommodations section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Just 2 hrs. and 10 min. after President Johnson had signed the bill, Maddox ordered three Negroes away from his place at gunpoint. Then, a three-judge panel in Atlanta ordered him to desegregate the Pickrick, but instead, he and Moreton Rolleston Jr., operator of the Heart of Atlanta Motel, asked Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black (who oversees the South's Fifth Judicial Circuit) to stay the effectiveness of the lower court's ruling. Black refused to do so, explaining that to delay the enforcement of the law would be an "unjustifiable" restraint on the will of Congress. He said that the full Supreme Court should resolve the case as soon as possible, and expressed the hope for "final argument the first week we meet in October."

That was not good enough for Maddox. "It's involuntary servitude!" he cried. "We will never integrate!" At the Pickrick's entrance he placed a box of red-painted ax handles marked "Souvenir—Or Otherwise—$2" for white customers who wanted to help keep his fried chicken inviolate. Near by he also placed a dummy with a knife in its back and red paint smeared over it, explained that this symbolized the "American free-enterprise system, states' rights and freedom," which were now "stabbed, bleeding and dying."

Defiant to the end, Maddox strapped a snub-nosed pistol to his side, rushed up to the door when Negroes appeared. When a U.S. district court ordered him to show cause why he should not be cited for contempt, Maddox caved in and closed the Pickrick. "The President, the Congress and the Communists have closed my business and ended my childhood dream," he said. "Not me. They did it."