this week wasn't his first keynote address. he keynoted the 1992 Democratic National Convention in New York and served as chairman of the platform drafting committee for the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
nothing gets said in most of those biographies about how zell got started in politics and who he palled around with in the formative years, or who mentored his career. it turns out Les was a cog in the deep south's backbone of segregation and racism, jim crow. he served as executive assistant to rabid racist georgia governor lester maddox, who went to his grave praising segregation.
at lester's funeral, "Former Governor Zell Miller, who had been personally groomed for office by Maddox, demurred that Maddox' greatest accomplishment in office had been reforming prisons and raising welfare-payments.
"That benefited blacks the most," beamed Miller. A bit apologetic, Miller went on to explain that he had been reluctant to accept the position of executive-assistant proffered to him by Maddox, but that he only accepted when the Governor assured him that he would not "disadvantage anyone because of race, color or national-origin."
"Neither Maddox nor anyone else, however, ever recollected any such conversation.
"I am not going to heaven as a white man,' shouted Miller, in conclusion.
"Meanwhile, downtown, Jackson, the first Negro Mayor of Atlanta, was being eulogized as one who did this and that 'for his people.' Mourners at his funeral stated how far 'we' had come and how much further 'we' had to go. The 'we' did not include any of those 'crackers,' 'hicks' and 'honkies' at Lester Maddox' services, however."
[including zell miller.]
http://www.nationalist.org/docs/ideology/maddox.html
zell pretended he was fair, but "Hi I am Zell Miller...let me introduce myself...
"Today's democrats are too liberal--they should be like my old buddy Lester... We have become too liberal nowadays. Real Democrats should be like Lester Maddox, the guy who I was chief of staff for.....
http://www.savannahnow.com/stories/062603/LOCMaddoxAP.shtml
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more about lester maddox, zell's mentor:
Maddox's legacy is remembered by fist shaking, political resistance and flamboyance
By Dick Pettys The Associated Press
ATLANTA -- Lester Maddox, one of the South's last fist-shaking segregationist governors who rode into office in 1966 on the notoriety of chasing blacks from his restaurant, died Wednesday. He was 87.
While Alabama's George Wallace and other prominent segregationists of the era eventually said they were wrong and sought to make amends, Maddox went to his death without ever backing down.
"I think forced segregation was wrong. I think it was just as wrong to force integration." And if he had it to do all over, "I'd fight even harder," he told The Associated Press in 1996.
A high school dropout born in a working-class section of Atlanta, Maddox's flair for political showmanship and his anti-integration stance won him a local following in Atlanta, where he made two unsuccessful bids for mayor.
But his fame grew to national proportions in 1964 when a widely disseminated newspaper photograph showed him picking up a pistol and chasing black protesters from his Pickrick fried chicken restaurant the day after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law.
Whites from his restaurant chased the protesters with pick handles, which became Maddox's symbol. He closed and then sold the Pickrick rather than serve blacks.
Though written off by moderates and liberals as a colorful crackpot, Maddox leaped into the 1966 race for governor and captured the Democratic nomination.
But in 1968, Maddox refused to close the Capitol for the funeral of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., which drew thousands of mourners to Atlanta's streets, and he expressed anger that state flags were being flown at half-staff.
"The Maddox administration was a good one, marked by historic and progressive achievements," said U.S. Sen. Zell Miller, Maddox's former chief of staff. "History will judge his administration well."
Posted by Keith Brekhus at November 15, 2003 11:38 PM http://www.theleftcoaster.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=803
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from http://nasilemak.blogspot.com/2003_11_23_nasilemak_archive.html by Nasi Lemak:
Miller is not a man whose racial past can be taken lightly. He ran for Congress in 1964 against the Civil Rights Act; but then a number of politicians then against the Civil Rights Act were later to take on a substantially more liberal hue. What is, I think, more troubling in Miller's history is his time as Chief of Staff to Georgia Governor Lester Maddox (1967-71, if I remember rightly). Miller has never disowned that administration; when Maddox died recently, Miller said:
"The Maddox Administration was a good one, marked with historic and progressive achievements. Under his watch, Georgia instituted a more humane prison system, and integrated the Georgia State Patrol, and county welfare and draft boards throughout the state. History will judge his administration well."
I find this troubling, because the Maddox Administration of which Miller was a key part was an ultimate dead-ender, to coin a phrase, standing for radical opposition to desegregation at a time when even Deep South states had to start desegregating their school systems, at a time indeed when many former segregationist politicians were starting to change their spots - when Strom Thurmond, for example, was hiring his first African-American staff members.
I want to drop in some choice words and phrases from a letter Lester Maddox, the man for whom Zell Miller worked and whom he apparently continues to respect, wrote as Governor of Georgia to the Supreme Court in 1970. The letter referred to an imminent busing case; while I suppose from some points of view one might be pro-desegregation but anti-busing, although the bits I want to quote are about desegregation more generally. Maddox disagreed with the Court's direction in the desegregation cases; specifically he called them "illegal", "unconstitutional", "tyrannical", "a police state", "blantantly (sic) communistic", "un-American", "guilty, guilty as sin"; he blamed them for the "spilling of much blood", "deaths, robberies, extortions, beatings, stabbings and shooting". Ironically, of course, any African American in Georgia before desegregation who had the temerity to express any political views whatsoever would be at risk of experiencing much in that latter list (there are some horrifying stories from Georgia, to put in context Richard Russell's political heritage, in Robert Caro's LBJ biographies).
Lester Maddox is dead; but the man who tended Maddox's career so he could write that disgusting, false, nauseating letter to try to force the Supreme Court into preserving segregation is something of a hero to Bush supporters in the blogosphere. So hurrah for Bush that he thinks Condie is an actual person, but in the scheme of things it doesn't seem like that big a deal.
UPDATE: a copy of the Maddox letter is preserved in the William J. Brennan Papers in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington DC; box 241 if memory serves.
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I live in Georgia and was here when O'Zell was guv. He was an educator (teacher or something) and his contribution to the education system here was to give us a lottery to fund what they call "Hope Grants". I remember him taking a trip to Florida to see their lottery system work. Basically he went to several gas stations and watched the flow of working stiffs and poor people HOPEing to get lucky and spending their children's lunch money (and sometimes the rent money) on a pipe dream. Deciding that gambling was ok if it kept him from having to address the appalling education system in the state, he gave us a lottery. It primarily bought a lot of computers, which became obsolete in a couple of years so more computers could be bought and so on. You get the picture. I was the beneficiary of a Hope Grant. My tuition, about $100 per course, and my books, about $50 per course, were free. I got to work on a computer, which cost about twenty times that, much. Most of my classrooms had about 50% of the computers in use. Seemed like a terrible waste of lunch and rent money to me.
Posted by dave at November 16, 2003 08:22 AM http://www.theleftcoaster.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=803
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Zell started his climb to national status round about the 1988 democratic cornvention in atlanta.
zell, who hopes he's today's strom thurmon and jessie helms rolled into one, said, "I will put my civil rights record up against anyone." The same Zell Miller who was chief of staff for unrepentant racist Lester Maddox, buddy of orvil faubus, buddy of george wallace, a heartbeat from sam nunn.
zell hasn't abandoned the democratic party. he's returned to his racist, jim crow, lester maddox roots. a dixiecrat without portfolio. we'll see how long the flame of this show dixiecrat burns in the hearts of the republican party; just how quickly he'll be discarded like todays balloons and confetti.
of course we must bear in mind the democrats were OK with peckerwood zell's checkered past when he was a democrat, a party with lots of diversity, and even more hypocrisy.
to quote the democrat line, dems who appear to have just discovered zell themselves:
"Yes, Zell Miller was right-hand man to Lester Maddox who, in 1964, smashed in the roof of a black minister's car. Maddox also publically pushed defiance of federal civil rights legislation calling for desegregation of restaurants and other public places--he pushed his racist agenda so strongly that he passed out axe handles to white customers at his eatery to prevent its integration. Later in the year, Zell Miller's boss Maddox closed his business establishment rather than be forced to serve African Americans.
"Yes, my friends. Lester's ex-chief of staff Zell Miller says that today's democrats are too liberal--and maybe he thinks they should be like his old role model Lester Maddox, who picked up a pistol and chased black protesters from the Pickrick fried chicken restaurant the day after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law.
"Was that the kind of Democrat for whom Zell waxes nostalgic and for whom he has the true respect?"
http://www.syracuse.com/weblogs/print.ssf?/mtlogs/syr_politics/archives/print030188.html
none of zell's checkered past came up when, in 2001, zell was calling kerry courageous and a great patriot. ahh, politics. the democrats didn't do much when zell refused to give max cleland meaningful support for re-election in 2002. or when Zell Miller said 40 years ago that President Lyndon Johnson had "sold his soul when he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964," an act LBJ said himself would mean the end of the democratic party.
LBJ was right.