"In every election but one since Jimmy Carter, the President's party has lost the VA Governor race"

[mahatmakanejeeves]

7. I recently read an article about Terry Sanford. He couldn't succeed himself.

He was governor about sixty years ago.

Here it is. I was going through old email, and there was a link to this.

Retropolis

How a courageous Southern governor broke ranks with segregationists in 1961



North Carolina Gov. Terry Sanford presents a scroll to President John F. Kennedy at the White House on April 27, 1961. (Henry Burroughs/AP)

By John Drescher
January 1, 2021 at 7:00 a.m. EST

Sixty years ago, as Southern governors criticized civil rights protests and fought integration, one broke ranks and gave a remarkable inauguration address: He called for equal opportunities for all his state’s residents.

North Carolina’s Terry Sanford, then 43 years old, was one of the first major Southern politicians to endorse John F. Kennedy for president. The two Democrats — energetic World War II veterans born three months apart — campaigned together across North Carolina in the fall of 1960. Sanford won the governor’s race and helped Kennedy carry the state in that nail-biting election.

Eight weeks later, with Kennedy’s brother Robert in the audience, Sanford took to the stage of Raleigh’s crowded Memorial Auditorium, bedecked with red, white and blue bunting, and gave his first address as governor.

“We are not going to forget, as we move into the challenging and demanding years ahead, that no group of our citizens can be denied the right to participate in the opportunities of first-class citizenship,” Sanford said near the end of his speech. He called for North Carolina to extend its spirit of goodwill so that its energy could be “directed toward building a better and more fruitful life for all the people of our state.”

Sanford spoke only a few sentences on issues of race. Yet those sentences were starkly different from the statements of other Southern governors of that era.

{snip}

John Drescher is a national politics editor at The Washington Post.