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Scott gladly found refuge on his farm from the vicissitudes of political warfare, but he had no intention of retiring from public life. Still angry at the racist attacks in the Smith-Graham contest, and upset with the conservative forces in the party that had tried to undermine his legislative program, he sought revenge in the 1954 race for the US Senate. After Senator Clyde Hoey died, Governor Umstead chose Alton Lennon as the new senator. Umstead and Lennon represented the same forces that had fought Scott and Graham in 1950. Thus, for Scott, this 1954 contest would be the “third primary,” and he hoped to avenge Graham’s defeat by ousting Lennon from office. Lennon had money and incumbency but was not well-known around the state. Scott, often undone by his candid remarks, refused to be drawn into arguments and ran on his record as governor. Future governor Terry Sanford managed his campaign and relied on the supporters who had elected Scott in 1948. Scott loved being back on the stump and campaigned vigorously. Lennon denounced Scott for his arrogant behaviour, which divided the people, and charged him with using highway funds to pave his own roads. The contest was conducted on a high plane until Lennon realized he would lose and, in a desperate move, descended into race baiting. The decision came shortly after the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Lennon tried to make segregation the key issue by indicting Scott for appointing a black, Harold Trigg, to the state Board of Education. This time, the last-minute tactic backfired, and Scott won by a close, but comfortable, margin of 25,twenty-five thousand votes. Now Kerr Scott was a US senator and had avenged Graham’s loss in 1950.

This chapter describes how John F. Kennedy's finest hours had come in times of national and international crises. Tributes flowed from Americans of nearly all political persuasions. North Carolina governor Terry Sanford said, “With a passionate concern for all people from both sides and from behind, President Kennedy set his strength determinedly for human understanding and world peace, remaining always resolute in his faith, always undaunted and unafraid. The valiant soldier of freedom is dead. All mankind is less.” Nearly the entire country watched with rapt attention the arrival of the body at Andrews Air Force Base, John Jr.'s poignant salute to his father's coffin, the Monday mass at St. Matthew's Cathedral, and the dirge at Arlington National Cemetery.

This chapter describes the constant battle Justice Sharp had to fight to keep from getting “promoted” to the federal bench, either the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals or the U.S. Supreme Court. Although she was ambivalent at best about the idea, Justice Sharp was a serious candidate for the highest court in the land for almost two decades prior to Sandra Day O'Connor's appointment in 1981. Her consideration at every vacancy reflected her national standing. Justice Sharp had scarcely gotten settled in her new position on North Carolina's highest court when Governor Terry Sanford offered her the opportunity to be the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. Had the timing been slightly different, it is likely that, as Sanford believed, he “could have probably put her on the Supreme Court of the United States” while John Kennedy was president.

Chapter 6 demonstrates the limitations of “black business activism” during the 1960s while focusing on urban renewal in Durham, North Carolina. Durham’s urban renewal program began in 1958, as a consequence of the Housing Act of 1954 and the state’s fledgling Research Triangle Park (RTP) initiative. The urban renewal program paved the way for an infrastructure that ultimately provided linkages in the physical landscape between RTP, the University of North Carolina, Duke University, North Carolina Central University, and North Carolina State University. Wheeler became the lone black member on the Durham Redevelopment Commission, the group responsible for administering the Bull City’s urban renewal program. I argue that, in part, Wheeler’s support for the federally funded urban redevelopment program fit within his own framework of how best to implement the gains already being won by the civil rights movement. The chapter also examines the “War on Poverty” in North Carolina in the context of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. It does so through trying to better understand Wheeler’s involvement with the North Carolina Fund (NC Fund), an antipoverty agency created by Governor Terry Sanford in 1963. The Fund became the model for President Johnson’s national reform agenda.

This chapter shows how Triumph of Good Will: How Terry Sanford Beat a Champion of Segregation and Reshaped the South, by John Drescher, was an important book on Terry Sanford's 1960 campaign for governor. It tells the story of a candidate who bucked the reactionary tide blanketing the South in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case, gave an endorsement speech at the Democratic National Convention for Massachusetts Catholic John Kennedy, and once in office pushed through a tax increase that overnight boosted North Carolina's teacher salaries from 39th to 32nd and per-pupil expenditures from 48th to 38th in the nation. In one sense, the last part of the title about reshaping the South may seem like a misnomer because the Sanford progressive way usually has been the road not taken in other Southern states.

This book is about the politics of race and poverty in America. It tells the story of the North Carolina Fund, a pioneer effort to improve the lives of the “neglected and forgotten” poor in a nation that celebrated itself as an affluent society. Governor Terry Sanford created the Fund in 1963, at a time when the United States stood at a crossroads. A decade of civil rights activism had challenged the country to fulfill its promise of equality and opportunity. Not since the Civil War and Reconstruction had reformers raised such fundamental questions about the political and social foundations of the republic. It was, however, by no means clear how Americans would answer. Alabama governor George C. Wallace spoke for one possibility.

During the 1960s, Austin lent his talents and his newspaper in support of the direct action movement in Durham and throughout the state. Unlike many other black leaders in the city, he immediately and enthusiastically embraced an early sit-in in Durham that began in 1957, three years before the more celebrated Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins. He also aided a boycott of white retail businesses that refused to hire black workers by publishing the names of those businesses in the Carolina Times. This strategy was quite effective in forcing white businesses to hire African Americans. Austin’s efforts and those of countless civil rights activists led to major freedom struggle successes with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Scott oversaw the reorganization of the state’s university system, changing it from a diverse political free-for-all into a coordinated system. Scott had to overcome serious opposition from many University of North Carolina supporters, who were afraid that UNC’s reputation would be harmed by the changes. In its final years, the Scott administration was plagued by cronyism and controversy.

In her later years she continued her community activism in poverty relief, health care, and interfaith and interracial relations. She served on the Charles B. Aycock Memorial Commission. Her personal politics remained on the left. Although not a partisan Democrat, she worked on the failed campaign to elect Frank Porter Graham to the Senate and supported the candidacies of Kerr Scott and Terry Sanford. She was reluctant to accept the honors increasingly awarded her.