Picnic at the Pickrick in Atlanta, GA
Unless you were Black, of course
I have never lived in Georgia. It’s possible it could have happened. My mother is from the state, and if she hadn’t gone up to Philadelphia to work as a maid, she wouldn’t have met my dad, who was in the Air Force. Then they (with me, my sister, and two brothers) wouldn’t have lived on bases from Germany to Idaho to New York and the Phillippines. She’d have stayed in Georgia, married a hometown boy, and, well, then I wouldn’t be me. I’d be somebody else.
But as long as I’ve been alive, Georgia was known to have a racist element buried within, but it was always wiped out by the busyness of Atlanta — at least by me. I ignored that redneck racism that lurked in the rural communities outside of the city. I was then young and naive enough to think I could charm my way through that unpleasantness if I encountered it.
The plan was to go to the Atlanta metropolis after college and make my fortune. Black people could get professional jobs there, buy one of those big butt houses, and drive the beautiful new highways in a new Chevrolet! Coca-Cola headquarters was there!
What was there not to love?
But I met my husband in college, and that was the end of that.
Georgia has changed
Georgia elected two new Senators on January 5th, 2021. One is Pastor Raphael Warnock, a son of the state who led Martin Luther King, Jr’s home church as the Senior Pastor, and the other is a young Jewish millennial named Jon Ossoff. Ossoff produced films that highlighted corruption and war crimes for international news organizations.
Both men were connected to the late Congressman John Lewis; Warnock was his pastor. Ossoff worked for and was mentored by Lewis.
Both were also the first Democratic Senators elected in Georgia since 2000.
So Georgia has come a long, long way, baby.
Segregation
In 1965, segregation in America, particularly in the South, was a thing. Black and White people were to be kept separate at all costs. This was inconvenient since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had just been passed. The law covered the North and the South too, and for some, this just could not be.
Lester Maddox was the owner of the Pickrick. He and his wife started the restaurant in 1947, and it was very successful. It could feed 400 people at one time! All with Negro waiters and cooks, of course.
The Pickrick was noted for the quality of its fried chicken and for its reasonable prices, but Mr. Maddox was determined that no black should experience the ambience that he had reserved exclusively for whites.
He had a way of creating pointed labels that would stick. When people of color arrived at his restaurant, he armed his customers with pickaxe handles. Twelve of them hung on the wall right inside the front door. He called them “Pickrick Drumsticks” and he also sold them for $2 each in his souvenir restaurant.
(If you have one laying around, they’re on sale online for about $400 each.)
It was a symbol of his resistance to the Civil Rights Movement.
He also had a commonly run page called Pickrick Says in the Atlanta Journal. It was like a long tweet, with an ad at the bottom, that he used to speak to the people. In it, he explained his segregation philosophy and promoted his restaurant.
The Pickrick would’ve been a great choice for a national restaurant, perhaps. Like Cracker Barrel and IHOP, the prices were good, and their specialty was home cooking, with a specific secret recipe for skillet-fried chicken.
A few years later, after the Pickrick restaurant started, Kentucky Fried Chicken (now KFC) opened in 1952. It’s now the world's largest restaurant (22,621 locations!) after McDonald's.
How about that?
But as we look back, we can see that millions of people just like him may have shortchanged their futures and financial health because they couldn’t or wouldn’t co-exist with people of color. Some, then and even now, ruin their businesses and/or careers because of racism.
Racism makes you stupid.
Follow the law
After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, Maddox refused to change his business practices. He wasn’t shy about it. He hated race-mixing!
He was the first person to be convicted under the Civil Rights Act. On February 5th, 1965, Maddox was held in contempt because he would not serve Black customers, so he was fined two hundred dollars a day.
Two days later he closed the restaurant and blamed President Lyndon B. Johnson, Congress, and the communists for making him shut it down.
You see, instead of growing his empire, he destroyed it. Like a Cadillac dealer on the brink of bankruptcy who refused to sell a vehicle to a Black man, no amount of money could make him integrate. Nothing could induce him to sign on to something as egregious as equal rights.
He threw it all away…
Racist or segregationist
Some have said that Lester Maddox was not a racist; he was a segregationist, that’s all. However, they neglect to mention he held the view “that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites, that integration was a Communist plot, that segregation was somewhere justified in scripture and that a federal mandate to integrate [all-white] schools was ‘ungodly, un-Christian and un-American.’”
When he ran for office (and he ran many times) he was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. And to be fair, he had his share of success, ultimately winning the governorship of Georgia in 1967. It was by a quirk that he won by a vote by the legislature, but the final result was still a victory. There were complaints:
He has never understood the legislative functions of the governor, much less performed them in any fashion, liberal or conservative.
In an article in the Harvard Crimson dated August 11, 1967, Boisfeuillet JONES Jr. writes that Maddox does not execute any policies. The people who follow him cause more problems than he does…his supporters (racists and extremists) are the ones who cause concern.
Why does this still ring a bell today? It’s because some things have not changed. Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts writes that Trump supporters fear a black and brown America. 1967 or 2021?
Fifty-four years have passed and we’re still talking about the same thing.
Maddox even ran for the presidency in 1976, handing out autographed pickaxe handles along the way.
His motto: Restore America’s Greatness with Lester Maddox.
So the segregationist was helped in politics by the closure of his restaurant. Racism was a winning strategy in Georgia in 1967. But was it a fitting replacement for his business? And did his business really have to close?
According to Governor Lester Maddox, the answer is yes:
‘’I want my race preserved,’’ he said, ‘’and I hope most everybody else wants theirs preserved. I think forced segregation is illegal and wrong. I think forced racial integration is illegal and wrong. I believe both of them to be unconstitutional.’’
There’s something wrong with these contradictory statements, but one will raise a headache just thinking about it…
Politics is temporary
Maddox was a political orphan. Convinced he could lead the average white American in a “new” direction, he ran as the presidential nominee for the American Independent Party. They lost as Jimmy Carter took the Presidency of the United States as a Democrat in 1976.
Now, he was neither Democrat nor Republican. No one took him seriously any longer.
But the former governor still had debts to pay.
Lester Maddox sold souvenir pick handles for a while and later had to sell off his personal belongings at a bankruptcy auction.
And yet…when Governor Maddox held the highest power in Georgia, it should be noted that:
He also integrated the Georgia State Patrol. He stopped the officers from calling Black people the N-word. Instead, they had to say “Mr. and Mrs.” when speaking directly to people of color.
There is something unique about the human condition. It’s a paradox. One could call it a mismatch in values and action. Some racists are against the alien (to them) community…of Black, Brown, Jewish, or Asian. But in person, face-to-face, they can be quite human.
Face to face vs the community
The car maven Henry Ford was an example of this. He was a strong anti-semite but he still gave a new vehicle to a certain Rabbi in his community every year — until the Rabbi, seeing how Ford expressed hatred towards his people, stopped accepting the automobile. Henry Ford was surprised. Why?
Ford also paid for an anti-semitic newsletter (The Dearborn Independent) blaming the Jews for “provoking incidents of mass violence.” He was a fan and pen-pal of Hitler. But individually, he laughed and gossiped face to face with the Jewish grocer in his community who served him.
Is it possible that people like this forget who and what we are; see the humanity within us and respond? But then, away from our presence, they regain their hatred towards our communities?
Despite everything in his past, Lester Maddox had friends, hidden perhaps, in the Black community.
He stopped the officers from calling Black people the N-word.
Because of this and other similar actions, he was not forgotten.
King’s close friend and ally, Dr. Hosea Williams moved a bill — unsuccessfully — to give Maddox a pension. “Lester Maddox did more for black people than any governor in the history of Georgia”, he said later. “He talked that racist talk, but the walk he walked was very different.”
The Governor died in 2003 at the age of 87 from pneumonia and prostate cancer.
So how does one explain a Lester Maddox?
The walk he walked was very different.