Call for Collins

"We will have segregation in this state by lawful and peaceful means," said Florida's Governor LeRoy Collins, 47, as he campaigned his way through a gauntlet of bigotry set up by his rivals for the Democratic nomination for governor. "We will not have our state torn asunder by rioting and disorder and violence. If you want a governor who is going to seek to have white people hating colored people, and colored people hating white people, then you do not want LeRoy Collins."

Florida Democrats wanted Collins, a moderate in tone if not in substance, so much that they broke all records last week to give him 432,000 votes, a clear majority over the combined vote (400,000) of his five opponents.

Down to a poor fourth place went Fuller Warren, former governor (1949-53), who had proclaimed: "If race-mixing comes to Florida, there will result from it a mulatto race." Up to a poor second went White Supremacist Sumter Lowry, retired National Guardsman and popeyed patriot, who highlighted his first campaign by displaying a blown-up picture of his eight-year-old daughter: "Now what kind of a man would I be if I didn't fight for a little girl like that?"

Collins' excellent showing in the Statehouse, e.g., record personal income and employment in the state (TIME, Dec. 19), added point to his warning that racist chaos would wreck the boom. He rolled up landslide margins amid the new factories of the boom: 78% in Broward County (Ft. Lauderdale), 72% of the vote in Dade County (Miami), 69% in Pinellas County (St. Petersburg). He is sure to walk away from G.O.P. Nominee William A. Washburne in November.

Added to Lyndon Johnson's clean sweep in Texas last fortnight (TIME, May 14), Collins' primary victory suggested a new fact for the rest of the South and the U.S.: the tone of moderation, drowned out of late in Deep-South Alabama and Georgia, still has its charms in the prospering Southern periphery.

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