End of the Road

Snapping his red galluses in the sunshine, he sometimes seemed the same old showman. A Goliath of a man (6 ft. 8 in., 245 Ibs.), he still had some big ideas.

Cried he: "Big Jim is going to furnish the leadership. We're going forward. If you want to go, I'll take you.'' James E. ("Kissin' Jim") Folsom. 53.

Governor of Alabama from 1947 to 1951 and from 1955 to 1959, was trying for a political comeback--and everyone thought he would make it. His campaign message was one of moderation on Alabama's most controversial question. "The Civil War is over!" Folsom orated. "Let us join the people together again. Let us furnish leadership for our colored people. You were raised amongst 'em. Go down in the black belt and the white folks talk more like the Negroes than the Negroes do. Their two colleges aren't even accredited. They've just got eight trade schools, and they want two more and they're entitled to them.

Last year we turned our bad face to the world. They took pictures of mobs running around the streets of Birmingham. They was taking people out at night, floggin' 'em and mutilatin' and castratin'. Let us have peace in the valley."

Big Jim had been talking this way for a long time--and getting away with it. As Governor, he had even dared tease Alabama's segregationists. Said he: "No Negro child will be forced to go to school with white children as long as I am Governor of Alabama." During his administration he opposed segregationist plans to convert public schools to private schools, refused to sign oppressive segregation bills, even had a drink in the Governor's mansion with New York's Negro Congressman Adam Clayton Powell ("They say I drank Scotch and soda with Adam Clayton Powell. That's a lie. Anybody who knows me knows I don't drink Scotch").

But now, in 1962. Alabama had changed, its racial feelings inflamed by violence at Montgomery, Anniston and Birmingham. Big Jim had changed, too. His hair was greyer, his face was pouchier, his lines had lost their punch. When the votes were counted last week in Alabama's Democratic primary. Big Jim was third in a field of seven. Selected to face each other in the May 29 runoff: former Circuit Judge George Wallace, 42, who promises that he will go to jail before permitting integrated schools, and Tuscaloosa State Senator Ryan deGraffenried. 37, a racial moderate. If it was any consolation to Folsom. Birmingham's super-segregationist Public Safety Commissioner. Eugene ("Bull") Connor, finished a sorry fifth.

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