by Casey Cep
His first political campaign had come seven years earlier, in 1962, when, in a preview of what his life would be like as a Southern liberal, he managed to lose a race he had indisputably won. On the first day of May, Tom had defeated a poultry farmer from Alexander City and a lumberman from Daviston for a seat in the Alabama House of Representatives. Afterward, he and his campaign manager went down to celebrate on the Gulf Coast of Florida, which is where Radney was when he learned that the legislative seat he was supposed to occupy had been reapportioned out of existence.
Apportionment had barely changed in Alabama since 1901, the year that the state had ratified a new constitution, but while Tom was celebrating, a federal court found that demographics had shifted substantially and ordered the state to redistrict. The court did not change the total number of seats in the legislature, but it did require them to be distributed differently across counties. The redrawn map gave additional seats to some counties by taking them away from others—including Tallapoosa, where the seat Tom had won disappeared. That left him facing a special election for the one seat into which his had been consolidated. On the last Tuesday of August, when the returns came in, Tom Radney lost.
Four years later, though, that same legal mandate proved pivotal to Tom’s political career. In 1966, Radney ran to represent Alabama’s Sixteenth District in the state senate. Before reapportionment, that district had consisted of two counties, Elmore and Tallapoosa, where the local political machine had cooked up an arrangement called senatorial rotation; they alternated running residents of one county with residents of the other, passing the seat back and forth with every election. But reapportionment added Macon County, home to the Tuskegee Institute, to the Sixteenth District, thereby killing that long-standing practice and changing the landscape for candidates in another way as well. Between 1964 and 1966, four thousand names had been added to the rolls of Macon County, mostly thanks to the Voting Rights Act, bringing its total number of registered voters to more than eleven thousand. Almost seven thousand of those voters were African American, meaning that for the first time a candidate for the Sixteenth District had to campaign in a county that was majority black.
That didn’t bother Tom, and early in January, in front of hundreds of friends, he announced that he was running for the seat. The platform was hazy, but the candidate was dreamy: born and raised in a small Alabama town, the young lawyer was a Methodist, a Mason, a Shriner, and an Elk; a member of the American Legion, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Kiwanis Club; an Auburn Tiger from his college days and part of the Crimson Tide since law school; a Sunday school teacher and an army vet.
Tom’s opponent in the primary was a man from Elmore County named H. H. “Runt” O’Daniel. Runt had almost more years in business than Tom had in life, and the farmer turned car dealer had a lot of customers who could be counted on to vote for him. But Runt was nowhere near as eager as Tom to campaign in Macon County. Instead, he planned to target the Sixteenth District’s segregationist vote, and he had the help of a powerful ally: Governor George Corley Wallace Jr.
It’s easy to forget these days, but George Wallace was a Democrat; the tectonic plates of the parties hadn’t yet shifted on race, and the GOP was still reviled in the South as the party of Lincoln, so segregationists and integrationists alike ran as Democrats. But the long career of George Wallace began years before and moral light-years away from his infamous promise of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.” The grandson of a probate judge, Wallace had risen up the ranks of a legal career to become an assistant attorney general and then a judge for the state’s Third Judicial Circuit. Along the way, he earned the admiration of black lawyers, who saw him as one of Alabama’s more liberal judges and one of the few who addressed both whites and blacks in his courtroom as “mister.” When he first ran for governor, in 1958, he had the endorsement of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, while his opponent was backed by the Ku Klux Klan. Wallace’s defeat, by a margin of more than thirty thousand votes, left him livid. “You know why I lost that governor’s race?” he confided to a campaign aide afterward: “I was outniggered.” It was a vicious assessment, and it spawned an equally vicious political philosophy: “I’ll tell you here and now, I will never be outniggered again.”
So began the inauspicious age of Wallace in Alabama politics. These were dark, demersal years, when white voters were pandered to by politicians at every level of government, promised power they’d never had at the expense of African Americans they were assured never would. It was Wallace, by then governor, who stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama in June 1963 to prevent two black students from enrolling, and it was Wallace who three months later ordered state troopers to prevent black kids half their age from integrating the public schools in Birmingham. He could find the race card in any deck and played it against everyone who dissented from his white-supremacist brand of populism. Anyone who criticized him, he said, was a “low-down, carpet-baggin’, scallywaggin’, race-mixin’ liar.”
In his rhetoric, Wallace was a law-and-order man, but in real life he liked making his own rules. Despite his tremendous popularity, he was unable to run for reelection in 1966, because Alabama forbade governors to serve consecutive terms. After the legislature refused to amend the state constitution to make him eligible, Wallace ran a proxy candidate instead: his wife, Lurleen. At campaign events, Lurleen would talk for a few minutes; then Wallace would take the stage and rant and rage for over an hour. He went around the state promoting not only his wife but also a whole slate of mini-Wallaces, including the Sixteenth District candidate Runt O’Daniel.
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Alabama had long been a one-party state; by the mid-1960s that party was Wallace. Tom Radney, however, was not a member. Born on June 18, 1932, in the tiny town of Wadley, just across the Tallapoosa County line, Radney was the sixth child of Nancy Beatrice Simpson and James Monroe Radney, known as Beatrice and Jim. His birth certificate reads “John Tomas,” and all his life, the missing h would appear and vanish and reappear at the whim of reporters, pundits, calligraphers, and copy editors.
Although he would eventually be known in Alexander City and around Alabama as Big Tom, he was the baby of the Radney family, and his mother treated him accordingly. Tom later claimed that his father never once said he loved him, but Beatrice favored her youngest son fiercely. After her husband left for work in the morning, running a branch of his father-in-law’s mercantile business and managing his plantation, she would fetch Tom from his bed and bring him to theirs, where it was warmer, and if the dinner table did not have something on it he liked, she would wait until the rest of the family was asleep, then cook him whatever he pleased. If their mother could have chewed his food for him, an older sister once recalled, she would have.
Yet all that spoiling made Tom sweet, not rotten. Beatrice would send her son to deliver milk or jam to other families, telling him that while they were lucky today, they might not be tomorrow, in which case they would want people to remember their kindness. Those lessons in human decency, which Tom learned from his mother by example, he learned from his father by contrast. The property Jim Radney managed included an area called “the Quarters,” which was farmed and occupied by twenty-nine sharecropping families, akin to the arrangement that the Maxwells had in Coosa County. One of the families at the Quarters had a son only a year older than Tom, and as children the two became close friends. But when the boy’s father lost his right arm to a cotton gin, Jim refused to help the family, then forced them off the Quarters. The shame of that experience skipped the father but struck the son and stayed with Tom all his life.
Tom was bothered, too, by a revival he attended one summer at a church in Wadley, the white version of the sort the Reverend Maxwell used to lead. He had gone with two friends, and all three boys watched wide-eyed as pictures were passed around of burning flames—like the ones
waiting for them in Hell, the preacher said, if they committed any of the sins he shouted at them. The boys raced for the door, and later Tom swore he’d never worship anywhere that preached God’s judgment without God’s love. He found a spiritual home in the Methodist Church, and for the rest of his life he said it was his faith that led him to believe in the equality of the races and the dignity of all people.
It was this belief that helped animate Tom’s bid for the state senate in 1966, and his campaign strategy, too. From his perspective, the African American citizens in Macon County were just as deserving of his time and attention as white citizens elsewhere in the district. Voters were voters, he thought, and he was out to win votes. Tom’s opponent, meanwhile, had resigned himself to losing Macon County but had a plan to steal Tom’s home county out from under him. Runt knew that Tom might well win the primary outright by getting more than 50 percent of the vote, but if he could force his opponent into a runoff, then he could use Tom’s African American supporters against him. To do that, he needed to split the voting population into smaller slices, which is why two months before the primary a spoiler made himself known: a mustachioed country singer named Gene “Mutt” Lanier put on his cowboy hat and announced that he was running for the senate. Radney couldn’t do anything about Mutt, and he couldn’t prove that Runt was behind the last-ditch candidacy, but he saw right through their plan. Between them, Runt and Mutt would get more than enough votes to keep Tom from winning outright in the primary and then, as he put it, “tie the Negro vote around my neck in the runoff.”
Mutt, Runt, and Tom all appeared on the ballot during the first week of May. Radney got the most votes, but was still about five hundred short of the majority he needed to avoid a runoff. Tallapoosa County went for its hometown boy, as did Elmore County, but, in the words of The Tuskegee News, “Negro support went bloc-fashion,” and it went for Tom Radney. That was all the information Runt needed to, in the parlance of the time, “seg” his way to victory, and he took his racist strategy straight to the printers and the radio stations. The runoff wasn’t until the end of that month, and all Runt wanted white voters to hear until then was how much he had in common with the Wallaces and how much Radney had in common with the district’s African American population. Leaflets went around encouraging hesitant supporters to call and verify that Wallace wanted Runt to win; when voters dialed the printed telephone number, they were put through to Wallace’s state finance director, who could stump for Runt and take a donation at the same time. “You can easily see who stands for whom,” Runt said of his young liberal opponent, then promised to fight with “Mrs. George C. Wallace’s Administration against the Left Wing Liberals in Washington” on behalf of “our State’s rights and Southern way of life.”
“State’s rights and Southern way of life” was a barely coded appeal to white supremacy, but it had nothing on the most pernicious piece of campaign literature that Runt produced in his fight against Tom Radney. That was a folded brochure, the front of which featured a cartoon man, black as tar, barefoot and naked but for a tiki skirt, clenching a white bone between his lips, stirring a simmering cauldron. Above him, written in blood-dripping red ink, was the question “WHO’S IN THE STEW…” Opening the brochure, voters were warned, “MAKE SURE IT’S NOT YOU!” Below that, Runt printed the results of the primary, making plain as day that Radney was the favored candidate among African Americans.
The advertisement was execrable but efficacious, and at first Tom couldn’t figure out what to do about it. He knew that Runt had sent the brochure to white voters in two counties, and he couldn’t stop staring at it, furious and stymied. He was in the middle of turning it over and over, in his mind as well as his hands, when he noticed the tiny union mark on the back cover. He called up the printer, learned that they still had the proofs of the brochure, paid them to run off another fifteen hundred copies, and then distributed them himself to black voters in Macon County. He also took copies around to his white country-club friends. None of them were liberals, but many of them were dismayed by such offensive politicking in Tallapoosa County. Alexander City was a town on the rise, flush with money from the cotton mills, and its leaders were trying to attract business from around the country. The clean, crew-cut Radney was a poster boy for the New South, and soon enough the Chamber of Commerce types were in the stew with him, too.
The bedrock of Radney’s campaign was his wife, Madolyn Boyd Anderson, who was both Eleanor to his FDR and Jackie to his JFK. She was raised in Montgomery, and her parents still lived there; the Andersons had already promised their son-in-law a room in their home if he needed it during legislative sessions. When Madolyn and Tom met, she was teaching first grade and cared deeply about public education. Tom, who had gotten both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in education from Auburn, impressed her with how seriously he had thought about the field and how passionately he believed that public schools promoted equality and social mobility. Madolyn sized Tom up quickly and knew what she was getting: a man made up of equal parts idealism and ambition, a politician with one eye on Montgomery and the other on Washington. They got married in the First United Methodist Church on September 8, 1962, and moved into a little apartment in downtown Alex City. After they’d saved enough money to buy some land on nearby Ridgeway Drive, her father, an engineer, supervised the construction of a home for them there. It was as modern as they were, and they would share it for the rest of Tom’s life.
When Tom first began campaigning, Madolyn went with him to most of his events, driving so that he could finish writing speeches in the car and entertaining the press once they arrived. But it was Tom who entertained the voters. His politics inspired those who shared them, and his enthusiasm, sincerity, and optimism won over even some of those who did not. A few days before the election, Tom published an open letter in a local newspaper asking the people of the Sixteenth District to vote for him. In exchange, he promised them “hard work, clean representation, and a voice you will be proud of in the Senate.”
When the runoff returns came in, Tom’s lead in his home county had fallen by more than five hundred votes, and in Elmore County, Runt had picked up another fifteen hundred supporters. But Tom Radney won Macon County by almost two thousand votes, enough to hand him the runoff—and with it, the senate seat. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 had not yet caused white Alabamians to abandon the Democratic Party en masse, so at the time—and for just about the last time—winning the Democratic primary in the state effectively meant winning the general election, just as winning a Republican primary in Alabama often does today. Come November, he easily defeated the sixty-year-old farmer who ran against him.
The following session, Tom Radney was sworn in as state senator. He was thirty-four and, as Madolyn had known since their first date, ambitious enough to already imagine running for an office he wasn’t yet old enough to hold. But he would never make it to Washington. Instead, in the years between when he was elected to the state legislature and when he and his family went to Montgomery to shoot those picture-perfect photographs for his lieutenant governor campaign, Tom Radney was nearly run out of politics entirely.
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Roses Are Red
If it was tough to run as a liberal in Alabama, it was almost impossible to govern as one. Tom Radney’s colleagues in the legislature had no choice but to let him in the chamber, but they had no intention of letting any of his bills out of it. One year into his term, Tom confessed to a church group in Auburn that he felt as if he “had to spend more time fighting bad legislation than passing good legislation.”
That bad legislation included a serious, if inexplicable, effort to remove Alabama from the United Nations, which made it through the house but not the senate; a bill that would have allowed the legislature to approve or reject speakers at state schools, which Tom managed to quash, partly through a public debate at Auburn University, where he mounted a passionate defense of academic freedom; and a Walla
ce-backed effort to defund the Tuskegee Institute, a recipient of state funding since 1881, which Tom derailed by threatening a one-man filibuster. The good legislation, proposed by Radney and resoundingly voted down, or denied a vote, included lowering the voting age in Alabama to eighteen (on the grounds that anyone old enough to die for their country in Vietnam was old enough to vote for its leadership), revising election laws around absentee voting, and removing a line item in the University of Alabama budget for the purchase of Confederate flags.
Tom Radney had gotten his idea of good from his mother and from the church, but he’d gotten his idea of good legislation from President Kennedy. In 1960, Tom had gone to the Democratic National Convention intending to nominate Adlai Stevenson. Then he met JFK at a cocktail party and switched his vote on the spot. “It’s sort of a silly way to say it,” he recounted years later, “but he made you feel that he was talking to you. Those eyes were penetrating.”
It was an apt description of what was, in essence, the beginning of a political love affair. Over the years, Tom’s admiration for the Kennedys led him to work for their campaigns, bring them on retreats to Lake Martin, and frame their business cards. He had been devastated when JFK was shot and came home from work that day to cry. But he never gave up on Kennedy’s vision of what a government could do for its citizens, and when the time came to take his wife, Madolyn, to Chicago for another nominating convention, he had another Kennedy on his mind.
