Early Political Campaigns
In 1962, Buchanan, while still an active pastor in Birmingham, was one of three unsuccessful Republican candidates for Congress. The U.S. House candidates that year ran statewide. Because state law required that voters support eight candidates for their ballot to count, the Republicans had to back five Democrats, who were technically their at-large opponents, or to write in the names of five Republicans who were not official candidates, a process that proved too burdensome to overcome. The congressional race corresponded with the controversial admission of James Meredith, who became the first African American in history to graduate from the University of Mississippi in neighboring Mississippi. Buchanan said that the Alabama congressional delegation had responded to the desegregation crisis "only after intense pressure from the home folks. ... they nodded their heads 'yes' when the Kennedys asked them to, and have come back home and denied thy were national Democrats." Buchanan led the three-candidate field in 1962 with 141,202 votes but failed to dislodge the eighth-place Democratic candidate, Representative Carl Elliott of Jasper.
Buchanan was also the finance director for the resurgent Alabama Republican Party. In 1964, he was handily elected to Congress from the Birmingham-based 6th district, having unseated the 10-year incumbent Democrat, George Huddleston, Jr., by a surprising 21-point margin. Alabama voters turned against the Democrats because U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Read more about this topic: John Hall Buchanan, Jr.
Famous quotes containing the words early, political and/or campaigns:
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“Motherhood is the second oldest profession in the world. It never questions age, height, religious preference, health, political affiliation, citizenship, morality, ethnic background, marital status, economic level, convenience, or previous experience.”
—Erma Bombeck (20th century)
“That food has always been, and will continue to be, the basis for one of our greater snobbisms does not explain the fact that the attitude toward the food choice of others is becoming more and more heatedly exclusive until it may well turn into one of those forms of bigotry against which gallant little committees are constantly planning campaigns in the cause of justice and decency.”
—Cornelia Otis Skinner (1901–1979)