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.
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