Attorney General of Alabama
In 1954, Patterson's father was nominated for state attorney general on a platform promising to eliminate crime but was shot to death in June of that year. John Patterson replaced his father on the Democratic ticket in a special election and was elected to the post of Attorney General.
As attorney general, Patterson worked against organized crime and the civil rights movement. He banned the NAACP from operating in the state of Alabama and blocked boycotts by the African-American community in Tuskegee and the capital city of Montgomery. With backing from the Ku Klux Klan, Patterson defeated a young George C. Wallace, who carried NAACP backing in the 1958 Democratic primaries—in those days, the real contest in Alabama. Patterson became the youngest governor in Alabama history and the first to move directly from the post of attorney general to governor. His defeat of Wallace is often credited with turning Wallace from a civil rights supporter to an ardent segregationist.
Read more about this topic: John Malcolm Patterson
Famous quotes containing the words attorney, general and/or alabama:
“Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.”
—Truman Capote (1924–1984)
“The tremendous outflow of intellectuals that formed such a prominent part of the general exodus from Soviet Russia in the first years of the Bolshevist Revolution seems today like the wanderings of some mythical tribe whose bird-signs and moon-signs I now retrieve from the desert dust.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Oh! Susanna, do not cry for me;
I come from Alabama with my banjo on my knee.”
—Stephen Collins Foster (1826–1864)