Running For Governor and Presidential Elector
On April 19, 1960, Courtney ran as the Louisiana States Rights Party gubernatorial nominee and received 12,515 votes (less than 2.5 percent). The winner was Democratic former Governor Jimmie Davis, elected to his second nonconsecutive term. Also in that gubernatorial general election was the Republican nominee, Francis Grevemberg, former superintendent of the Louisiana State Police.
Kent Courtney's brother, Cy D. F. Courtney, also of New Orleans, had been an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor in 1959 on a segregationist intraparty ticket with gubernatorial hopeful William M. Rainach, a state senator from Claiborne Parish. Cy Courtney lost out to fellow Democrat Clarence C. "Taddy" Aycock, a conservative from Franklin in St. Mary Parish. Ironically, Kent Courtney, as a member of a third party, could not actually vote for his brother in the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor.
In the general election held on November 8, 1960, Courtney was a States Rights Party presidential elector, along with future Republican U.S. Representative and Governor David C. Treen and the conservative firebrand Leander Perez, often called the political boss of Plaquemines Parsh. The Democratic ticket of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson handily won Louisiana's electoral votes.
After the gubernatorial disaster, Courtney organized a southern conference that again included columnists Tom Anderson and Medford Evans as speakers, along with other controversial right-wing figures Matt Cvetic, David Molthrop, Robert Nesmith, Harold Poeschel, and Clayton Rand.
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