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Do you mean to tell me in all your life you've never considered the proposition that there was something perhaps a little awry about this system of separate schools, sitting in the back of the bus, separate drinking fountains--?
In the South. That was a way of life in the South.
You accepted it?
No, I didn't accept it. I didn't live in the South.
But you went there. You went there in the campaign of 1948. You saw these things.
Yes, and they didn't vote, and we knew they didn't vote. I went there. When Eugene Talmadge told me that in the state of Georgia, we had a hundred percent Anglo-saxon population, I did say, “Well, what were those strange black things I saw walking around the streets? If they weren't population, what were they?”
I mean, that startled me a little bit. But, the way I regarded it, the laws of the South are quite separate in their way of thinking, and it's the way we've gotten along, and I always regarded it as not my function to tell the South what to do. It was my function to do what I thought was right, where I lived, and not try to solve the problems that they had.
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