Two candidates were now in the running. There was Herman Talmadge, son of the late governor-elect Eugene Talmadge, a legend in Georgia politics who had served three terms as governor and was a pillar in the region’s white supremacist political structure. The New York Times once called him “the all-time Georgia champion of ‘white supremacy.’”
“Wise Negroes,” Talmadge had said before the 1946 midterm elections, “will stay away from white folks’ ballot boxes.”
Herman Talmadge was hoping to walk in his father’s footsteps into the Atlanta governor’s mansion, and to continue pressing for the segregationist laws he had known all his life. At a rally in Fort Valley, Georgia, in August 1948, Talmadge had told a crowd, “We’re going to have white supremacy in Georgia, by peaceful means if possible, by force if necessary.”
His opponent was Melvin E. Thompson, who had come up as an educator and had served in a previous governor’s administration. Thompson publicly supported Truman’s civil rights campaign and the Supreme Court’s Smith v. Allwright ruling.
Leading up to the primary, racial angst spread through the state. Georgia’s Ku Klux Klan chapters pledged support for Talmadge. The KKK’s local grand dragon, Samuel Green, publicly announced he would turn out a hundred thousand Klan votes for Talmadge, who was polling a three-to-one advantage in the race. On the night before the primary, just after Melvin Thompson gave his final campaign address, thirty robed and hooded Klansmen gathered in the black section of the town of Valdosta and burned a cross in front of a group of a hundred blacks and a phalanx of police officers. Two other cross burnings, clear threats to African Americans who aimed to cast a ballot in the election, were reported that night.
The following morning, September 8, Georgians nervously went to the polls. A black man named Isaiah Nixon, who lived on a farm in Alston, Georgia, went to his local polling station to cast his ballot. Like many other black men in Georgia, he had registered to vote with the help of the local chapter of the NAACP. Nixon was strongly advised by election officials not to vote, but he cast his ballot anyway.
Later that day, Nixon was at home on his farm with his family. His wife was on bed rest, as she had recently given birth. A car pulled up and out stepped two white men whom Nixon knew: two brothers named Johnson. One was carrying a shotgun, the other a pistol. They yelled for Nixon to come outside, and both Nixon and his wife emerged from their home. When the Johnson brothers asked Nixon whom he had voted for, Nixon reportedly said, “I guess I voted for Mr. Thompson.”
According to subsequent investigations, the Johnson brothers demanded that Nixon get in their car, and he refused. According to the defense lawyer who later represented the Johnson brothers, Nixon charged at them with a knife, though this version of the story was disputed. One Johnson brother fired a shot into Nixon’s abdomen. When Nixon remained standing, his wife screamed, “Fall, Isaiah, fall!”
Herman Talmadge won the governor’s race by a huge margin. Georgia’s most widely read newspaper, the Atlanta Constitution, noted: “Herman Talmadge’s victory in the gubernatorial Democratic primary . . . today may give the States’ Rights Democrats a boost in their presidential campaign.” Talmadge went on to become a popular governor, and then to serve twenty-four years as US senator. Two days after Talmadge’s primary win, Isaiah Nixon died in a local all-black hospital. The Johnson brothers were charged with murder, but would ultimately be found not guilty by an all-white jury, on the grounds of self-defense.
Days after the Georgia gubernatorial primary, in a black school not far from the Georgia State Capitol, a teacher asked her third-grade students whether their parents were going to vote in the upcoming presidential election in November. A male student responded, “My mama ain’t going nowhere and get shot voting.”
On September 10, two days after the Georgia primary, Henry Wallace surged again to the top of the political news cycle. Following his trip through the Deep South, Wallace made a triumphant return to his strongest base, in the city of New York. Some forty-eight thousand people moved through turnstiles at Yankee Stadium, illuminating the striking cultural and political divide between the new conservatism building in the American South and the new liberal movement in New York, as personified by Gideon’s Army. Promoters of this rally were claiming it was the largest political rally for which admission was charged in the history of the United States, and the largest political rally ever held in New York City.
The scene was, in the words of one man present, “a weird combination of the old-fashioned open-air church revival meeting, of chanting and song-fest and evangelical fervor in mass.” Banners hung from around the stage, reading SAFEGUARD FREEDOM, KEEP AMERICA FREE, FIGHT JIM CROW, and NO ISRAEL EMBARGO—the latter banner a protest against the weapons embargo that was keeping the Truman administration from sending arms to the Israelis. The speaker’s platform was set up over the baseball field’s second base. The black actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson sang “Let My People Go” and “Old Man River.” Folk singer Pete Seeger shouted into the microphone a description of his experience touring the South with Henry Wallace the previous week.
“I can tell you a lot of things the newspapers didn’t tell you,” Seeger said of Wallace’s trip through Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. “They were wonderful things. In Memphis, in Birmingham, in Durham, where white men and Negroes had never sat side by side before, they sat together and they sang and cheered Wallace—but the newspapers didn’t tell you that.”
More warm-up speakers took the stage. There was Wallace campaign officer Lee Pressman, who just weeks earlier had been accused of being a Communist conspirator by Whittaker Chambers during the Alger Hiss
