Floridian of His Century: The Courage of Governor Leroy Collins

Martin A. Dyckman, “Floridian of His Century: The Courage of Governor Leroy Collins” University Press of Florida, 2006, 269 pp.

I continue my education regarding Florida and found this book a very useful addition to that end.  Leroy Collins, after many years in the State legislature, became Florida’s governor from 1954 through 1960.  He was the only southern governor voicing racial moderation following the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling against the so-called “separate-but-equal” schooling systems in the South.  He also led the fight against the rural domination of the Florida state government and his fight led the Supreme Court to order Florida to reapportion on the basis of population.  In 1967 a federal district court drew new districts statewide ending the domination of lightly populated northern counties.

Later, Leroy was chosen by President Lyndon Johnson to direct a conciliation service created by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Collins arranged a peaceful conclusion to the famous Selma to Montgomery voting rights march. But this mission became fuel for a later racist backlash when “Liberal LeRoy”—as his opponent dubbed him—ran for the U.S. Senate in 1968, and the defeat ended his political career.

My Notes:

Pg. 8:  The US Supreme Court licensed the South’s institutionalized racism in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision upholding a Louisiana law requiring railroads to provide ‘equal but separate’ accommodations for whites and blacks.  The Court said that such laws ‘do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other.’  The court had a lone dissent: John Marshal Harlan, a native Kentuckian.

Pg. 48:  The Florida sales tax began in 1948.  It is now (2006) at six cents on the dollar with some higher local rates and hundreds of additional exemptions but remains the state’s primary revenue source.  It accounts for roughly three-fourths of general revenue.