Addressing the place of race in national politics in the mid-1970s
Talmadge addresses the the place of race as a political issue by the mid-1970s. According to Talmadge, the race issue in terms of pitting whites against blacks had become less abrasive. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that efforts to find a national racial balance persisted and alludes to the role of school busing as an especially contentious issue at the time.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Herman Talmadge, December 18, 1975. Interview A-0331-3. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- JACK NELSON:
-
Senator, we talked quite a bit over these previous interviews about your
past stand on racial issues and so forth. Is race dead as a political
issue in this country?
- HERMAN TALMADGE:
-
Well, it depends on how you mean "race as a political
issue." If you resort to compulsion to move people around to
try to get some sort of mythical racial balance, it is the most volatile
issue there is in America today. Race as such, arraying blacks against
whites or whites against blacks is, I think, relatively dead, unless you
resort to this business of compulsion which all people resent, black and
white.
- JACK NELSON:
-
But that's not an issue today in Georgia, your own state?
- HERMAN TALMADGE:
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No, it's not an issue in Georgia except that the overwhelming majority of
people in Georgia and everywhere else in the nation, both black and
white, are violently opposed to this forced busing. They think that it
is a denial of their basic freedoms and I certainly think so.
