John Patterson and 'Nobody'

Former Alabama Gov. John Patterson is busy this month promoting his biography, Nobody But the People by Warren Trest.

John Fleming, the Anniston Star's editor at large, writes about the former governor who was replaced by George Wallace:

MONTGOMERY — In the kindly, craggy face of John Patterson can be seen the New South governor our Alabama never had.
Pull back the layers of a not-so-musty history of pre-civil rights, Deep South-politics and root around a little. There, you'll see it: The reformer, the rural highway builder, the opener of credit to the poor, the man of the people, the populist, the leader of the vanguard of the New South — except he wasn't.
Therein lies the tragic reality of Alabama's youngest governor. Though he was most of the above, he also was the segregationist governor.
He was initiated by fire into Alabama politics when he was appointed to the office of attorney general after his crime-busting dad was assassinated in Phenix City in 1954.
He cleaned up Phenix City and went on to the governor's mansion in 1958 to clean up much of the rest of the state. Then he went about trying to fix other ills of Alabama by using an ideology more at home with today's liberal left.
Yet, he is not our early-day William Winter or our Jimmy Carter, all because of something called gradualism. Or, put more commonly, the slow-walking of integration. It was a mistake for him, and for Alabama.
Because John Patterson was not a hero prepared to ignore real politik, Alabama lived through the anguish of the confrontational policies of George Wallace.