Hardly a Contest

"Malice, distrust, rancor and hate create dangerous divisions among our people," warned Mississippi's former Democratic Governor James P. Coleman.

"More and more, Mississippi is being painted as a terrible, dirty place where people love violence and bloodshed."

Coleman, 49, was trying to return to the Governor's mansion, and his appeal came in a desperate, last-minute effort against Lieutenant Governor Paul Johnson, 47, in a Democratic primary runoff last week. It was not that Coleman was an integrationist. During his campaign, he tossed the word "nigger" around almost as freely as Johnson. But Coleman did argue for at least law-abiding resistance to integration, and he warned that extreme racism "is going to destroy our state and everything we hold dear if we don't control it."

As for last-ditch Segregationist Johnson, he tarred Coleman with being an old friend of Jack Kennedy (whose name is mud in Mississippi), painted himself as the man "who stood up for Mississippi" by blocking, for a while, the admission of Negro James Meredith to Ole Miss. Such is the climate of Mississippi today that the Coleman-Johnson runoff was hardly a contest. Johnson won, with 261,000 votes to Coleman's 196,500.

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