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The legacy of Florida's greatest governor

By HOWARD TROXLER
Published August 6, 2006

I don't have to get re-elected. But I do have to live with myself.

- LeRoy Collins, governor of Florida, 1955-1961

Florida is somewhat heritage-challenged.

It's not that our state lacks a heritage. The history and lore of Florida is as rich or richer than any state's.

But Florida is especially challenged to hold onto its heritage, to share it and celebrate it among its people. The explosive growth of the second half of the 20th century made this, as the apt saying goes, "a state of strangers."

I like to hope and believe that in recent years Florida has had a chance to catch its breath a little, that it has started to knit into a state with a shared identity, a shared pride, and a shared sense of ownership.

If so, part of the nurturing of our sense of statehood has to be an understanding and remembrance of where we come from. To that end, we are in luck - there is a new book about Florida's greatest governor.

The book is Floridian of His Century: The Courage of Governor LeRoy Collins. I suppose I have a hometown rooting interest and perhaps a conflict as well, as the author is Martin Dyckman, who recently retired as associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times, and spent years on this labor of love for the University Press of Florida

(The publication date is August; the $29.95 book will be available in local bookstores or through the university press, 1-800-226-3822, or www.upf.com.)

Thomas LeRoy Collins was elected governor in 1954 to finish the term of a governor who had died in office. In 1956 he won his own four-year term.

Collins led Florida on a path of moderation during the troubled years of desegregation and the civil rights movement. His greatest success is what didn't happen in Florida - no Little Rock showdowns, no George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door.

In his gentle way, he helped made racial prejudice unacceptable in a modern South.

One may be hated and still retain his human dignity, but one who hates suffers a shrinking of soul.

- Collins inaugural address, 1957

Make no mistake - by modern standards Collins was part of the Old South. He has been and still is criticized for holding back. At first, he decried the U.S. Supreme Court's rulings on desegregation, and paid lip service to protecting "our state's customs and traditions." He criticized the early lunch-counter civil rights protestors as lawbreakers

But his heart was not in it. Before his term was up, Collins was encouraging Floridians to accept the Supreme Court rulings as the law of the land and to treat all people equally in public accommodations. Even if segregation might be argued in court to be legally permissible, he said, it was morally wrong. For a lot of his contemporary critics, Collins might as well have declared himself to be a Communist.

After his governorship, Collins became president of the National Association of Broadcasters, but criticized his own industry and won new enemies. President Lyndon Johnson hired him as the head of a new civil rights agency, the Community Relations Service.

In that federal role, Collins went to Alabama, the scene of some of the most famous civil rights marches. He was photographed walking alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Andrew Young.

Though he was in Alabama to calm the waters rather than to show support, the photographs of Collins were widely circulated in Florida, and racist attacks helped ensure the end of his political career in 1968 when he lost a comeback race for the U.S. Senate.

In 1991, upon Collins' death, the Legislature - with which he had fought landmark battles over fair voting districts, among other things - memorialized him as the "Floridian of the Century." "Collins devoted his life," Dyckman concludes, "to a philosophy utterly opposite the view of some present-day cynics that government is an instrument of evil." Collins believed that fighting brutality, evil and oppression constituted "the glory of government."

In the end, there is a common good after all, and a Florida shared by all of us. The pursuit of the one and the belief in the other - done with faith, optimism and patience - is Collins' legacy, and a gracious reminder for a modern state still struggling with what kind of place it intends to become.

[Last modified August 6, 2006, 01:16:01]