ATLANTA, June 25 (UPI) -- Former segregationist and one-time governor of Georgia, Lester Maddox is dead in Atlanta at the age of 87.
Family members confirmed his death Wednesday in a statement released through Gov. Sonny Perdue's office.
Maddox was a born showman, selling fried chicken and voicing the reaction of whites to desegregation with equal gusto. He sold souvenir copies of the pick handles infamously used to drive would-be black customers from his restaurant.
He closed the restaurant rather than serve blacks.
It was largely an accident of the turbulent desegregation era that Maddox became governor in 1967, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Maddox, the only Atlantan elected Georgia's governor, served from 1967 to 1971. He might have been elected to a second term had the state constitution then allowed governors to succeed themselves.
He had been battling cancer since 1983, and developed pneumonia recently.
