Terry Sanford and the New South

By February of 1960, Terry Sanford had been working to win the governorship of North Carolina for the better part of a decade. He had dreamt of the job most of his adult life. But when four young black men sat down at a Woolworth counter in the city of Greensboro in his home state and demanded to be served, their actions put him in the most excruciating dilemma. To support them would be to commit political suicide; to condemn them would be to violate his most basic principles.

To remain silent was impossible. “I knew the lines of history were intersecting right there,” Sanford would say later of his fateful campaign for the governorship and his single term in office.

Terry Sanford and the New South, by award-winning filmmaker Thomas Lennon, examines how Sanford pushed his vision for the New South, winning major new programs in education and economic investment and influencing progressive southern politics that helped set the political stage for Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. The documentary, narrated by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer, features insights from presidential hopeful John Edwards, former Governor Jim Hunt, former Clinton White House aide Vernon Jordan and Sanford’s late wife, Margaret Rose Sanford.

Instead of aligning himself with segregationists like Alabama governor George Wallace, Terry Sanford struck his own path. Never radical, always cunning, Sanford helped forge the New South with progressive politics and a singular, optimistic vision. By the time Sanford’s four-year term ended, he’d broken rank to back a northeastern Catholic for president, delivered IBM to North Carolina, waged war on poverty, hiked the minimum wage and created a model for Head Start. Before Jimmy Carter, before Bill Clinton, there was Terry Sanford.

“During my campaign for president and vice president I was asked a number of times who my political hero was. And my answer was Terry Sanford,” says John Edwards in Terry Sanford and the New South. “Very few people outside of North Carolina knew who I was talking about … but that’s because his story hasn’t been told.”

In the midst of his own campaign, Sanford compounded his political risks by backing John F. Kennedy instead of fellow southerner Lyndon B. Johnson for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. Sanford calculated that while supporting Kennedy would likely cost him half the margin of victory in his own campaign, he would nevertheless win and that helping Kennedy would pay huge dividends to North Carolina and to him personally for years to come.  

 Once in office, Sanford charmed and cajoled an all-white, mostly rural, deeply conservative legislature as he pushed his vision for a New South, winning major new programs in education and economic investment. In 1962-63, as the civil rights movement came to a boil through the South, Sanford grew increasingly outspoken. The film charts the emergence of this back-slapping, cigar-smoking Southern white politician as a forceful agent of racial change. Four days after Wallace famously called for “Segregation now … segregation forever,” Sanford replied, “The time has come for American citizens to quit unfair discrimination, and to give the Negro a full chance to earn a decent living for his family and to contribute high standards for himself and for all men.”

 By the time he left the governor’s mansion, Sanford’s progressive reputation was secure. But he was only 47 years old, vigorous and restless. He presided over Duke University while making two failed bids for the White House.

“He thought that he would be the first modern Southern president from the really old South,” says Vernon Jordan in Terry Sanford and the New South. “That’s what Terry Sanford wanted. And it was never to be

Bitterly disappointed, Sanford nevertheless refutes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous assertion that there are no second acts in American lives. He would find a major second career, and personal fulfillment, as an educator. While president of Duke University, Sanford launched an innovative public policy analysis program to help educate and train future government and business leaders.

Sanford, who served as a U.S. senator from 1987 to 1993, died in 1998. His wife of 55 years, Margaret Rose Sanford, often credited as a political force in her own right, died August 26, 2006. She watched the film with her family in a private screening when it premiered at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, in April 2006.

Terry Sanford and the New South is a production of Thirteen/WNET New York, co-produced in association with Duke University and The Center for Documentary Studies, and in association with Thomas Lennon Films and UNC-TV.

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