- Title
- Public addresses and papers of Robert Gregg Cherry: Governor of North Carolina, 1945-1949
-
-
- Date
- 1951
-
-
- Creator
- ["Cherry, Robert Gregg, 1891-1957."]
-
- Place
- ["North Carolina, United States"]
-
Public addresses and papers of Robert Gregg Cherry: Governor of North Carolina, 1945-1949
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xl
Robert Gregg Cherry
were leaders in the affairs of Halifax and adjoining counties.
Personal and political friends of the governor served as spokes¬
men. The pressure was great. But Governor Cherry faced that
powerful delegation and gave them a firm “No” for an answer.
And then he backed up his one-word answer with quite a little
speech in which he said that men who did not have more control
and a better temperament than these men had demonstrated
could not and would not be given the power of arrest over their
fellow men.
The fourth example of the Cherry fortitude that should be
cited here has to do with the manner in which he faced his fel¬
low Southern governors in 1948 and told them he would have no
part in the move they were starting toward the formation of the
Dixiecrat party — an abortive, tragic, and silly Southern “seces¬
sion.” In that he stood alone, but he showed there too that he
actually thrived under pressure and wasn’t afraid of any threat
or suggestion of reprisal. Governor Cherry was never known to
do the popular thing — just because it would be popular. On the
other hand there was always manifestation of deliberate thought
and directness of action. Maybe it was something he learned
in the trenches of France, but he was always superbly cool
under fire.
Leaders of the Democratic party, in North Carolina and
throughout the rest of the nation, very properly have credited
Gregg Cherry with saving that party from a major division, a
serious rupture, and perhaps a route that would have removed
it from America’s political scene as a dominant party.
Dissatisfaction developed among Southern Democrats in the
earlier days of Truman, a political unhappiness that finally
spewed up into the ineffective Dixiecrat party that split away
from the Democrats in some Southern states. The growing un¬
happiness in the South over how things were being handled from
Washington fanned itself into a flame when President Truman
came forth with his so-called Civil Rights program in 1947. The
South blew a fuse.
An early reaction was the calling of a special session of the
Southern Governors’ Conference at Washington. Attorney Gen¬
eral Howard McGrath, then chairman of the National Demo¬
cratic party and the man credited with inspiring the Civil Rights
program, agreed to meet with the Dixie governors. The titular
heads of the party in the South were to face the National Chair¬
man and have this business out. They did. And Chairman Me-
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