Such was the lesson of the King phone calls in the campaign, and the advisers were shrewd enough to recognize another sign hidden among the election results. In Fayette County, Tennessee—one of the two counties in Tennessee where John Doar of the Eisenhower Justice Department had sued to protect Negroes—twelve hundred new Negro votes helped turn the county Republican for the first time since Reconstruction. This landslide, going against the general Kennedy landslide, was interpreted to mean that Negroes in the South would reward those who helped them gain the right to vote.
