Richard Russell of Georgia. “A Russell of the Russells of Georgia,” is what I titled my chapter on him because he was so proud of his heritage, proud of “the Old South,” a racist in the deepest, cruelest sense of the word, a man seething with hatred toward blacks. He was the leader of the really all-powerful “Southern Caucus,” the Southern Bloc in Congress that for literally decades had kept any meaningful civil rights legislation from passing.
