The supremacist police chief, Bull Connor, had a favorite in that 1961 race. He decided to secure the election of the man he wanted to win by framing the man he wanted to lose: he paid a black man to shake the opposing candidate’s hand in public as a photographer lay in wait. The story took up a full page in a local newspaper, and the opponent lost the election as Bull Connor knew he would. For white southerners, it was a “cardinal sin,” it was “harrowing,” wrote the historian Jason Sokol, “to call a black man ‘Mister’ or to shake hands with him.”
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