Floridian of His Century

Book excerpt: Six years after his election as a segregationist, Florida governor LeRoy Collins denounced racial discrimination as contrary to “moral, simple justice.” In 1991, the Florida House of Representatives eulogized Collins as the “Floridian of the Twentieth Century,” and today Collins is remembered as one of Florida’s outstanding governors. As champion against rural misrule in 1954 and as the voice of racial moderation in 1956, Collins won the two most important gubernatorial elections in Florida history. In Floridian of His Century, a political portrait of this controversial Southern governor, Martin Dyckman argues that Collins’s courageous moral leadership spared Florida the humiliation that befell other states under less enlightened leaders.