you." I remember very distinctly walking up to her and standing there for 15 or 20 seconds, in honest doubt about whether I should drop those rocks which were worthless and take the cookies that my had prepared for me, which between her and me were very valuable.
Quite often, we have the same inclination in our everyday lives. We don't recognize that change can sometimes be very beneficial, although we fear it. Anyone who lives in the South looks back on the last 15 to 20 years with some degree of embarrassment, including myself. To think about going back to a county unity system, which deliberately cheated for generations certain white voters of this state, is almost inconceivable. To revert back or to forego the one man, one vote principle, we would now consider to be a horrible violation of the basic principles of justice and equality and fairness and equity.
The first speech I ever made in the Georgia Senate, representing the most conservative district in Georgia, was concerning the abolition of 30 questions that we had so proudly evolved as a subterfuge to keep black citizens from voting and which we used with a great deal of smirking and pride for decades or generations since the War between the States—questions that nobody could answer in this room, but which were applied to every black citizen that came to the Sumter County Courthouse or Webster County Courthouse and said, "I want to vote." I spoke in that chamber, fearful of the news media reporting it back home, but overwhelmed with a commitment to the abolition of that artificial barrier to the rights of an American citizen. I remember the thing that I used in my speech, that a black pencil salesman on the outer door of the Sumter County Courthouse could make a better judgment about who ought to be sheriff than two highly educated professors at Georgia Southwestern College.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was perhaps despised by many in this room because he shook up our social structure that benefited us, and demanded simply that black citizens be treated the same as white citizens, wasn't greeted with appropation and accolades by the Georgia Bar Association or the Alabama Bar Association. He was greeted with horror. Still, once that change was made, a very simple but difficult change, no one in his right mind would want to go back to circumstances prior to that juncture in the development of our Nation's society.
I don't want to go on and on, I'm part of it. But, the point I want to make to you is that we still have a long way to go. In every age or every year, we have a tendency to believe that we've come so far now, that there's no way to improve the present system. I'm sure when the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, they felt that was the ultimate in transportation. When the first atomic bomb was exploded, that was the ultimate development in nuclear physics, and so forth.
Well, we haven't reached the ultimate. But who's going to search the heart and soul of an organization like yours or a law school or state or nation and say, "What can we still do to restore equity and justice or to preserve it or to enhance it in this society?"
You know, I'm not afraid to make the change. I don't have anything to lose. But, as a farmer I'm not qualified to assess the characteristics of the 91 hundred inmates in the Georgia prisons, 50% of whom ought not to be there. They ought to be on probation or under some other supervision and assess what the results of previous court rulings might bring to bear on their lives.
I was in the Governor's Mansion for two years, enjoying the services of a very fine cook, who was a prisoner—a woman. One day she came to me, after she got over her two years of timidity, and said, "Governor, I would like to borrow $250.00 from you."
I said, "I'm not sure that a lawyer would be worth that much."
She said, "I don't want to hire a lawyer, I want to pay the judge."
I though it was a ridiculous statement for her; I felt that she was ignorant. But I found out that she wasn't. She had been sentenced by a Superior Court judge in the state, who still serves, to seven years or $750. She had raised, early in her prison career, $500. I didn't lend her the money, but I had Bill Harper, my legal aide, look into it. He found the circumstances were true. She was quickly released under a recent court ruling that had come down in the last few years.
I was down on the coast this weekend. I was approached by a woman who asked me to come by her home. I went by, and she showed me documents that indicated that her illiterate mother, who had a son in jail, had gone to the County Surveyor in that region and had borrowed $225 to get her son out of jail. She had a letter from the Justice of the Peace that showed that her mother had made a mark on a blank sheet of paper. They paid off the $225, and she has the receipts to show it. Then they started a 5-year program trying to get back the paper she signed, without success. They went to court. The lawyer that had originally advised her to sign the paper showed up as the attorney for the surveyor. She had put up 50 acres of land near the county seat as security. When she got to court she found that instead of signing a security deed, that she had signed a warranty deed. That case has already been appealed to the Supreme Court, and she lost.
Well, I know that the technicalities of the law that would permit that are probably justifiable. She didn't have a good lawyer. My heart feels and cries out that something ought to be analyzed, not just about the structure of government, judicial qualification councils and judicial appointment committees and eliminating the unsworn statement—those things are important. But they don't reach the crux of the point-that now we assign punishment to fit the criminal and not the crime.
You can go in the prisons of Georgia, and I don't know, it may be that poor people are the only ones who commit crimes, but I do know they are only ones who serve prison sentences. When Ellis MacDougall first went to Reidsville, he found people that had been in solitary confinement for ten years. We now have 500 misdemeanants in the Georgia prison system.
Well, I don't know the theory of law, but there is one other point I want to make, just for your own consideration. I think we've made great progress in the Pardons and Paroles Board since I've been in office and since we've reorganized the government. We have five very enlightened people there now. And on occasion they go out to the prison system to interview the inmates, to decide whether or not they are worthy to be released after they serve one-third of their sentence. I think
