“They’re pulling out all the old classics for this one,” said Gordon Harvey, a history professor at Jacksonville State University in Alabama. While Folsom railed against the elite-owned “lyin’ newspapers,” much like Mr. Moore and right-wing populists today, he championed women and blacks along with poor whites. “When you look at his followers,” said John Knight, a black Alabama state representative who grew up in segregated Montgomery, “they’re the same people that were energized by Wallace.”The same people are outraged, too. Thomas T. Gallion III, a Montgomery lawyer whose father was the state’s attorney general, voiced the often unstated perspective of Alabama’s elite as to why Mr. Moore was viable. “‘He’s an embarrassment to the state of Alabama following in a long line of embarrassments,’” Mr. Griffin reported the friend as saying.

Source: New York Times December 09, 2017 20:03 UTC