He served 38 years in the Senate and, earlier as governor, helped ease school desegregation efforts.
By Jerrold Schecter April 6 at 10:58 AM Ernest F. “Fritz” Hollings, who as South Carolina governor in the early 1960s oversaw the orderly desegregation of schools and then as a U.S. senator for 38 years was known for his attempts to balance the federal budget and for his sharp, often caustic tongue, died April 6. He was 97.
He also drew attention for the unpredictable candor with which he expressed himself in his deep Southern drawl. His Charleston accent was so thick that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a close friend and fellow Democrat, once jovially introduced him as the first non-English-speaking candidate for president.
The two South Carolinians took drastically different approaches to their jobs in the Senate, said Hastings Wyman Jr., founding editor of the Southern Political Report. “Thurmond, who wanted to push the South into the Republican column, painted with a broad brush and wasn’t terribly interested in lawmaking,” he said. “Hollings was a much more pragmatic legislator who cared about details and programs.
Winning term after term, Mr. Hollings became chairman of the Budget Committee, chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, and a senior member of the powerful Committee on Appropriations. In 1993, the NAACP lambasted him for saying of African delegates at an international trade conference in Switzerland that, “rather than eating each other, they’d just come up and get a good square meal in Geneva.” Mr. Hollings insisted that he wasjoking. Years earlier, he called civil rights leader Jesse Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition “the blackbow coalition.”
The jovial, impeccably tailored Mr. Hollings was a frequent traveler to Wall Street, Latin America and Europe, where he pitched investment in a nonunion state with a triple-A credit rating. In one marathon week in New York, he signed up 63 companies — including 17 at one lunch — to open plants in his home state.
Gantt, who years later became the first black mayor of Charlotte, N.C., and a Democratic Party power broker, registered at Clemson with no picketing or jeering soon after Mr. Hollings stepped down as governor. His early years in the Senate were marked by a high-profile war on hunger in South Carolina. His efforts includeda book called “The Case Against Hunger” . He encouraged the expansion of the federal food stamp program and helped sponsor legislation that established the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants and Children, commonly known as WIC.
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