and prostate cancer. He and his wife Virginia are both interred at Arlington Memorial Park in Sandy Springs in northern Fulton County, Georgia. Due to a successful business career, Maddox was relatively wealthy when he died. Legacy After Maddox's death in 2003, Tom Murphy, the former Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, said of the former governor: "He had a reputation as a segregationist, but he told us he was not a segregationist, but that you should be able to associate with whoever you wanted. He went on to do more for African Americans than any governor of Georgia up until that time." This view, however, is not universally shared. In its obituary of the former governor, The New York Times called him an "arch segregationist"; to support this contention, the Times noted that his convictions included "the view that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites, that integration was a Communist plot, that segregation was somewhere justified in scripture and that a federal mandate to integrate [all-white] schools was 'ungodly, un-Christian and un-American.'" Despite this, the obituary notes that after becoming governor, Maddox "surprised many by hiring and promoting blacks in state government and by initiating an early release program for the state prison system". The Interstate Highway 75 bridge over the Chattahoochee River at the boundary of Cobb County (Vinings) and Fulton County (Atlanta), is named the "Lester and Virginia Maddox Bridge". Electoral history See also Conservative Democrat Dixiecrat References Notes Further reading Bruce Galphin, The Riddle of Lester Maddox (Atlanta: Camelot, 1968). Brad Rice, "Lester Maddox and the Politics of Populism," in Georgia Governors in an Age of Change: From Ellis Arnall to George Busbee, ed. Harold P. Henderson and Gary L. Roberts (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988). Bob Short, Everything Is Pickrick: The Life of Lester Maddox (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1999). External links Lester! from Creative Loafing, March 20, 1999 (with link to his personal rebuttal to the article) Entry in New Georgia Encyclopedia Oral History Interview with Governor Lester Maddox, March 7, 1986, Georgia's Political Heritage Program. https://dlg.usg.edu/record/uwg_phc_maddox2, April 17, 1986, Georgia's Political Heritage Program. Lester Maddox collection at the University of West Georgia Lester Maddox Photographs from the Atlanta History Center |- |- |- 1915 births 2003 deaths 20th-century American politicians 20th-century far-right politicians in the United States American Independent Party presidential nominees American restaurateurs American segregationists American white supremacists Baptists