about his first campaign. He dropped in on a farm and introduced himself as a Republican candidate. And as he tells it, the farmer's eyes lit up, and then he said, "Wait till I get my wife. We've never seen a Republican before." And a few minutes later he was back with his wife, and they asked Prentiss if he wouldn't give them a speech. Well, he looked around for kind of a podium, something to stand on, and then the only thing available was a pile of that stuff that the late Mrs. Truman said it had taken her thirty-five years to get Harry to call "fertilizer." So, he stepped up on that and made his speech. And apparently he won them over. And they told him it was the first time they'd ever heard a Republican. And he says, "That's okay. That's the first time I've ever given a speech from a Democratic platform." Walker relinquished his House seat after only one term. He instead challenged U.S. Senator James Eastland. He ran well to Eastland's right and accused the veteran senator of being too friendly with US President Lyndon Johnson and of not doing enough to block integration-friendly judges in his position as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. With 105,652 votes, Walker polled 26.7 percent at the general election. His supporters included blacks in southwestern Mississippi, which came as a surprise because of Walker's open support for segregation. Black voters had entered the political process under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and carried Claiborne and Jefferson Counties for Walker in protest of Eastland as a "Democratic Regular." Years later, Wirt Yerger, the chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party in the 1960s, noted that Walker's decision to relinquish his House seat after one term for the vagaries of a Senate race against the powerful Eastland was "very devastating" to the growth of the Republican Party in Mississippi. In 1966, state Representative Lewis McAllister of Meridian, the first Republican elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives since Reconstruction, sought to hold Walker's House seat for the Republican, but victory went to fellow State Representative Gillespie V. "Sonny" Montgomery, also of Meridian, who held the seat for 30 years. Walker tried to unseat Montgomery in 1968 but got only thirty percent of the vote. When Walker again ran for the Senate against Eastland in 1972, as an Independent, rather