LeRoy Collins; Former Florida Governor Battled Discrimination

Former Florida Gov. LeRoy Collins, who fought and overcame many racist traditions in his native South, died Tuesday.

The Florida House of Representatives immediately passed a unanimous resolution honoring him as “Floridian of the Century,” then observed a moment of silence.

Collins, 82, Florida’s governor from 1955 to 1961, was diagnosed as having lung cancer in 1989.

“I don’t let it absorb me in any way that is discouraging,” Collins said of the disease.

Collins chaired the 1960 Democratic National Convention and was considered one of the first “New South” politicians.

Although history has focused on Collins’ personal initiatives in helping blacks, he also moved Florida into the modern era by persuading lawmakers to begin a junior college system and create a statewide public television network.

He stunned segregationists in 1956 by invoking an obscure constitutional provision to adjourn the Legislature, preventing passage of segregationist bills. The next year, Collins vetoed a “last resort” bill allowing schools to close to avoid integration.

“Any rational man who looks out at the horizon and sees the South of the future segregated is simply seeing a mirage,” he said in 1963. “Above all else it is the moral duty of our generation to plow under racial injustice everywhere in the United States.”

One of six children born to a Tallahassee grocer and his wife, Collins spent nearly all of his life in this capital city.

He left for a few years in the 1960s, first as president of the National Broadcasters Assn., then as head of the Community Relations Service, a national peacekeeping agency he organized at the request of President Lyndon B. Johnson after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.