A populist Southern Democrat, Maddox came to prominence as a staunch segregationist,[1] when he refused to serve black customers in his Atlanta restaurant, the Pickrick, in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Maddox left school shortly before graduation to help support the family by taking odd jobs, including real estate and grocery.

[2] During World War II, Maddox worked at the Bell Aircraft factory in Marietta, Georgia producing the B-29 Superfortress bomber.

[3] In 1944, Maddox, along with his wife Hattie Virginia (née Cox, 1918–1997), used $400 in savings to open a combination grocery store-and-restaurant called Lester's Grill.

[2] Building on that success, the couple then bought property on Hemphill Avenue near the Georgia Institute of Technology campus to open up the Pickrick Restaurant.

Following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision of the United States Supreme Court, these restaurant ads began to feature the cartoon chickens commenting on the political questions of the day.

However, Maddox's refusal to adjust to changes following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 manifested itself when he filed a lawsuit to continue his segregationist policies.

[1] Maddox provides the following account of the events: Mostly customers, with only a few employees, voluntarily removed the twelve Pickrick Drumsticks, (a euphemism for pickaxe handles) from the nail kegs on each side of the large dining room fireplace.

During a trial for contempt of court on September 29, Maddox argued against the charges because he was no longer offering service to out-of-state travelers or integrationists.

Maddox ultimately closed his restaurant on February 7, 1965, rather than integrate it; he claimed that President Lyndon Johnson and communists put him out of business.

In 1962, Maddox ran for lieutenant governor as a Democrat, against Peter Zack Geer, a candidate with whom he shared segregationist and states' rights views.

In the following years, Maddox proclaimed himself a "Society of Liberty" martyr intent on opposing a central government which thwarted states' rights and gave special protection to minority groups.

According to one account, the former restaurateur's appeal transcended race to embrace a right-wing brand of "populism", picturing government, rather than big business, as the villain.

[12] Maddox quipped that he had been nominated despite having "no money, no politicians, no television, no newspapers, no Martin Luther King, no Lyndon Johnson, and we made it!"

He joked further that Johnson had been "the best campaign manager I've got even if he did put me out of business", a reference to the closing of the Pickrick Restaurant to avoid desegregation.

[13] Stunned Arnall supporters announced a write-in candidacy for the general election, insisting that Georgians must have the option of a moderate Democrat beside the conservatives Maddox and Callaway.

[14] Callaway won a plurality in the general election, becoming the first Republican gubernatorial candidate to top the polls in Georgia since the close of Reconstruction, and Maddox finished second.

[21] Maddox considered personally raising flags that had been placed at half-mast at the State Capitol after MLK's assassination and reportedly decided against doing so because news cameras were nearby.

[27] In the 1966 campaign, the Savannah Morning News forecast that as governor, Maddox would "tell off the federal government forty times a day, but four years after his inauguration, he would have accomplished little else".

Blackburn, a former U.S. representative, also noted that no accusation of corruption was made against Maddox, whose administration was characterized by economic development and the appointment of African Americans to state executive positions.

During a commercial break, fellow guest and former football player Jim Brown asked Maddox if he had "any trouble with the white bigots because of all the things you did for blacks".

[39][note 1] Fears had served time in prison for a drug offense before Maddox, as lieutenant governor, was able to assist him in obtaining a pardon.

[40] After Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down in 1983, with U.S. Representative Larry McDonald aboard, a special election was held to fill his seat in Congress.

The CCC, of which Maddox was a charter member, is considered by the Southern Poverty Law Center[46] and the Anti-Defamation League to be a white supremacist group.

[47] On June 25, 2003, after a fall while recuperating from intestinal surgery in an Atlanta hospice, Maddox died of complications from pneumonia and prostate cancer.

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.'"