Earl Buford Ellington

Background

Earl Buford Ellington was born on June 27, 1907 in Lexington, Mississippi. He was the son of Abner Earl Ellington, a farmer, and Cora Ophelia Grantham.

Education

After graduating from Holmes County Agricultural High School, Ellington attended Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, sporadically between 1926 and 1929.

Career

Returning to his home county after leaving college for the last time, Ellington edited a weekly newspaper in Durant, Mississippi.

In 1931, Ellington moved to Tennessee, the state in which he built his political career. For eight years, he sold farm equipment for International Harvester Company of Memphis.

In 1939, he purchased a general store in Verona, Tennessee, and began to acquire farmland in the surrounding area. Ellington became active in local politics, and in 1946, he served as campaign manager for Joe L. Evins, the successful Democratic candidate for the U. S. House of Representatives.

In 1948, Ellington ran for office for the first time, winning a two-year term as a representative from Marshall County in the Tennessee General Assembly. Simultaneously, he worked as a field representative for the Tennessee Farm Bureau Federation Service Program and as manager of the Tennessee Farm Bureau Insurance Service.

In his jobs with the farm bureau, a powerful force in Tennessee politics, he traveled the state, organizing an insurance sales force. He also laid the groundwork for his emergence into the statewide political arena. Managing the successful campaign of gubernatorial candidate Frank Clement in 1952, Ellington won the position of chairman of the Democratic State Executive Committee the same year.

In 1953, Governor Clement named him state agriculture commissioner; he served in this office until 1958, when he began his own campaign for governor.

Ellington won the Democratic primary in August 1958 and was elected governor over weak Republican and independent opposition in November.

Upon leaving the governor's mansion in 1963, Ellington was appointed to a vice-presidency in the Louisville and Nashville Railroad.

In 1965, his old friend, President Lyndon Johnson, called him to Washington to be director of the Office of Emergency Planning and to serve informally as the president's liaison with the nation's governors.

On January 15, 1966, Ellington resigned the federal post to return to Tennessee to run for a second term as governor. In an arrangement that some would call "leapfrog government, " he would seek again to succeed his political associateFrank Clement, who had succeeded him in turn in the governor's mansion.

Ellington easily won election to his second term, and he took office on January 16, 1967. Civil rights remained a focus of public attention in Ellington's second gubernatorial effort.

During the 1966 campaign, Ellington recanted his previous support for segregation, and early in his term he appointed the first black to the Tennessee governor's cabinet. He also established the Tennessee Commission on Human Relations to work toward dismantling the racial policies of the past.

When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. , was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, Ellington mobilized the National Guard to maintain order and issued a statement praising Dr. King and his efforts to end discrimination.

Ellington's success in his second term was limited by a combination of his own ill health and political changes in Tennessee's political landscape. Traditionally, the governor had dominated the legislative process; but by the time Ellington began his second term, reapportionment of the legislature had transferred political power from rural areas, where Clement and Ellington were strong, to the cities.

National events, furthermore, had turned the tide in favor of the Republican party to such an extent that to Ellington's chagrin, in 1968, Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey won only 28 percent of the vote in Tennessee, despite Ellington's active support.

Ellington himself was politically crippled in the same year when Republicans won control of the state's house of representatives. He was succeeded, in 1971, by Winfield Dunn, Tennessee's first Republican governor in fifty years.

Ellington reportedly advised his successor, "It's no fun the second time. " Ellington showed little interest in politics after his second term and spent most of his time thereafter in Florida.

He died of an apparent heart attack on a golf course in Boca Raton.

Achievements

• As governor, Ellington focused his attention on reorganizing the state government, maintaining a balanced budget without increasing taxes, and developing the state's industrial base. His Reorganization Act of 1959 reduced the number of state officials reporting to the governor from over seventy to a mere eighteen, primarily by bringing independent boards and commissions into the departments of state government. Ellington made numerous industry-recruiting trips in the North, and his efforts paid off in rapid industrialization, new jobs, and rising tax revenues without tax increases; in 1959, unemployment in Tennessee reached an all-time low. He also established the Tennessee Commission on Human Relations to work toward dismantling the racial policies of the past. The Ellington Agricultural Center, the headquarters of the Tennessee Department of Agriculture, is named in honor of Governor Ellington. A golf course at Henry Horton State Park and buildings on the campuses of Tennessee Technological University, the University of Memphis, and the University of Tennessee at Martin were also named in his honor.

Politics

The state constitution prohibited Clement, who had already served two terms, from serving a third consecutive term. He supported Ellington, despite their apparent disagreement on civil rights, one of the major issues of the day.

After the U. S. Supreme Court had declared segregated schools unconstitutional in 1954, Clement, a moderate, had facilitated the end of racial segregation in some Tennessee school systems.

Ellington, on the other hand, proclaimed himself "an old-fashioned segregationist and states' righter" and promised to close any public school forced to integrate.

Despite his campaign rhetoric, as governor from January 19, 1959, to January 15, 1963, Ellington obstructed not school desegregation but rather the efforts of die-hard segregationists to adopt the extremist policies of some other southern states.

And while few black children actually enrolled in formerly all-white schools, under the Ellington administration school desegregation continued in Tennessee without the violence that occurred elsewhere.

Views

Quotations: "I would go to school for a quarter, and then get out and work for a quarter. "

"I didn't get to finish college. Times were hard then, and I did a little of everything from picking up laundry to delivering papers. "

"It's no fun the second time. "

Connections

On December 20, 1929, Elington married Catherine Ann Cheek, a school teacher from Tennessee.  They had two children.  

Father:

Abner Earl Ellington

Mother:

Cora Ophelia Grantham

Wife:

Catherine Ann Cheek

Daughter:

Ann Ellington

Son:

John Ellington