On Sunday, Aug. 18 at 5 p.m., longtime Charlotte Observer reporter and editor John Drescher talks openly with North Carolina Bookwatch host D.G. Martin about his new book chronicling the successful campaign that shook North Carolina and changed southern politics forever “Triump of Good Will: How Terry Sanford Beat a Champion of Segregation and Reshaped the South.”

In the spring of 1960, North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Terry Sanford invented the modern way to win a southern election – emphasizing better schools, more economic development and, most dramatically, improved race relations.

Sanford’s political strategies would go on to influence the campaigns of Dixie candidates from Jim Hunt’s in North Carolina to Bill Clinton’s in Arkansas.

Six years after the 1954 Brown decision, rendering segregation in public schools illegal, white voters across the south rebelled against the ruling by voting for more racially conservative politicians.

Many argue today that those who lived through the 1960 gubernatorial primary between segregationist I. Beverly Lake and racial moderate Terry Sanford would never forget it. On this episode of Bookwatch, Drescher argues that as hard to forget as this election was for many who lived through it, the issues behind the election of 1960 not only signify a vital turning point for North Carolina politics, but remain a constant reminder of the south’s troubled racial past.

“In the 1960 election, all the rest of the South was going with the strong segregationists and North Carolina had to decide what path it was going to choose,” says Drescher. “By choosing a different path [through the election of Terry Sanford], my premise in this book is that it made an awful lot of difference.”

Through Sanford’s liberalizing of North Carolina elections, the new governor not only brought the Tar Heel State into the national mainstream, but also set into motion a legacy for partisan politics that exists in North Carolina even today.

Charlotte native John Drescher is currently the managing editor of The State in Columbia, S. C.