A one-hour documentary about former North Carolina Gov. Terry Sanford's role in the emergence of progressive politics in the South will premiere on television stations nationwide at 9 p.m. April 4.
In North Carolina, UNC-TV will follow its broadcast of Thomas Lennon's film, "Terry Sanford and the New South," with an hour-long tribute to Sanford, titled "Terry Sanford Life & Legacy."
At Duke University, where Sanford served as president for 16 years, the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy will screen the documentary April 4 in several lecture halls, and the public is invited to attend.
The 9 p.m. screening will be preceded by the showing of a panel discussion about Sanford, which was taped at last year's Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and moderated by former PBS and CNN anchor Judy Woodruff. Panelists were:
-- James B. Hunt Jr., former governor of North Carolina (1977-1985 and 1993-2001);
-- Al Hunt, executive editor of Bloomberg News, Washington, D.C.;
-- Hodding Carter III, professor of leadership and public policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; former president and CEO of the Knight Foundation;
-- Dan Blue, a member of the North Carolina House of Representatives;
-- Filmmaker Lennon, who has won two national Emmys, two George Foster Peabody awards, the duPont-Columbia, an Academy Award nomination and many other awards.
"Terry Sanford and the New South" features interviews with vice presidential candidate John Edwards, former Gov. James B. Hunt, civil rights leader Vernon Jordan and Sanford's wife, Margaret Rose Sanford. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer narrates the film.
"During my campaign for president and vice president I was asked a number of times who my political hero was," said John Edwards in "Terry Sanford and the New South." "And my answer was Terry Sanford. Very few people outside of North Carolina knew who I was talking about -- [b]ut that's because his story hasn't been told."
Once in office, Sanford charmed and cajoled an all-white, mostly rural, deeply conservative legislature as he pushed his vision for a New South. In 1962-63, as the civil rights movement came to a boil, Sanford grew increasingly outspoken. The film charts the emergence of this back-slapping, cigar-smoking Southern white politician as a forceful agent of racial change. Four days after Ala. Gov. George Wallace famously called for "Segregation now -- segregation forever," Sanford replied, "The time has come for American citizens to quit unfair discrimination, and to give the Negro a full chance to earn a decent living for his family and to contribute high standards for himself and for all men."
By the time Sanford's term ended, he'd delivered IBM to North Carolina, waged war on poverty, hiked the minimum wage and created a model for Head Start.
After he left office, he forged a new career in education as president of Duke, where he created the school's public policy program. He later served as a U.S. senator (1987-1993) and launched two failed bids for the U.S. presidency.
"Terry Sanford and the New South" is a production of Thirteen/WNET New York, co-produced in association with Duke University and the Center for Documentary Studies, and in association with Thomas Lennon Films and UNC-TV.