Family Tradition

I picked the Sloppy Floyd State Park just outside Summerville, Georgia, sight unseen, based on the online reviews and its location on our route south. Only forty miles from Cloudland Canyon, it gave us a time-cushion as an easy-going intermediate rest-stop as we headed back south to meet our daughter and her family in Athens. The name Sloppy Floyd just didn’t evoke visions of a pristine campground, regardless of the on-line reviews, but it was on the way and we still had a week to kill before all our schedules aligned. Sloppy Floyd was a good solution to our timing problem.

But, Sloppy Floyd? Who was this guy anyway? Marjorie Taylor Greene, the controversial US Representative from Georgia’s 14th District, probably knows his history well. Her 14th District in northern Georgia includes Summerville and Chatooga County, and of course Sloppy Floyd State Park.

It all homogenizes into the same blend of conservative tonic when you realize Speaker of the House, James “Sloppy” Floyd, the park’s namesake, led the fight to prevent the first black legislator from being sworn in 1965. Julian Bond, later famous as a Civil Rights leader and head of the NAACP, was finally seated in the Georgia House in 1967 by order of the U.S. Supreme Court - after being elected two years earlier in 1965 - and Sloppy stormed out in protest.

Supposedly it wasn’t a race issue, but a Freedom of Speech case that has ramifications that actually apply to Ms. Greene. ‘Ol Sloppy led a House hearing that excluded Bond from being seated by a vote of 184 to 12, not because of race, they said, but because Mr. Bond made an anti-Vietnam war comment. According to an article in the November 2019 issue of Atlanta magazine, Mr. Bond said “"I don’t think that I, as a second-class citizen of the United States, have a requirement to support that war.”

Sloppy Floyd and his fellow representatives felt Julian Bond’s comments “were not consistent with a legislator’s oath of support for the Constitution,” and voted to prevent him from taking the oath of office. In response, Julian Bond filed a Federal Lawsuit to overturn the house decision. By a 2 to 1 vote, the three judge panel upheld the Georgia House decision to bar Mr. Bond. Undeterred, Julian took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, where all nine justices agreed Mr. Bond’s right to free speech had been violated. It was two years after his election when he was finally seated in the Georgia legislature and ‘Ol Sloppy stormed out.

‘Ol Marjorie hasn’t stormed out yet, but somehow I think she might someday, waving her Q-Anon flag as she goes. I can’t help but think someday, somewhere in a remote corner of Georgia, there may be a Marjorie Taylor Greene State Park.