Atlanta ? Lester Maddox, who was elected one of the last of the South’s fist-shaking segregationist governors in 1966 after he and his friends used pick handles and a gun to scare blacks away from his fried-chicken restaurant, died Wednesday at 87.

Maddox never backed down from his stance on segregation, even after Alabama’s George Wallace and many of the other hard-line Southern governors eventually said they were wrong to fight integration.

“I think forced segregation was wrong. I think it was just as wrong to force integration,” he told The Associated Press in 1996. And if he had it to do over again, he said, “I’d fight even harder.”

“That puts a stain on the legacy,” said state Rep. Tyrone Brooks, a civil rights veteran.

Maddox served as governor from 1967 to 1971 after being elected as something of a fluke in a disputed contest that had to be decided by the Legislature. Despite his views on integration, he was more moderate as governor than most expected, appointing more blacks to key positions than any of his predecessors.

“In spite of all that, he couldn’t shake the yoke of racism and segregation,” Brooks said. “If Lester had said, ‘I was wrong,’ I believe the vast majority of African-Americans would have said, ‘OK, we forgive you.”‘

Maddox had battled cancer since 1983 and cracked two ribs earlier this month when he fell at an assisted-living home. He later developed pneumonia and died in an Atlanta hospice.

The flamboyant restaurant owner often seemed more caricature than flesh. His slick pate and thick glasses were fodder for cartoonists, and he was known for quaint sayings and outrageous gestures like riding a bicycle backward.

“How you, chief?” was one customary greeting. Another: “It’s great to be alive. A lot of folks aren’t, you know.”

Lester Maddox, who closed his Pickrick restaurant in Atlanta in a refusal to integrate it, autographs a Pickrick

A high school dropout born in a working-class section of Atlanta, Maddox gained national attention in 1964 when he brandished a pistol and chased black protesters from his Pickrick restaurant the day after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law. Whites from his restaurant chased the protesters with pick handles. Maddox closed and then sold the Pickrick rather than serve blacks.

He would adopt the pick handle as his political symbol during his gubernatorial campaign and thereafter, and sold souvenir picks and axes.

Maddox’s showmanship and his anti-integration stance won him a following in Atlanta, where he made two unsuccessful bids for mayor.

He captured the Democratic nomination for governor in 1966, despite being written off by moderates and liberals as a colorful crackpot.

In the general election, he trailed Republican Howard H. “Bo” Callaway, but write-in votes for other candidates assured that neither received the required majority.

That threw the election to the Democrat-dominated Legislature, which picked Maddox.