John H Buchanan Jr

In 1964, John H. Buchanan Jr., a Southern Baptist minister and Goldwater Republican, was elected to Congress as part of the Deep South’s backlash to the civil rights agenda of the Johnson administration. He was one of the first five Republicans, all elected that year, to be sent by Alabama to the House of Representatives in the 20th century. But by 1980, Mr. Buchanan had left his constituents so far behind that he lost the Republican primary. He was denied renomination for a ninth term in Congress by a former John Birch Society member whose evangelical supporters had been galvanized by the rise of the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. Mr. Buchanan never returned to Alabama to live. He morphed politically into a spokesman for the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way — the Moral Majority’s antithesis — which the television producer Norman Lear founded in 1981. Mr. Buchanan was chairman of the organization’s board from 1982 to 1990. He later formally became a Democrat. He died on March 5 in Rockville, Md., at 89. His daughter Lynn Buchanan said the cause was complications of dementia. Representative from Alabama; born in Paris, Tenn., March 19, 1928; served in the United States Navy 1945-1946; graduated from Samford University, Birmingham, Ala., in 1949, did graduate work at the University of Virginia, and graduated from the Southern Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., in 1957; served as pastor of churches in Tennessee, Virginia, and Alabama for ten years; unsuccessful candidate for election to the Eighty-eighth Congress in 1962; served as a supply pastor in the Birmingham, Ala., area and as director of finance for the Alabama Republican Party, 1962-1964; elected as a Republican to the Eighty-ninth and to the seven succeeding Congresses (January 3, 1965-January 3, 1981); unsuccessful candidate for renomination in 1980 to the Ninety-seventh Congress; member, United States delegation to the United Nations, 1973 and 1984; member, United States delegation, United Nations Human Rights Committee, 1978-1980; chairman, Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education in the Department of Education, 1981-1983; board member, People for the American Way, 1982 to 2018; died on March 5, 2018, in Rockville, Md.