12 Facts About Bibb Graves

In 1900, Graves married Dixie Bibb, his first cousin, who eventually became Alabama's first female Senator.

Bibb Graves was a founding member of Bob Jones College's Board of Trustees and a personal friend of the founder, evangelist Bob Jones, Sr.

Bibb Graves died in Sarasota, Florida while preparing for another gubernatorial campaign.

Bibb Graves attended public school in Texas before returning to his home state to attend the University of Alabama, where he studied Civil Engineering.

Bibb Graves graduated in 1893, then briefly studied law at the University of Texas before transferring to Yale Law School, receiving a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1896.

In 1904, Graves ran for Congress in Alabama's Second Congressional District but lost to the incumbent Democratic congressman, Ariosto A Wiley.

Bibb Graves lost his first campaign for governor in 1922, but four years later, with the secret endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan, he was elected to his first term as governor.

Almost certainly Bibb Graves was the Exalted Cyclops of the Montgomery chapter of the Klan, but both Bibb Graves and US Supreme Court justice Hugo Black, another Alabama Klan member, were more opportunists than ideologues, politicians who used the temporary strength of the Klan to further their careers.

In 1937, when Black's ties to the Klan were debated in Congress, Bibb Graves noted his own previous membership as well, a membership that had been publicly revealed when he resigned from the organization in 1928.

Graves appointed his wife, Dixie Bibb Graves, to serve the remainder of Black's term.

Bibb Graves made many successful trips to Washington to secure funds for Alabama, which he called "plum-tree-shaking expeditions," and President Roosevelt appointed him to a national advisory committee on agriculture and to an inter-regional highway committee.

Bibb Graves has had multiple landmarks named after him, though since 2011, most have been renamed.