You must be reading history from an alternate universe, where facts are interpreted in reverse.
Maddox was not a liberal.
Lester Maddox was a segregationist just like George Wallace and became governor of Georgia in 1966 based on public dissatisfaction with desegregation. He replaced a governor who was liberal.
https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/government-politics/lester-maddox-1915-2003
Plenty of libs were segregationists.
FDR, example given.
President Roosevelt organized and deployed a great Jim Crow Army to fight the Axis during WWII. My father was a WWII veteran, didn't see a single black guy in uniform during his 4 years in the Army, that's how pro-segregation FDR was. Mr. Hitler was having a real belly laugh at this. America was fighting him for his racism yet was just as racist.
No wonder why America wasn't taken seriously and it took so long and so many lives to defeat the national Socialists.