The short, futile run of the Dixiecrat party

The Dixiecrats' futile run for the presidency in 1948 was a political footnote – but it signaled big changes to come.

The short-lived party boosted an ambitious politician named Strom Thurmond, helped unravel decades of Democratic control in the South, and heralded years of tenacious, violent Southern backlash to civil rights.

Now the pro-segregation offshoot of the Democratic Party has been invoked again in national politics, after Senate GOP leader Trent Lott's warm embrace of Thurmond's quixotic bid for the presidency 54 years ago.

Nine out of every 10 voters in Lott's home state of Mississippi chose the segregation ticket of Thurmond and his running mate, then-Mississippi Gov. Fielding Wright.

Lott's words at a 100th birthday celebration for Thurmond – "and if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either" – threw new light on an pivotal chapter in American political history.

The Dixiecrats, officially called the States Rights Democratic Party, were a response to the national Democratic Party's adoption of a civil-rights plank to its platform. Southern delegates, with Thurmond at the head, walked out of the national party's convention.

"It was just a terrible moment," said former South Carolina Gov. John West, who was a law student and war veteran when Thurmond, then his governor, stomped out.

"There was a tremendous emotional fear among the white community that integration would mean white girls dating black men, amalgamation of the races ... the feeling was, I hate to say it, overwhelming, if not unanimous among the white community."

The Democratic split occurred in the midst of increasing pressure following World War II to take action on civil rights.

Black men returned from military service with new ambitions, while registration drives throughout the South, backed by federal court rulings, sought to get more blacks to vote. Poll taxes and other obstacles blocked black voters in many states.

At the same time, there was a wave of horrific racial violence across the South, said Kari Frederickson, history professor at the University of Alabama and author of "The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968."

President Harry S. Truman wanted to court black votes, and "was also quite repulsed by the violence, particularly toward men in uniform," Frederickson said. Truman addressed Congress on civil rights, and then the party adopted a civil-rights plank.

The Dixiecrats never expected to win the presidency, just to deny an electoral vote victory to either Truman or the Republican candidate, New York Gov. Thomas Dewey, which would let the House of Representatives choose the president.

But they didn't come close. Thurmond won only Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana and Alabama for a total of 39 electoral votes.

He captured 56 percent of the white vote in the Deep South – the states he won plus Georgia – but only 12 percent of the white vote in the rest of the old Confederacy, said Merle Black, political science professor at Emory University.

Still, Thurmond's campaign weakened the hold national Democrats had held on the South since the Civil War. White conservatives slowly began to vote for Republicans for president and then other offices.

The race also gave Thurmond important political experience, and deep support at home. He won a write-in election for Senate in 1954, where for years he was a strident opponent of civil rights legislation, once filibustering a 1957 civil rights bill for 24 hours and 18 minutes – still the nation's record.

He changed, however, with the nation's racial politics, becoming the first Southern senator to hire a black aide, supporting the appointment of a black Southern federal judge and voting to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday.

The paragraph I bolded is an important one. I don't think many Northerners have any idea how or why Southerners felt the way they did 50 years ago.

Northerners have generally lived in a society that is 90%+ white. What minorities lived in the north, then as now, were generally in run-down portions of the major cities that were studiously avoided by most whites. They had little contact with blacks, and even though most northern whites shared southern white's social views (and most still do if our housing, marital, and schooling patterns tell us anything), they like to feel better about themselves, and think that they are not discriminatory or bigoted.

Living in such a way, it is easy to look over ones shoulder and chastise the Southern whites for literally living in fear of the Southern blacks. The Southern white has always lived mixed among the blacks, with the blacks making up 1/3 to 1/2 of the population in various areas. Because of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, with the whites, rich and poor, being used to keep the blacks down, many blacks have always been keen to lunge at the white's throat down south and give it a good throttling or two while crying out "How does it feel now with the roles reversed!"

The fear of revenge and of losing ones identity to racial amalgamation is incredibly strong when social positions have been based upon centuries of subjagation of one group by the other.

When the northern white came in and started chastising the southern white for living as he did, the southern whites en masse literally viewed this as a threat to their very existence. The political reaction was entirely understandable and predicatable.

The irony of history is that many blacks moved to the north, and in doing so, exposed the rampant hypocrisy of the self-righteous white northerner when attempts have been made to really integrate neighborhoods and schools. Northerner whites have never accepted this as a possible outcome, let alone a desirable one. The list of truly integrated northern neighborhoods can be counted on one hand, and include no more than a few hundred thousand whites.

While speaking as a white person of both southern and northern heritage, my perception, and I think it is shared by many blacks, is that the southern white in general might have a cruder approach to race and integration in general, and there will always be some small fraction of the populace with KKK sympathies down there, and all the rest of 383 years of racial baggage too, the northern white is much more bigoted in actual life. Huge numbers of southern whites had black maids or nannies or household help of one kind or another, and live next door to black neighbors, and so have always developed friendships and respect across racial lines. The same cannot be said of northern whites, and most simply couldn't conceive of ever doing these things.

If you don't believe it, move a handful of black families into an all-white neighborhood up north, and watch what happens over a span of about 5-7 years. Like say Canarsie in Brooklyn, or Harvey outside Chicago, or Crescentville and Summerdale in Philadelphia. Or Lewsiton, Maine, more recently in the news.

In this vein, it is amusing that the most self-righteous white inveighers against Lott here on this board and in the political world are from such "diverse" locales as New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The marginalization and distaste towards the small black (and other minority) populations in those states was breathtaking to witness, when I lived in Lowell, MA for two years.

Canarsie is about 40% African American and Caribbean American. Hit the old Hagstom's Map and find another 'hood.

Crescentville and Summerdale are about 40% black now. They were about 5% black in 1990, just like Canarsie. In another ten years, they will be 80% black.

Northern whites have shown repeatedly that they will not live long in a neighborhood with more than a few blacks.

Oh, and BTW, the 2000 Census shows Canarsie has 85,055 residents, of whom, 13,398 are white and 57,319 are black. By my math, that is 67.39% black, and 15.7% white. In 1990, the were 66,177 residents of Canarsie, including 45,007 whites, and 11,701 blacks. The blacks were concentrated into 9 of the 34 census tracts that make up Canarsie, mostly in the northeast corner of the neighborhood - 950, 954, 974, 982, 986, 988, 1016, and 1034 where 11,264 blacks outnumbered their 9,367 white neighbors. In the rest of Canarsie 35,640 whites were the vast majority of the total population of 40,986 people. Most of the minorities in that area were Asians or Hispanics who claimed white racial classification. Maybe you should check up on the Census. With the rate at which whites were leaving Canarsie, it is likely that only about 6500 are left living there now.

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