States' Rights Democratic Party
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The States' Rights Democratic Party was a segregationist American political party founded in 1948 to protect bigotry and oppression "states' rights." Members of the party were referred to as "Dixiecrats." The party was formed by a number of Southern Democrats in response to the passage of a platform including civil rights at the 1948 Democratic National Convention and Harry Truman's desegregation of the military. They ran Strom Thurmond in that year's election and he picked up the states of South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana with a total of 2.41% of the popular vote.[1] The party folded after the 1948 election, though the Dixiecrat moniker stuck in reference to pro-segregation Democrats. Thurmond and other Dixiecrats would go on to work within the Democratic Party to block and filibuster later civil rights legislation until many converted to the Republican Party in the 1960s thanks to the southern strategy.
In the 1964 national Democratic convention, pro-civil rights Mississippi Democrats formed their own branch called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.[2]
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[edit] See also
[edit] Dixiecrats we have articles on
[edit] External links
- Party platform
- Dixiecrats, New Georgia Encyclopedia
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ US Election Atlas: 1948 election results
- ↑ Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), University of Southern Mississippi