Transmogrification of the Old Time Southern Democrats to the Republican Party.

 

  A history lesson you won’t get on Fox News.

 

In the 1940’s and early 50’s, the main political power in the South was the Democratic Party.   My grandmother raised me, and her sister was married to Fielding Wright, who was the governor of the state of Mississippi from 1946 to 1952.   Even though politics was far from anything I was concerned with, it existed in my peripheral world.

 

President Truman had desegregated the military, and the powerful Southern political figures of that era were concerned about a possible move to desegregate the South.  In 1948, they came together in a common effort to oppose racial integration and to retain Jim Crow laws and the Southern racial segregation status quo.

 

Mississippi Governor Fielding Wright, Mississippi Senator John Stennis, Mississippi Senator Allen Eastland, and South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond were among the movers and shakers of this movement.   It was decided that if the Democratic Party introduced a platform of integration at their 1948 convention, the southern democrats would break away and form a third party.

 

As expected, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota made a speech urging the party to adopt an anti-segregationist plank, and thirty-five southern members walked out of the convention.

 

The States’ Rights Democratic Party (Dixiecrat) was formed with a party slogan of ‘Segregation Now, Segregation Forever!’  The party ran Strom Thurmond for President and Fielding Wright for Vice President.  

On Election Day, the Thurman-Wright ticket carried Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, receiving 1,169,021 popular votes and 39 electoral votes.

 

The defeat of the Dixiecrats was the defining point at which disenchanted southern Democrats began to change party affiliation.  Over the next twenty years, most southern, segregationist, white fundamentalist Christian Democrats were assimilated into the Republican Party

 

It is remarkable when you think about it: The Republican Party, once the party of Lincoln and champion of human rights, slowly became the party of the financial elite, white southern Christian fundamentalists, and covert racists, while the Democratic Party became the party of the middle class, the ethnic, and the poor.

Republicans can no longer call themselves the party of Lincoln.  Lincoln would not be welcome in today's Republican Party.    

 

the Ol’Buzzard