Rise of The Dixiecrats

The Democratic National Convention of 1948 was characterized by division within the party over controversial new civil rights planks. The planks moved the country toward racial desegregation of schools and the workplace. The new planks proposed by Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota were unpopular with southern democrats who supported segregation and the right to associate with whomever one pleased. At the time President Harry S. Truman's own initiatives in the promotion of civil rights, which included the Committee on Civil Rights and the Fair Employment Practices Commission worked against the any compromise he was trying to strike to hold the together the New Deal Coalition that had been passed down to him from the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. The adoption of the new planks caused thirty-five southern democrats to leave the convention and form the States Rights Party, that be later became know as the Dixiecrats.

The Dixiecrats met in Birmingham, Alabama where they developed the platform below and nominated then Governor Strom Thurman of South Carolina as their presidential candidate.

The State Rights Party platform consisted of the following planks:

1. We believe that the Constitution of the United States is the greatest charter of human liberty ever conceived by the mind of man.

2. We oppose all efforts to invade or destroy the rights guaranteed by it to every citizen of this republic.

3. We stand for social and economic justice, which, we believe can be guaranteed to all citizens only by a strict adherence to our Constitution and the avoidance of any invasion or destruction of the constitutional rights of the states and individuals. We oppose the totalitarian, centralized bureaucratic government and the police nation called for by the platforms adopted by the Democratic and Republican Conventions.

4. We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race; the constitutional right to choose one's associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to learn one's living in any lawful way. We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, and the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program. We favor home-rule, local self-government and a minimum interference with individual rights.

5. We oppose and condemn the action of the Democratic Convention in sponsoring a civil rights program calling for the elimination of segregation, social equality by Federal fiat, regulations of private employment practices, voting, and local law enforcement.

6. We affirm that the effective enforcement of such a program would be utterly destructive of the social, economic and political life of the Southern people, and of other localities in which there may be differences in race, creed or national origin in appreciable numbers.

7. We stand for the check and balances provided by the three departments of our government. We oppose the usurpation of legislative functions by the executive and judicial departments. We unreservedly condemn the effort to establish in the United States a police nation that would destroy the last vestige of liberty enjoyed by a citizen.

8. We demand that there be returned to the people to whom of right they belong, those powers needed for the preservation of human rights and the discharge of our responsibility as democrats for human welfare. We oppose a denial of those by political parties, a barter or sale of those rights by a political convention, as well as any invasion or violation of those rights by the Federal Government. We call upon all Democrats and upon all other loyal Americans who are opposed to totalitarianism at home and abroad to unite with us in ignominiously defeating Harry S. Truman, Thomas E. Dewey and every other candidate for public office who would establish a Police Nation in the United States of America.

9. We, therefore, urge that this Convention endorse the candidacies of J. Strom Thurmond and Fielding H. Wright for the President and Vice-president, respectively, of the United States of America.

Thurman won four states, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina and received in excess of seven percent of the total vote. President Truman was re-elected, but the Dixiecrats made their point. The New Deal Coalition would be severely weakened and the struggle racial desegregation would continue for some time to come.