Dixiecrats Quotes

Looking back on the Dixiecrat challenge, Harry Truman—the man who won the four-way 1948 presidential campaign, triumphing over the segregationist Thurmond, the Progressive candidate Henry A. Wallace, and the Republican Thomas E. Dewey—once said: “You can’t divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can’t encourage people’s prejudices. You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.

The white nationalist, nativist politics that we see today were first imagined and applied by David Duke during the heyday of his Grand Wizardshop, and the time of my undercover Klan investigation. This hatred is never gone away, but has been reinvigorated in the dark corners of the internet, Twitter trolls, alt-right publications, and a nativist president in Trump. The Republican Party of the 19th century, being the party of Lincoln, was the opposition to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist domination insofar as America's newly freed Black slaves were concerned; it is my belief that the Republican Party of the 21st century finds a symbiotic connection to white nationalist groups like the Klan, neo-Nazis, skinheads, militias, and alt-right white supremacist thinking. Evidence of this began in the Lyndon Johnson administration with the departure of Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) to the Republican Party in protest of his civil rights agenda. The Republicans began a spiral slide to the far right that embrace all things abhorrent to nonwhites. David Duke twice ran for public office in Louisiana as a Democrat and lost. When he switched his affiliation to Republican, because he was closer in ideology and racial thinking to the GOP than to the Democrats, and ran again for the Louisiana House of Representatives, the conservative voters in his district rewarded him with a victory. In each case his position on the issues remain the same; white supremacist/ethno-nationalist endorsement of a race-centered rhetoric and nativist populism. What change were the voters. Democrats rejected Duke politics while Republicans embraced him.

Sometimes the transcript is not so hidden. Point Four of the 1948 platform of Strom Thurmond’s States’ Rights Democratic Party—the Dixiecrats—weaves together the public and private in a seamless and visible whole: “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 earn one’s living in any lawful way. We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, 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.” The Rise of Conservatism in America, 1945–2000: A Brief History with Documents, ed. Ronald Story and Bruce Laurie (Boston:

States’ Rights Democratic Party and ran a candidate to Truman’s right. They held a nominating convention in Birmingham during which Frank M. Dixon, a former governor of Alabama, said that Truman’s civil rights programs would “reduce us to the status of a mongrel, inferior race, mixed in blood, our Anglo-Saxon heritage a mockery.” The Dixiecrat platform rested on this statement: “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race.” As its candidate, the States’ Rights Party nominated South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond.45

we have much to learn from the struggles in Alabama and Mississippi in the early 1960s. In the spring of 1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. King launched a “fill the jails” campaign to desegregate downtown department stores and schools in Birmingham. But few local blacks were coming forward. Black adults were afraid of losing their jobs, local black preachers were reluctant to accept the leadership of an “Outsider,” and city police commissioner Bull Connor had everyone intimidated. Facing a major defeat, King was persuaded by his aide, James Bevel, to allow any child old enough to belong to a church to march. So on D-day, May 2, before the eyes of the whole nation, thousands of schoolchildren, many of them first graders, joined the movement and were beaten, fire-hosed, attacked by police dogs, and herded off to jail in paddy wagons and school buses. The result was what has been called the “Children’s Miracle.” Inspired and shamed into action, thousands of adults rushed to join the movement. All over the country rallies were called to express outrage against Bull Connor’s brutality. Locally, the power structure was forced to desegregate lunch counters and dressing rooms in downtown stores, hire blacks to work downtown, and begin desegregating the schools. Nationally, the Kennedy administration, which had been trying not to alienate white Dixiecrat voters, was forced to begin drafting civil rights legislation as the only way to forestall more Birminghams. The next year as part of Mississippi Freedom Summer, activists created Freedom Schools because the existing school system (like ours today) had been organized to produce subjects, not citizens. People in the community, both children and adults, needed to be empowered to exercise their civil and voting rights. A mental revolution was needed. To bring it about, reading, writing, and speaking skills were taught through discussions of black history, the power structure, and building a movement. Everyone took this revolutionary civics course, then chose from more academic subjects such as algebra and chemistry. All over Mississippi, in church basements and parish halls, on shady lawns and in abandoned buildings, volunteer teachers empowered thousands of children and adults through this community curriculum. The Freedom Schools of 1964 demonstrated that when Education involves young people in making community changes that matter to them, when it gives meaning to their lives in the present instead of preparing them only to make a living in the future, young people begin to believe in themselves and to dream of the future.

...Me, I do not want to go to no suburbans not even Brooklyn. But Joyce wants to integrate. She says America has got two cultures, which should not he divided as they now is, so let's leave Harlem." "Don't you agree that Joyce is right?" "White is right," said Simple, "so I have always heard. But I never did believe it. White folks do so much wrong! Not only do they mistreat me, but they mistreats themselves. Right now, all they got their minds on is shooting off rockets and sending up atom bombs and poisoning the air and fighting wars and Jim Crowing the universe." "Why do you say 'Jim Crowing the universe'?" "Because I have not heard tell of no Negro astronaughts nowhere in space yet. This is serious, because if one of them white Southerners gets to the moon first, COLORED NOT ADMITTED signs will go up all over heaven as sure as God made little green apples, and Dixiecrats will be asking the man in the moon, 'Do you want your daughter to marry a Nigra?' Meanwhile, the N.A.A.C.P. will have to go to the Supreme Court, as usual, to get an edict for Negroes to even set foot on the moon. By that time, Roy Wilkins will be too old to make the trip, and me, too." "But perhaps the Freedom Riders will go into orbit on their own," I said. "Or Harlem might vote Adam Powell into the Moon Congress.'' "One thing I know," said Simple, "is that Martin Luther King will pray himself up there. The moon must be a halfway stop on the way to Glory, and King will probably be arrested. I wonder if them Southerners will take police dogs to the moon?

If administration actions are not to mock its own rhetoric, the President must now take the lead in mobilizing public opinion behind a new resolve to meet the crisis in our cities. He should now put before Congress a National Emergency Public Works and Reconstruction bill aimed at building housing for homeless victims of the riot-torn ghettos, repairing damaged public facilities, and in the process generating maximum employment opportunities for unskilled and semiskilled workers. Such a bill should be the first step in the imperative reconstruction of all our decaying center cities. Admittedly, the prospects for passage of such a bill in the present Congress are dismal. Congressmen will cry out that the rioters must not be re-warded, thereby further penalizing the very victims of the riots. This, after all, is a Congress capable of defeating a meager $40 million rat extermination program the same week it votes $10 million for an aquarium in the District of Columbia! But the vindictive racial meanness that has descended upon this Congress, already dominated by the revived coalition of Republicans and Dixiecrats, must be challenged—not accommodated. The President must go directly to the people, as Harry Truman did in 1948. He must go to them, not with slogans, but with a timetable for tearing down every slum in the country. There can be no further delay. The daydreamers and utopians are not those of us who have prepared massive Freedom Budgets and similar programs. They are the smugly "practical" and myopic philistines in the Congress, the state legislatures, and the city halls who thought they could sit it out. The very practical choice now before them and the American people is whether we shall have a conscious and authentic democratic social revolution or more tragic and futile riots that tear our nation to shreds.

if at all, since the Civil War. In Greenwood, many black workers were still earning 30 cents an hour and returning huge profits for these Dixiecrat barons. For those who toiled in the fields there seemed only one hope. The ratio of black people to white

Four candidates emerged in the hard-fought presidential campaign of 1948: Republican Thomas Dewey, Progressive Henry Wallace, Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond and the eventual winner, Democrat Harry Truman.  Although the candidates were intense rivals and had very different political views, all four were Freemasons.

The Civil War was only one hundred years in the past at the time the Civil Rights Act passed, and during that interregnum, the white South had been trying to balance its top domestic priority - the enforcement of white supremacy - with its forced membership in the broader United States. The southern Democratic Party was the vehicle through which the white South negotiated that tension. Put simply, the southern Democratic Party was an authoritarian institution that ruled autocratically in the South and that protected its autonomy by entering into a governing coalition with the national Democratic Party. The Dixiecrats gave the national Democrats the votes they needed to control Congress, and the national Democrats let the Dixiecrats enforce segregation and one-party rule at home. The Dixiecrat-Democrat pact is a powerful reminder that there are worse things than polarization, that what's now remembered as a golden age in American politics was purchased at a terrible cost.

Yes. I guess he was the last remaining Southern Republican, when the term meant something else than unreconstructed Dixiecrat.

The public had no difficulty understanding the high moral tone of LBJ’s presidential oratory. He despised the false rhetoric of those Dixiecrats who feigned class solidarity with poor whites—rhetoric that typically involved angry appeals to white supremacy. As president, when he advocated civil rights, Lyndon Johnson spoke the language of brotherly love and inclusiveness. In spite of all this, the old country-boy image still haunted him. 6

Democratic Party not only elected virtually all public officials in the region and therefore commanded the admiration and participation of high-status people, it symbolized the abiding principle of right-thinking citizens—white supremacy. Even after Truman's integrationist policies drove Dixiecrats into revolt in 1948 Southern Democrats still saw their party in the 1950s as arguably committed to segregation by virtue of the power that the Southern delegation wielded within it. Goldwater's candidacy, the enfranchisement of black Democrats, Wallace's Independent candidacy in 1968, and the endorsement of Nixon by many Southern Democratic leaders in 1972 gradually chipped away at the middle-class respectability of the Democratic Party. When conservative Christian leaders became outspoken Republicans in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Democratic Party was routinely castigated as the party of secular humanists. The allure of respectability eventually redounded to the benefit of Republicans, as their ranks were augmented by evangelical and fundamentalist Christians.

The Communist Party in the United States blamed the assassination on “pro-Fascists, ultra-right forces, Dixiecrats, and racists” who will

Broad changes in demography invariably have political effects. The migration to the Sun Belt changed the political map of America. Once a Democratic stronghold, the South was besieged by a massive influx of retirees who were more conservative in their political outlook. As the historian Nelson W. Polsby demonstrates in his book How Congress Evolves, Northern Republicans moving south in the post-AC era did as much to undo the “Dixiecrat” base as the rebellion against the civil rights movement. In Congress, this had the paradoxical effect of unleashing a wave of liberal reforms, as the congressional Democrats were no longer divided between conservative Southerners and progressives in the North. But air-conditioning arguably had the most significant impact on Presidential politics.

In the first half of the 60s, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson started moving the nation toward social justice, passing civil rights laws in opposition to the well-known racism of the Dixiecrats. That bunch got mighty irascible. The idea that they might have to abandon their racism, parochialism, anti-federalism, and ignorant religion to continue living in a nation of decent people just got their blood a’boilin’.

The Dixiecrat revolt of 1948 captured the electoral votes of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina and presaged the rise of a two-party South.8 Judge Brady was already a fuming Dixiecrat, calling for a new party “into whose ranks all true conservative Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, will be welcomed” to battle “the radical elements of this country who call themselves liberals.” Senator James Eastland of Mississippi termed the Dixiecrat revolt “the opening phases of a fight” for conservative principles and white supremacy, and “a movement that will never die.”9

Nevertheless, some believed a Republican revival could be forged through concerted appeals to the disaffected Dixiecrats. J. Harvie Williams, a North Carolinian, spent 1949 fund-raising for a “Citizens’ Political Committee” that would spark “political realignment” by strengthening the coalition of conservatives. A more “formal alliance between Republicans and Southern Democrats,” he noted, would inspire “white,

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was heard often on radio beginning soon after her husband’s inauguration in 1932. To stem inevitable criticism, all fees from her commercial broadcasts were donated to charity. Her shows were often behindscenes color pieces: on one 1937 Blue Network Pond’s Cream broadcast, her topic was “White Housekeeping,” a discussion of life in the White House, with recipes. Her early talks were given in a hesitant, nervous voice, leading to widespread mimicry and even cruel ridicule. “Eleanor” jokes became common at parties and in the workplace. Perhaps her best radio series came after her husband’s death, when she had attained a kind of senior stateswoman status. She was in Paris for the opening programs of Eleanor and Anna Roosevelt, and her voice was heard by transcription while her daughter, Anna Boettiger, handled the rest of the show live from California. It made instant news: Mrs. Roosevelt blasted the “Dixiecrat” wing of the Democratic Party and called upon party bosses to throw the boll weevils out. While Washington buzzed, Variety raved about her courage and cited her as one of the “standout commentators of the air.