Hmm.., Weren't the majority of the South, Democrats between 1865 until the mid 1960's? It wasn't Republicans that segregated the Army, Was it?
It wasn't the Republicans who tried to keep the Little Rock High School segregated. Was it?
It wasn't Republicans that bombed churches in Mississippi. Was it?
They weren't Republicans that murdered all those Civil Rights people. Was it?
Nope. It was conservatives.
Really?
President Woodrow Wilson was conservative?
Was Gov. Fabus a conservative?
Was Gov. George Wallace a conservative?
Was Bull Connor a conservative?
[Excedrpt]
In the 1948 election, after Harry Truman signed an Executive Order to desegregate the Army, a group of Southern Democrats known as Dixiecrats split from the Democratic Party in reaction to the inclusion of a civil rights plank in the party's platform. This followed a floor fight led by Minneapolis mayor (and soon-to-be senator) Hubert Humphrey. The disaffected Democrats formed the States' Rights Democratic, or Dixiecrat Party, and nominated Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president. Thurmond carried four southern states in the general election: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. The main plank of the States' Rights Democratic Party was maintaining segregation and Jim Crow in the South. The Dixiecrats, failing to deny the Democrats the presidency in 1948, soon dissolved, but the split lingered. In 1964, Thurmond was one of the first conservative southern Democrats to switch to the Republican Party.[citation needed]
In addition to the splits in the Democratic Party, the population movements associated with World War II had a significant effect on the makeup of the South. More than 5 million African Americans migrated from the South to the North and West in the second Great Migration lasting from 1940-1970. Starting before WWII, many took jobs in the defense industry in California and major industrial cities of the Midwest.[citation needed]
Changes in industry, growth in universities and the military establishment in turn attracted Northern transplants to the South, and bolstered the base of the Republican Party. In the post-war Presidential campaigns, Republicans did best in the fastest-growing states of the South with the most Northern settlers. In the 1952, 1956 and 1960 elections, Virginia, Tennessee and Florida went Republican, while Louisiana went Republican in 1956, and Texas twice voted for Dwight D. Eisenhower and once for John F. Kennedy. In 1956, Eisenhower received 48.9 percent of the Southern vote, becoming only the second Republican in history (after Ulysses S. Grant) to get a plurality of Southern votes.[citation needed]
The states of the Deep South remained loyal to the Democratic Party, which had not officially repudiated segregation. Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and North Carolina actually lost congressional seats from the 1950s to the 1970s, while South Carolina, Louisiana and Georgia remained static.[citation needed]
The "Year of Birmingham" in 1963 highlighted racial issues in Alabama. Through the spring, there were marches and demonstrations to end legal segregation. The Movement's achievements in settlement with the local business class were overshadowed by bombings and murders by the Ku Klux Klan, most notoriously in the deaths of four girls in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.[26]
After the Democrat George Wallace was elected as Governor of Alabama, he helped link the concept of states' rights and segregation, both in speeches and by creating crises to provoke Federal intervention. He opposed integration at the University of Alabama, and collaborated with the Ku Klux Klan in disrupting court-ordered integration of public schools in Birmingham in 1963.[26]
