Most of the conservative southern racists of that era, KKK and their ilk, wrapped themselves in the banner of the Democratic party and hated the liberal "party of Lincoln" - the Republicans. This of course started changing when the 1948 Democratic platform contained civil rights elements that the die-hard Jim Crow supporters couldn't live with. Hubert Humphrey made a speech urging the Democrats to "get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights..." "States Rights" in that era even more so than today was well understood code for segregation and federal enforcement of civil rights statutes. The forty or so delegates who walked out formed the "States Rights Party" (Dixiecrats) and nominated Strom Thurmond as their presidential candidate. Bull Connor was one of the most visible conservative racists who ran under the Democratic banner. John Kennedy said of Connor, "The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln."
Bull Connor was a socialist, you drooling ******* moron.
Was he a "conservative" socialist, shit fer brains?
Inevitably as the national Democratic Party became more liberal and more vocal and activist in supporting civil rights these southern conservatives clinging to the last vestiges of Jim Crow found themselves homeless. Republicans Goldwater and Nixon realized by watching the vote getting potential of George Wallace's "soft racism" that the Republican Party could attract the votes of even quiet socially conservative northerners as well as fearful southerners. The coalition quickly formed, northerners opposed to "busing" and "affirmative action" type solutions and recalcitrant southern racists mixed with the Christian Right and became what amounted to Reagan's moral majority.
You people who hate Democrats for their liberal, multicultural, anti-Christian ways trying to tar them with the brush of Conservative racism must realize that breed fled the Democratic Party and found a new, welcoming home in the Republican Party. Failure to recognize this is denying history. Democrats don't deny these dinosaurs were once among them, Republicans shouldn't, in futility, deny that they now inhabit the Republican "big tent".
The thing that marked the Segregationists was that they represented the radical left of the party.Orval Faubus returned from WWI and joined the Communist Party, which his father was a leader in. He left the CPUSA and joined Roosevelt as a champion of the New Deal and was embraced by the party.
I realize that democrats are utterly without honor or integrity - but the attempt by the left to recast the segregationists are "conservative" is a level of outrageous lies that must be answered.
Racism and collectivism are natural partners, both deny the individual in favor of the group - where it is socialist democrats like Bull Connor demanding that people are no more than their skin color, or Barack Obama saying people are no more than the results of repression by EVIL ****** - it's all the same - the collectivist denial of the individual.
You might put a young Bull Connor in the "populist" camp along with many other conservatives (and liberals). You'd have a hard time devising a narrative that would support your Conner as socialist bullshit. Conner, like his fellow Right-wing populist Joseph McCarthy, was vehemently anti-communist;
"In 1948, Connor's officers arrested U.S. Senator from Idaho, Glen H. Taylor, the running mate of Progressive presidential candidate (and former Democratic Vice President) Henry Wallace. Taylor, who had attempted to speak to the Southern Negro Youth Congress, was arrested for violating Birmingham's segregation laws. Connor's concerted effort to enforce the law was sparked by the group's reported communist philosophy, with Connor noting at the time, "There's not enough room in town for Bull and the Commies."
AND;
"A second run for Governor fell flat in 1954, but Connor remained a focal point of controversy that year by pushing through a new city ordinance in Birmingham that outlawed communism".
Those snippets are both from wikipedia. There's mountains of evidence to support the fact that Connor was just about as far from socialism as you can get. Including Connors own files. A treasure trove of these files are preserved in the Birmingham Public Library and are available on line through the Birmingham Public Library digital collections
here. I've gone through them, I invite you to do the same and see if you can still hold on to that notion of Connor as socialist.
At that 1948 Democratic convention Connor was a delegate and led the Alabama delegation in it's walkout when the platform committee included a civil rights plank.
I can understand Republicans trying to distance themselves from the conservative racists who rally under their banner today, but you would be more honest by outing them instead of denying they exist and tortuously distorting and making a mockery of historical facts. Name calling and bizarre Orwellian manipulation of language does not an argument make, they just add to the aura of lunacy you folks have about you.