Can you tell me the direct connection between "state's rights" and racism?
Sure. It's a euphemism.
It started out meaning literally that, a decentralized governmental structure where the states had more autonomy and the Fed keeps its distance. In other words aversion to "big gummint", the irony of which is that aversion is seemingly associated with the RP today, whereas it was the position of the Democratic Party for most of the 19th century. The Republican Party (founded 1854) was a coalition of Abolitionists and Whigs. The latter, a party dying out and splitting over the slavery issue, was the host of "big gummint" ideas, which seeded the RP and would manifest in the strong federal presence of Reconstruction and land grants to freed slaves, the first affirmative action. But the middle of the century was of course dominated by the Civil War, which was at root about "states rights", i.e. most fundamentally whether the states had the right to secede, form their own country, and run their own variant constitution.
Slavery became the human cargo on that rickety ship, and the South-North schism over control issues that had begun back with Henry Clay's* "Tariff of Abominations" (1828, a legislation that had nothing to do with slavery) would come to be invoked long after the Civil War by the descendant racists like Thurmond and Wallace as a hot-button term for "segregation", which by the 20th century was the only remaining shard of a Southern independence movement that had originally been an economic/big government dispute.
In its time, that Tariff --- an import tax designed to protect Northern/New England industry at the expense of the agricultural South, which bitterly opposed it --- was toasted in the South, on the Fourth of July 1828, with
"Let the South look to States rights and State sovereignty".1
This is the origin of the idea of Southern secession, which would fester for 33 years until literally blowing up in 1861 -- an economic dispute. By the time the Civil War was a century in the past, the original economic question was long in the past and invoking "states rights" was a nod and a wink to the concept of "keeping the ******* down", used as campaign rhetoric by those demagogue descendants (Thurmond, Wallace et al). As Lee Atwater -- Ronald Reagan's adviser -- put it:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, “******, ******, ******.” By 1968 you can't say “******” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff."
--- and that's exactly what Reagan did in Philadelphia Mississippi --- followed his advisor's advice. It was a clear and obvious pander to those Southern conservative white racists, the message being "you know the Democrats won't give you what you want -- come buy the new improved Republican Party". And that's exactly what we mean by the "Southern Strategy".
Fun fact: Henry Clay (a Whig/"National Republican") had a cousin who went on to become a noted and courageous Kentucky abolitionist; his name was later taken in tribute by a black musician/artist whose son would go on to achieve his own kind of fame -- his name was Cassius Marcellus Clay.
Your command of history sounds like a sound bite from the DNC.
Well let's see how much of this I got from the DNC:
Zero.
Why would I do that? The DNC is a political party. As such, it's a partisan source. Its website even lies about its own origins. A partisan ship will only sail where it wants you to see. I don't play that.
In the 1966 campaign, as related in my new book The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority, out July 8, Nixon blasted Dixiecrats “seeking to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice.”
"Your" new book?
It needs some work. The Dixiecrats were around for one year -- 1948. You're off by 18 years. By 1966 half the Dixiecrats (Thurmond) had become a Republican, and the other half (Wright) was dead for a decade. Are you insinuating Richard Nixon -- a private citizen/lawyer at the time -- was talking to dead people?
Nixon called out segregationist candidates in ’66 and called on LBJ, Hubert Humphrey, and Bobby Kennedy to join him in repudiating them. None did. Hubert, an arm around Lester Maddox, called him a “good Democrat.” And so were they all—good Democrats. While Adlai chose Sparkman, Nixon chose Spiro Agnew, the first governor south of the Mason Dixon Line to enact an open-housing law.
Link?
Interesting again since (a) there was no Presidential election in 1966, and (b) the reason Thurmond and his Dixiecrat movement walked out of the Democratic Party convention in 1948 was that they were hearing too much about civil rights for their taste after a stirring speech in advocacy of such by a young mayor of Minneapolis named Hubert Humphrey.
As I said -- your book might need work.
1 - Page Smith, "A Nation Comes of Age", Vol. 4 (1981) p.
And as history showed, all the dixiecrats returned home.
Not sure what you mean by "returned home" but the fact remains, in 1966 Dixiecrats were 18 years in the past, so your Nixon story doesn't add up. Actually neither Nixon nor anybody else ran a (Presidential) campaign in 1966 -- that wasn't a POTUS election year.