Dixiecrat Revolt - Strom Thurmond Leads Segregationist Walkout After Democratic Civil Rights Platform

On July 17, 1948, approximately 6,000 Southern Democrats from 13 states converge on Birmingham, Alabama, to form the States’ Rights Democratic Party (Dixiecrats) after walking out of the Democratic National Convention in protest of the party’s civil rights platform. The convention nominates South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond for president and Mississippi Governor Fielding L. Wright for vice president on an explicitly segregationist platform. The revolt follows the Democratic National Convention’s adoption of a stronger civil rights plank than even President Truman supported, triggering the Alabama and Mississippi delegations plus individual delegates from other Southern states to bolt.

The Dixiecrat platform opposes federal anti-lynching legislation, anti-poll tax measures, permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, and pledges to uphold segregation and promote white supremacy. The party’s strategy aims to win the 127 electoral votes of the Solid South, denying both Truman-Barkley and Dewey-Warren an electoral majority and throwing the presidential election to the House of Representatives. Once in Congress, Dixiecrats plan to extract segregationist concessions from whichever party seeks their support.

Though the immediate roots lie in opposition to Truman’s February 1948 civil rights program and the Supreme Court’s 1944 Smith v. Allwright decision enabling Black political mobilization, deeper resistance stems from opposition to New Deal pro-labor reforms. Dixiecrat leaders successfully maneuver to have the Thurmond-Wright ticket declared the “official” Democratic Party ticket on ballots in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. On election day, the Dixiecrats carry these four Deep South states, receiving 1,169,021 popular votes and 39 electoral votes, but fail to prevent Truman’s upset victory over Dewey.

Though dismissed as a failed third party, the Dixiecrat revolt proves essential to Southern political transformation. It breaks the Solid South’s historic allegiance to the national Democratic Party and inaugurates an era where white Southerners experiment with various vehicles to thwart racial progress. Most Dixiecrat leaders return to the Democratic Party after 1948, but the movement permanently weakens Democratic identity among white Southerners. Strom Thurmond himself switches to the Republican Party in 1964 in opposition to the Civil Rights Act, presaging the mass realignment of segregationist Southern Democrats to the Republican Party that defines late 20th century American politics. The Dixiecrat revolt establishes the template for coded racial appeals and “states’ rights” rhetoric that Republican strategists will exploit through the Southern Strategy, ultimately transforming the GOP into the party of white racial resentment.