Southern Democratic Party

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY in the south has had a complex, oftentimes problematic past. It had its modern start in the pursuit and maintenance of white supremacy, was transformed, sometimes painfully, into the party of reform and equal rights, and continues with faction-ridden, locally charged, and fractious politics. From the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s, through the early 1960s, the south, as defined as the states that succeeded from the Union prior to the Civil War, was almost entirely dominated by the Democratic Party. The Democrats held the solid south through a sharply narrow states' rights agenda wholly consumed with the preservation of the white elites at the expense of African-American opportunity. The national party winked at this central agenda in return for solid support for the national Democratic Party, particularly in presidential elections, but also in the Congress in terms of loyalty to the party policy agenda.

This coalition between southern white supremacists and an increasingly liberal national party held, almost seamlessly, until the end of World War II. When Democratic President Harry Truman commissioned an inquiry into the state of civil rights in the south in the late 1940s, the first cracks began to appear between the national and southern state Democrats. Truman's reelection effort in 1948 saw the defection of four southern states (South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana) under the banner of South Carolina's Senator J. Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats (States' Rights Party): in Louisiana, Truman did not even appear on the ballot.

Further fissures appeared after the 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (often shortened to Brown v. Board) Supreme Court ruling, signaling the beginning of the end of segregation in southern schools. As the decade of the 1950s ended, the first signs of a two-party system began to surface. Though Republicans had held small outposts since the Civil War era (mountain Republicans in Tennessee and North Carolina, for example, who had opposed secession), no Republican had won statewide office in the deep south until John Tower was elected senator from Texas in 1961. The election of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson (a southerner himself) saw some defections, but it was the public support of the voting rights movement in the south by the national party that fired up open political warfare between southerners and their northern and western counterparts.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) during the Johnson administration signaled the end of the total dominance of white elites over the electoral process in the south. For decades, the state Democratic parties, as private associations, had had total control over the party and, by fiat, over the party's primary elections: in a solidly Democratic south. These “white primaries” sometimes explicitly excluded African Americans from the voting process; while the strategies were more covert (for example, through the use of rigged literacy tests and dizzyingly complex registration processes) they were nonetheless very effective at disfranchising the African-American population. The Voting Rights Act effectively ended the period of legal restrictions on African-American political activity, though many would argue that years would pass before there was effective enfranchisement of African Americans.

...