The 1948 Dixiecrats

These days the Democratic Party is portrayed by opponents as "liberal," but this hasn't always been the case.

During the 1948 Truman-Dewey presidential election campaign season, a group of Southern Democrat delegates, mostly from Mississippi and Alabama, walked out of the National Democratic Convention in protest of incumbent President Harry S. Truman's support of a civil rights plank in the party platform. This plank included making lynching a federal crime and abolishing the polling tax, a long-time voting discrimination practice in the South. Another sticking point for the delegates was that, during his first presidential term, Truman (a former member of the Missouri KKK) had abolished segregation in the U.S. armed forces.

The Dixiecrats

The disgruntled delegates met to form The States' Rights Democratic Party. On July 17, 1948, a meeting of these splinter Democrats took place in Alabama. They selected Strom Thurmond, the governor of South Carolina, to be their presidential candidate. The press nicknamed this influential political group "The Dixiecrats."

Strom Thurmond

Strom Thurmond became the senator from South Carolina in 1956 and left the Senate in 2003, a few months before his death at age 100. In the Democratic Party's defense, Thurmond switched parties and became a Republican in 1964, during the Lyndon Johnson presidency and the implementation of the Civil Rights Acts. At the time of his death, he had become venerable and respected as the longest serving member of the Senate.

After his death, it was revealed that Sen. Strom Thurmond, the former Dixiecrat, had fathered a child with an African-American woman.