The Full Strom
Senator Thurmond's life: the good, the bad, and the old
Even so, Truman admired nothing about Thurmond's campaign. When South Carolina's float passed by in Truman's parade, Thurmond doffed his hat to the president. Truman shot him a frosty stare. But South Carolina's white citizenry gave him a hero's embrace. As the Dixiecrat movement faded, Thurmond returned to Democratic ranks and renewed his attacks on Truman's "un-American, communistic, and anti-Southern programs."
For the first time since Reconstruction, meaningful numbers of blacks were appearing on Southern voter rolls--a result of a 1944 Supreme Court decision banning the all-white nature of Southern primaries. South Carolina's party leaders tried to outfox the judges by having voters sign a white-supremacy vow. When a court blocked the runaround, Thurmond complained that "every American citizen has lost a part of his fundamental rights."
Some 50,000 South Carolinians, however, soon gained the fundamental right to vote--a sliver of the black population but sufficient, Thurmond would learn in 1950, to make a difference. That year, he tried to unseat a U.S. senator, Olin Johnston, in a contest that deteriorated into a question of who liked segregation more.
Watching the showdown in a Darlington auditorium was 10-year-old Dan Carter, now a University of South Carolina history professor, who sat with his father among the whites on the main floor while blacks occupied the balcony. Johnston spoke up for regional mores, touching off boos and hisses among the blacks. Thurmond followed with his defense of the status quo. More boos and hisses. "Strom got real excited," Carter recalls. "Then he said, `Listen! Listen! They're booing me louder than they booed him!' "
Sure enough, blacks loathed Thurmond more. He won the white vote, but African-Americans voted solidly for Johnston and kept the senator in office.
Thurmond wouldn't be denied for long. In 1954, he beat a party boss in the only successful write-in campaign anyone ever waged for the Senate. The maverick Democrat entered a chamber that was intent on keeping an armistice on civil rights issues--but he would have none of it. In 1956, he helped draft and circulate a "Declaration of Constitutional Principles" assailing the Supreme Court's school segregation ban as an illegal "abuse of judicial power" and vowing to use "all lawful means" to reverse it. Dubbed "the Southern Manifesto," the litmus test on segregation drew signatures from 90 percent of the region's lawmakers. Tennessee's Sen. Albert Gore Sr., one of the few holdouts, walked away when Thurmond asked him to sign. The document, Gore said, was "dangerous, deceptive propaganda" that would cause people to defy the government.
In fact, defiance already was rampant. Legislatures across the South enacted laws to keep schools segregated. Heartened by their politicians' militancy, working-class whites revived the Ku Klux Klan. Doctors, lawyers, and merchants formed White Citizens' Councils, ready to wage what Thurmond would call "unremitting war on the court's unconstitutional usurpations."
For Thurmond in 1957, the war included a stint in the Senate steamroom. After drying out his 54-year-old body so he wouldn't have to go to the restroom, he droned on for 24 hours and 18 minutes against a diluted civil rights bill--still the Senate's longest solo filibuster.
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