White Southerners In The 1940s

During the years between 1960-1970, there was an increase in involvement of white southerners in the Republican Party compared to the previous years of whites in the Democratic Party. This is seen as a result of a southern strategy of Conservative Republicans to centralize their campaign towards the Southern United states by appealing to racism against African Americans. “By isolating white southerners as carriers of the racist gene…the southern strategy narrative understates the role of racial reaction on the right.” Not only did they pursue southerners, but also those in the North and West who were dissatisfied with the Democratic Party; a majority of whom did not agree with the ideals set in place by the New Deal, which transformed the
As this withdrawal takes place, Thurmond and his followers move over to the Republican Party. “He [Thurmond] quit the Democratic Party at high mark of the civil rights revolution…and led a historic shift of white southerners into the GOP.” This switch was greatly brought on by a document written by President Harry Truman’s Civil Rights Committee, To Secure These Rights. This report called for an end to discrimination, both racially and economically, the desegregation of all public facilities, the passing of an anti-lynching law, as well as various ideals to create a more equal living environment between whites and
He argued, “The FEPC was made to order for communist use in their designs upon our national security.” Thurmond drew this idea from Stalin’s “All-Races Law” that was passed in Soviet Russia. Because three of his opponents supported the idea of racial equality in the workplace, Thurmond concluded that communistic ideas had penetrated the United States government. While this belief was seen to have the threat of Communism as its basis, Thurmond used it as one of many ways to bash the FEPC. President Roosevelt signed the FEPC in 1941 and it lit a fire under the battle for racial equality in the work place, which became a defining issue in the Civil Right’s movement. Thurmond argued that this order interfered in the matters of private business owners by forcing them to hire employees they didn’t want; mainly African Americans, and added on to his opposition of desegregation of all public