Republicans, Democrats, and race: an uneasy history: in 1948, Southern Democrats rebelled against their party's civil rights agenda. Many of them later joined the party of Lincoln.

• Author: Toner, Robin
• Position: Times past

In July 1948, the liberal mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey, rose at the Democratic National Convention and urged his party to embrace the cause of civil rights for black Americans.

In a fiery speech that would echo through American politics for the next 50 years, he urged Democrats to "get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights."

It was not a politically easy position for the Democrats to take. In fact, it tore the party asunder. Almost immediately, a group of Southerners opposed to the party's new civil-rights platform broke away and formed a new party known as the Dixiecrats. Ultimately, in the decades that followed, the Democrats' decision to push for civil-rights legislation cost them the support of many white Southerners and was a key factor in the Republican Party's growing dominance in the region.

The issue of how America's two main political parties have dealt with race is still a potent one, as Republican Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi discovered. He resigned under pressure from his leadership post in December after appearing to praise the Dixiecrats and their 1948 presidential candidate, Strom Thurmond.

THE SOUTHERN WAY

In 1948, blacks and whites were segregated across the South--kept apart in schools, hotels, restaurants, and other public places. Some of the staunchest defenders of segregation in the South were Democrats, many of them members of Congress.

They asserted that segregation was simply the Southern way of life, protected by "states' rights." The federal government, these Southern Democrats maintained, had no right to dismantle it.

Still, spurred on by Humphrey and other Northern liberals, the delegates to the 1948 Democratic Convention adopted a platform that called for equal opportunity in the workplace, in politics, and in the military. The reaction from Southern Democrats was fast and furious.

Within days, some of them met in Birmingham, Alabama, to form their own party and mount their own presidential campaign. They called themselves the States' Rights Democratic Party, or the Dixiecrats, and their presidential nominee was a prominent Governor from the region, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.

Their platform was defiant, predicting that the Democrats' civil-rights program would "be utterly destructive of the social, economic, and political life of the Southern people."

DEFIANT CAMPAIGN

Thurmond was even more defiant on the campaign trail. "I want...