The 1948 Dixiecrats, Birmingham as Stage

On July seventeenth, nineteen forty-eight, approximately six thousand delegates and observers from thirteen southern states gathered in Birmingham, Alabama, for a political convention. They were there because the national Democratic Party had just adopted a civil rights plank, and they would not accept it.

President Harry Truman had proposed federal anti-lynching legislation, a federal commission on fair employment, and the elimination of poll taxes. Southern delegates who opposed these measures had walked out of the national Democratic convention in Philadelphia and come to Birmingham to form their own party. They called themselves the States' Rights Democratic Party. The name they acquired from the press was Dixiecrats.

In Birmingham, they nominated Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president and Governor Fielding Wright of Mississippi for vice president. Their platform was explicit: they opposed federal interference with segregation, opposed anti-lynching laws, opposed equal employment requirements, and pledged to maintain white supremacy.

In the November election, the Dixiecrats carried South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama, receiving thirty-nine electoral votes. They won a popular vote of more than one million. They did not win the presidency.

The Dixiecrat Party was short-lived as a formal organization. But historians mark nineteen forty-eight as the moment the solid Democratic South began to fracture. The political migration of white Southern voters away from the national Democratic Party, which accelerated through the nineteen sixties, traces a direct line back to that summer convention in Birmingham.