And the GOP became the party of racism, switching sides with the lynching, klanning, church burning Democratics? Southern Democrats are members of the U.S. Democratic Party who reside in the Southern United States.. The Tea Party is an echo of that same movement, save for one distinction: in 2013, the rebels have nowhere left to go. Back in 1948, the year Carroll County voters bolted to the Dixiecrats, Humphrey managed to insert an anti-segregation pledge into the Democratic Party Platform and gave a … By the time they left the Democrats, Dixiecrats Thurmond and Representative (later Senator) Jesse Helms were on the fringes of their party. At the 1948 Democratic National Convention, a group led by Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota proposed some controversial new civil rights planks of racial integration and the reversal of Jim Crow laws to be included in the party platform. In that environment, the Dixiecrats and the “Southern Strategy” was born. So Southern Dixiecrats – of the States Rights Democratic Party – these segregationists & racists fled from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party after the Civil Rights Act in 1964? The States' Rights Democratic Party, customarily called the Dixiecrats, was a segregationist political party in the United States. It was founded in 1948 as a breakaway wing of the Democratic Party resolved to protect states' rights to enact racial segregation against what they considered to be an oppressive federal government. They were politicians from the South who left the Democratic Party because of a civil rights plank in the Democrats' platform. They usually say – the racist Dixiecrats left the Democratic party for the Republican Party, but they can never give more than one name – Strom Thurman! This is the crux of the entire reason why black leaders today say that the Republicans are the party of lynchings and killing blacks when they are 100% wrong. Second, the left does not particularly want Biden reminding people that the Democrats were the party of segregation as recently as within his lifetime (and the lifetimes of many voters). Photograph by Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post/Getty. However, only two Democrats-turned-Dixiecrats left the Democratic Party for the Republican Party: Senator Strom Thurmond traded in his party alliance with the Democrats to join the Republicans in 1964—not because he continued to support racism, but because he began repudiating it. In 1948, it was the States' Rights Democrat Party, commonly called the Dixiecrats. The Republican Party, of course, was founded in 1848 with the abolition of slavery as its core mission. Democrats argue that Southern Dixiecrat racists fled from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party after the Civil Rights Act in 1964. The Dixiecrats ran Strom Thurmond as their candidate for president in 1948 against Harry Truman (Democrat) and Tom Dewey (Republican). 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