What was the Democratic Party's role in maintaining racial segregation in the South? What happened within the party when the party began to support civil rights for black Southerners?

The Politics of the Civil Rights Movement

The American Civil War ended slavery in the United States. However, beginning in the late nineteenth century, Southern states passed laws that created segregation. These laws separated blacks and whites and kept blacks legally and economically inferior.

This system of segregation was also commonly known as Jim Crow. Black Southerners were not allowed to use restaurants, hotels, restrooms, or other facilities reserved for whites. Many black Southerners were prevented from voting by poll taxes, literacy tests, and other tactics designed to ensure that only whites were legally eligible to vote. Black children were forced to attend separate, and often inferior schools. These laws were based on the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the United States Supreme Court had upheld segregation, declaring that "separate but equal" facilities were constitutional. In addition to legal and economic inequality, black Southerners were intimidated by threats of violence, including lynching, in which men were accused of crimes, tortured, and murdered without a trial. Nearly 5,000 people were lynched in the United States between 1880 and 1950. Most lynching victims were Southern black men.

The first focus of the civil rights movement was on politics, particularly on the the Democratic party and its traditional "Solid South" strategy. The "Solid South" meant that the Democratic Party controlled politics in every Southern state, maintained segregation, and prevented most black Southerners from voting. Because Northern Democrats wanted to keep the support of Southern Democrats in Congress and in presidential elections, the Democratic Party supported segregation for decades.

Between the 1930s and 1950s, the "Solid South" began to become less solid because:

    Northern blacks began voting Democratic during the New Deal of the 1930s, forcing the Democratic Party to respond to the interests of black Americans.

    Black Americans served in the military and performed necessary factory labor during World War II. President Roosevelt ordered that companies manufacturing supplies for the war not discriminate against black workers.

    During the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union and communism, the U.S. considered itself the "leader of the free world." Inequality of black Americans harmed America's image as a land of freedom.

In response to the views of black Democratic voters, President Harry S. Truman appointed the Presidential Committee on Civil Rights in 1946. It published a report, To Secure These Rights, in 1947. The report declared that black Americans deserved:

    safety from lynching, violence, and terror

    the right to vote

    freedom of expression

    equality of economic opportunity

In the 1948 presidential election, the Democratic Party supported civil rights and voting rights for black Americans. Many Southern Democrats opposed civil rights, and formed a new party, the States' Rights Party (or "Dixiecrats"), led by South Carolina Governor J. Strom Thurmond. Harry Truman was re-elected president in a close election, but the Dixiecrats won in several Southern states, ending the solidly Democratic South.