The Dixiecrats were a political party organized in the summer of 1948 by conservative white southern Democrats committed to states' rights and the maintenance of segregation and opposed to federal intervention into race, and to a lesser degree, labor relations. The Dixiecrats, formally known as the States' Rights Democratic Party, were disturbed by their region's declining influence within the national Democratic Party. The Dixiecrats held their one and only convention in Birmingham.



After the southern conservatives failed to prevent the nomination of Harry Truman at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, some 6,000 individuals from 13 southern states converged on Birmingham on July 17, 1948, to hold their own convention. Participants from South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi made up the majority of those in attendance. Governors J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Fielding Wright of Mississippi were nominated as the presidential and vice-presidential candidates of the States' Rights Democrats. Their goal was to win the 127 electoral-college votes of the southern states, which would prevent either Republican Party nominee Thomas Dewy or Democrat Harry Truman from winning the 266 electoral votes necessary for election. Under this scenario, the contest would be decided by the House of Representatives, where southern states held 11 of the 48 votes, as each state would get only one vote if no candidate received a majority of electors' ballots. In a House election, Dixiecrats believed that southern Democrats would be able to deadlock the election until one of the parties had agreed to drop its civil rights plank.

To the surprise of most Americans, Truman was elected president on November 2, 1948. The Dixiecrats carried Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana, where Thurmond and Wright were listed as the Democratic Party nominees. The party received only 39 electoral votes; too few to affect the outcome. The Dixiecrats' victory in Alabama was relatively short lived. In 1950, the states' rights forces in Alabama lost control of the party to the national party loyalists.
Although the Dixiecrats have been dismissed as a failed third party, they were essential to southern political change. The Dixiecrat Party broke the South's solid historic allegiance to the national Democratic Party and in doing so inaugurated an unpredictable era in which white southerners grappled with a variety of efforts to thwart racial progress. Dixiecrats were prominent members of the White Citizens Councils and other so-called Massive Resistance organizations dedicated to upholding segregation that flourished throughout the region in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the Dixiecrats as a political entity did not survive past 1948, white southerners used the movement's organizational and intellectual framework to create new political institutions and new alliances in their desperate attempt to stymie racial progress and preserve power. Some Dixiecrats returned to the Democratic Party, and others, uncomfortable with the party's civil rights position, voted as political independents in the presidential elections of the 1950s. Since the late 1940s, the term "Dixiecrat" has become a generic term used to describe white southern Democrats opposed to civil rights legislation.
Additional Resources
Bernard, William D. Dixiecrats and Democrats: Alabama Politics, 1942-1950. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974.
Additional Resources
Bernard, William D. Dixiecrats and Democrats: Alabama Politics, 1942-1950. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974.
Frederickson, Kari. The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.