page_title: Strom Thurmond
section_title: Post-1970 views regarding race
hierarchical_section_title: Strom Thurmond / 1970s / Post-1970 views regarding race
caption_attribution_description: A photo of Gov. Carroll Campbell laughing and smiling at a 1986 campaign rally. Also pictured are Vice President George H.W. Bush and Senator Strom Thurmond. &#32; This file was uploaded with Commonist
context_page_description: James Strom Thurmond Sr. was an American military officer and politician who served for 48 years as a United States Senator from South Carolina. He ran for president in 1948 as the Dixiecrat candidate on a States' rights platform supporting racial segregation. He received 2.4% of the popular vote and 39 electoral votes, failing to defeat Harry Truman. Thurmond represented South Carolina in the United States Senate from 1954 until 2003, at first as a Southern Democrat and, after 1964, as a Republican.
  A magnet for controversy during his nearly half-century Senate career, Thurmond switched parties, primarily because of his vehement opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and endorsed Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. In the months before switching, he had "been critical of the Democratic Administration for ... enactment of the Civil Rights Law", while Goldwater "boasted of his opposition to the Civil Rights Act, and made it part of his platform." Thurmond left office as the only member of either chamber of Congress to reach the age of 100 while still in office, and as the oldest-serving and longest-serving senator in U.S. history.
context_section_description: In 1970, black people still constituted some 30 percent of South Carolina's population; in 1900, they had constituted 58.4 percent of the state's population. Thousands of black people left the state during the first half of the 20th century in the Great Migration to escape the Jim Crow laws and seek opportunities in the industrial cities of the North and Midwest. After the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was implemented, African Americans were legally protected in exercising their constitutional rights as United States citizens to register to vote in South Carolina without harassment or discrimination. State politicians could no longer ignore this voting bloc, who were allied with increasing numbers of white residents who supported civil rights.
  Thurmond appointed Thomas Moss, an African American, to his Senate staff in 1971. It has been described as the first such appointment by a member of the South Carolinian congressional delegation (it was incorrectly reported by many sources as the first senatorial appointment of an African American, but Mississippi Senator Pat Harrison had hired clerk-librarian Jesse Nichols in 1937). In 1983, he supported legislation to make the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. a federal holiday. In South Carolina, the honor was diluted; until 2000 the state offered employees the option to celebrate this holiday or substitute one of three Confederate holidays instead.  Despite this, Thurmond never explicitly renounced his earlier views on racial segregation.
caption: Thurmond and Vice President George H. W. Bush at a 1986 gubernatorial campaign rally for Congressman Carroll A. Campbell Jr.
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