The proclamation by President Harry S. Truman and Senator Hubert Humphrey of support for a Negro civil rights plank in the Democratic Party platform of 1948 led to a walkout of 35 delegates from Mississippi and Alabama. These southern delegations nominated their own "States Rights Democratic Party" (a.k.a. Dixiecrat) nominees with Senator Strom Thurmond leading the ticket (
Thurmond would later switch in 1964 to the Republicans). The Dixiecrats held their convention in Birmingham, Alabama, where they nominated Thurmond for president and Fielding L. Wright, governor of Mississippi, for vice president. Dixiecrat leaders worked to have Thurmond-Wright declared the "official" Democratic Party ticket in Southern states. They succeeded in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina; in other states, they were forced to run as a third-party ticket. [...]
After 1968, with desegregation a settled issue, the Republicans began a strategy of trying to win conservative Southerners away from the Democrats and into the Republican Party. Nonetheless, a bloc of conservative Democrats, mostly Southerners, remained in the United States Congress throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These included Democratic House members as conservative as Larry McDonald, who was also a leader in the John Birch Society. During the administration of Ronald Reagan, the term "boll weevils" was applied to this bloc of conservative Democrats, who consistently voted in favor of tax cuts, increases in military spending, and deregulation favored by the Reagan administration. [...] Most of the boll weevils eventually retired from office, or in the case of some such as
Senators Phil Gramm and Richard Shelby, switched parties and joined the Republicans. [...]
Conservative Democrat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia