The previous post addressed the great American political realignment of the twentieth century, offering Daisy Lampkin’s partisan work as an important inflection point. When Lampkin, Robert Vann, and others advocated that African American voters repudiate the Republican party and support the Democrats in the 1930s, after a decade’s worth of intense activism and advocacy, it was a watershed moment in American political history. It was the Republican party, after all—the “party of Lincoln—that as Lampkin herself once pointed out had stood foursquare behind the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, the Constitutional revisions in the wake of the Civil War that defined citizenship for African Americans. Up until this point the Democrats, especially in their southern stronghold, had always been the party of Jim Crow and segregation.

But after the 1930s, prompted in part by the mass influx of African American voters represented by Lampkin and Vann’s defection, the Democratic party increasingly (though always imperfectly) began to embrace a civil rights agenda. In response, over the course of the 1950s and 60s, conservatives began to leave the Democratic party and take their segregationist views into the Republican party. The once solid Democratic south remained solidly in support of segregation, but by now it was the Republican party, and not the Democratic party, that championed these views. The two-party system had realigned itself, primarily around the topic of race.
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Today let’s look at the other end of that pivot. If many voters were streaming into the Democratic party and realigning its views on race, many voters (and their politicians) were also streaming out of the Democratic party into the Republican party, also realigning its views on race. The career of long-time South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, still a revered figure in the state, is a case in point.

Among my goals for this blog is not merely to introduce the world to the tragically underappreciated Daisy Lampkin, but also to demystify for lay readers and novice historians what historical research looks like and how judgments and reasonable historical interpretations are made. In this post I give some indication how new research discoveries can combine with that we already know (i.e., the “historiography”), to produce new interpretations. What follows is somewhat speculative, but that is the nature of historical hypotheses. Further research will either confirm my propositions or falsify them.