The Southern Manifesto by John Kyle Day

Author:John Kyle Day [Day, John Kyle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Discrimination, Political Science, Civil Rights, History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV)
ISBN: 9781626741867
Google: 6v0aBwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Published: 2014-07-09T04:05:13+00:00

6.1 United States Senator J. Strom Thurmond and Mrs. Jean Crouch Thurmond in their staged photograph distributed to journalists the weekend before the promulgation of the Southern Manifesto. Courtesy of the J. Strom Thurmond Institute.

Despite its lack of substance, Thurmond’s addendum was the culmination of his efforts to establish the perception that he was the Southern Manifesto’s originator and principal author. In an extensive interview to the Associated Press over the weekend, he related the narrative of the drafting process that placed him at the center of the project and, by implication, leader of the southern campaign against Brown. He also assured the American people that he supported South Carolina Democrats if they chose to bolt that summer’s Chicago national convention and form another Dixiecrat Revolt. Thurmond consummated his propaganda campaign by distributing a photograph to the journalists present, which showed him dictating the statement to his wife, Jean Crouch. Appearing on the front pages of newspapers across the country, the picture implied that the Thurmonds were typing up the statement’s final draft.5

Thurmond was obsessed with the idea that he alone was the great champion of Jim Crow. The news magazine Time recognized the Thurmonds’ phony picture as merely a publicity stunt, and reported that when the Dixiecrat’s initial “arm-waving call for nullification” was presented on February 8, the Southern Caucus “pushed Thurmond aside, ordered the paper rewritten by more temperate Senators,” and rightly identified Democratic Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia as the principal author. Incensed, Thurmond informed the editor that “the word nullification was not in the draft I presented,” and disingenuously claimed that “there was no such implication” therein. He repeated the mendacity that he had “served on the final drafting committee at the request of Senator George, who acted as chairman of the caucus.” The damage control succeeded; his personally manipulated narrative of the drafting process is still widely accepted by both scholars and the general public. Thurmond should not be given undue credit, though, for the worst episode of racial demagoguery in modern American political history.6

After the loquacious Thurmond finished speaking, the Senate’s civil rights advocates came to the support of the retreated Lehman. Next recognized by Nixon, Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon agreed with George that “the hour is indeed historic,” but proclaimed that the Senate was considering a different “great constitutional question,” which was “whether or not there was to be equality of justice for all Americans, irrespective of race, color, or creed.” Morse refuted the South’s criticism toward the federal judiciary: “A unanimous Supreme Court, which includes in its membership men with the tradition of the South in their veins, has at long last declared that all Americans are equal, and that the flame of justice in America must burn as brightly in the homes of the blacks as in the homes of the whites.” He dismissed gradualism, for “the South has had all the time since the War Between the States to make this adjustment.

“How much more time is needed,” Morse

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