When the 1948 Democratic National Convention adopted a plank proposed by Northern liberals calling for civil rights , 35 southern delegates , including all Mississippi 's delegates , walked out . Southern Democrats sought to exclude Harry Truman 's name from the ballot in the South . The Southern defectors created a new party called the States ' Rights Party ( Dixiecrats ) , with its own nominees for the 1948 presidential election : Democratic South Carolina Governor J. Strom Thurmond for president and Fielding L. Wright , governor of Mississippi for vice president . ( In his 1948 gubernatorial inaugural address , Wright had described racial segregation as an " eternal truth " that " transcends party lines " . ) The Dixiecrats thought that if they could win enough Southern states , they would have a good chance of forcing the election into the U.S. House of Representatives , where Southern bargaining power could determine the winner . To this end Dixiecrat leaders had the Thurmond-Wright ticket declared the official Democratic ticket in some Southern states , including Mississippi . ( In other states , they were forced to run as a third party . ) Efforts by the Dixiecrats to paint Southern Truman loyalists as turncoats generally failed , although the 1948 Mississippi state Democratic sample ballot warned that a vote for Truman electors was " a vote for Truman and his vicious anti-Southern program " and that a Truman victory would mean " our way of life in the South will be gone forever . " On election day of 1948 , the Thurmond-Wright ticket carried Mississippi , South Carolina , Louisiana , and Alabama , all previously solid Democratic states . Truman won the national election anyway , without their electoral votes . The States ' Rights Party movement faded from the landscape , and its Mississippi leaders resumed their place in the ranks of the national Democratic Party with no repercussions , even though all seven incumbent Congressmen and Senator James O. Eastland had run on the Dixiecrat ballot with Thurmond and Governor Wright
1948 Democratic National Convention
1948 Democratic National Convention
Mississippi Democratic Party