By the 1870s , voters of southern United States were heavily voting Democratic in national and presidential elections , and apart from minor pockets of Republican electoral strength in Appalachia plus Gillespie and Kendall Counties of central Texas , forming what was known as the " Solid South " . The social and economic systems of the Solid South were based on Jim Crow , a combination of legal and informal segregation acts that made blacks second-class citizens with little or no political power anywhere within the southern United States . Three-time Democratic Party presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan opposed a highly controversial resolution at the 1924 Democratic National Convention condemning the Ku Klux Klan , expecting the organization would soon fold . Bryan disliked the Klan but never publicly attacked it . In the 1930s a realignment occurred courtesy of the New Deal under President Franklin D. Roosevelt . While many of the Democratic Party members in the southern United States had shifted toward favoring economic intervention , their own recognition of full civil rights for Black Americans was not yet incorporated within the New Deal agenda , as Southerners controlled many of the key positions of power within the U.S. Congress
1924 Democratic National Convention
1924 Democratic National Convention
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