tates Senate. “He wasn’t regarded lightly,” anyone that’s in politics who sees someone get elected on a write-in vote to the United States Senate has to have power. Thurmond exercised his power in the 1957 filibuster against the Civil Rights Act, he “began speaking at 8:54 pm. He did not finish until 9:12 pm the next night, twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes later.” “The Democratic Party has abandoned the people…” With that statement Strom Thurmond rocked the political strength that held the South since the Reconstruction. “The Democratic Party has succored and assisted our Communist enemies through trade and aid at the expense of the American people.” His Comments were tailored to have his “Fellow South Carolinians” see the Democrats as an evil group who no longer represented them. In 1965 when blacks first began voting in significant numbers in South Carolina, Thurmond became the first Southern senator to hire black staff members and appoint blacks to high positions. Strom Thurmond’s influence over Southern politics can be seen through his endorsement of Richard Nixon for President in 1968. “He saw Nixon as the vehicle for shifting the center of the G.O.P. to the right.” In order to ensure this “Thurmond possessed the credibility among Southerners to tell them a third-party protest was fruitless, and that a ‘vote for Wallace is a vote for Humphrey.” At least 14 Senators fell asleep for 5 or more minutes during the White House’s defense of Clinton’s impeachment trial. Strom Thurman was one of them. Senator Thurman always leaves his mark somehow.I have to admit that I did not agree with some of Senator Thurmond’s early politics, but the personal change he experienced in ideology through your relationships with Armstrong Williams and Thomas Moss really impressed me. Before reading this biog...
