Strom Thurmond was a prominent South Carolina politician and vocal segregationist. While governor of South Carolina, he led the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948 as the pro-segregationist presidential candidate; he won significant support in the South but lost the election. In 1954, Thurmond was elected to the Senate, where he grew in national influence as a leading opponent of civil rights. In 1956, he was a primary drafter of the Southern Manifesto, which denounced the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education and encouraged Southern states to prevent public school integration.

A staunch opponent of civil rights legislation, Thurmond famously staged a 24-hour filibuster to prevent passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. He also opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1964 and its reauthorization in 1975. Thurmond served 48 years in the Senate and died in 2003 at the age of 100. He never publicly renounced his segregationist views.

Widely regarded as one of the most virulent opponents of civil rights in the Louisiana State Legislature, William “Willie” Rainach, whose tenure lasted from 1940 to 1960, stridently opposed Brown and fought to delay its implementation. While Rainach was chair of the Joint Legislative Committee to Maintain Segregation, the legislature directed the state board of education to nullify graduation certificates from any integrated public school, withheld books and lunches from integrated schools, and criminalized all efforts to violate segregation laws.

In Rainach’s words, “A vote against these bills is an open invitation to the carpetbaggers, scalawags, and National Association for the Advancement of the [sic] Colored People to integrate our schools.” In 1958, Rainach and other leaders of the White Citizens’ Council mounted a campaign to systematically disenfranchise thousands of Black voters by requiring literacy tests and targeting the credentials of Black registrants for scrutiny. These tactics reduced the Black electorate by 85 percent in Washington Parish and 75 percent in Ouachita Parish -- until litigation by the Justice Department restored some 1400 voters to the rolls.

Olin DeWitt Talmadge Johnston was governor of South Carolina from 1935 to 1939 and 1943 to 1945, and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1944, 1950, 1956, and 1962. Johnston supported President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which put him at odds with other segregationists, including his 1938 opponent for governor, “Cotton Ed” Smith. Despite this economic liberalism, Johnston’s championing of the common man did not extend to the civil rights of African Americans. He was unapologetically racist in his rhetoric, opposed all federal efforts to weaken segregation, and attempted to maintain all-white primary elections even after the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional.

In 1944, Johnston refused to use his powers as governor to stop the execution of George Stinney, a 14-year-old Black boy convicted of killing two white girls in a sham trial with no investigation or evidence, even though Johnston had granted clemency to a white man just six years before. In 1985, on the 50th anniversary of his first inauguration as governor, a marker honoring Johnston was erected in his native Abbeville County and the local highway was named for him. Strom Thurmond was among the honored guests at the dedication.

Theodore Bilbo served as a governor of Mississippi from 1916 to 1920 and 1928 to 1932, and as a U.S. senator from 1935 to 1947. A towering figure among white supremacist and segregationist politicians, Bilbo praised Nazi racial philosophy and was famous for his extreme and inflammatory rhetoric. In a 1938 filibuster against anti-lynching legislation, Bilbo said on the Senate floor that the bill would “open the floodgates of hell in the South” by encouraging Black men to rape white women.

In 1946, after four white men beat a Black Army veteran for attempting to register to vote, Senator Bilbo delivered a radio address urging every “red-blooded Anglo-Saxon man in Mississippi to resort to any means to keep hundreds of Negroes from the polls in the July 2nd primary.” He continued, “And if you don’t know what that means, you are just not up on your persuasive measures.” Southern senators successfully defended Bilbo against an NAACP-led effort to remove him from office for inciting violence against Black voters.

Before succumbing to cancer at age 69, Bilbo spent the last weeks of his life writing a book, Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, in which he outlined his fears of “race-mixing” and advocated for the relocation of African Americans to West Africa. (He had proposed a relocation bill in the Senate in 1938, but it failed.) Bilbo never repudiated his racist views and remained an influential figure among leading segregationists in the South long after his death.

Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas from 1955 to 1967, is most widely remembered for defying a federal order to desegregate Little Rock Central High School. On September 2, 1957, Faubus called in the Arkansas National Guard to block nine Black students, the Little Rock Nine, from enrolling at all-white Central High. A federal court ordered that the guardsmen be removed, but an angry mob of white men, women, and youth blocked the school entrance. To restore order and enforce the court’s ruling, President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and dispatched the Army to escort the Black students into the school. Faubus was not as staunch a segregationist as some Southern governors, but under pressure from hardliners and his own constituents, he embraced the segregationist cause for political gain. Though his stand did not stop school desegregation in Arkansas, it cemented his identity as a segregationist leader and earned him four more terms as governor.

A dominant figure in Georgia politics and a virulent racist, Eugene Talmadge was elected governor in 1932 after he ran on a white supremacist and segregationist platform, and won re-election three times. Talmadge defended racial hierarchy and demanded the same from others. In the early 1940s, when he suspected that the dean and faculty at the University of Georgia were not committed to racial segregation, Talmadge expelled members of the Board of Regents, fired professors, and censored books that promoted social equality.

The Ku Klux Klan supported Talmadge’s unprecedented actions and even orchestrated a scheme to get “evidence” against the dean by kidnapping one of his Black employees. The resulting scandal cost Talmadge the 1942 election, but voters overwhelmingly returned him to office in 1946 after a campaign so steeped in racist rhetoric that it sparked violence across the state. The FBI later investigated Talmadge for inciting mob violence and sanctioning the 1946 lynching of two Black couples in Walton County in an effort to sway rural white voters during his campaign. The case was dropped after a federal grand jury claimed it could not identify any members of the lynch mob.

The political legacy of four-time Alabama governor and four-time presidential candidate George Wallace is enduring and increasingly relevant. Wallace’s 1962 gubernatorial campaign used the slogan “Stand up for Alabama,” and he vowed to fight integration at the University of Alabama. Wallace gave a furious inauguration speech, written by Ku Klux Klan organizer Asa E. Carter, in which he condemned integration and federal intervention in state affairs. Six months later, Wallace launched himself into the spotlight by physically blocking two Black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from enrolling at the University of Alabama. The dramatic “stand in the schoolhouse door” was broadcast on national television, and within a week, Wallace received over 100,000 telegrams commending his actions.

Wallace developed a political identity that combined racial demagoguery and fiery rhetoric to defend segregation under the veneer of “states’ rights.” By appealing to racial sentiments, Wallace gained the support of votes who felt threatened by increasing Black political power. His overt appeals to segregationists later burdened Wallace’s presidential campaigns and he never reached national office. Today, a portion of Interstate 10 in Alabama and community colleges in the cities of Dothan and Eufaula bear George Wallace’s names. He remains one of the most infamous and influential segregationist leaders of this era.

A towering figure in Louisiana history, Allan Ellender was a U.S. senator from 1937 until his death in 1972. Though widely regarded as a moderate and a pragmatist who supported liberal New Deal policies, Ellender was deeply committed to racial separation and consistently supported segregationist policies. In voicing his opposition to President Harry Truman’s proposed civil rights bill, Ellender insisted that “the Negro himself cannot make progress unless he has white leadership. If you call that ‘supremacy,’ why suit yourself. But I say that the Negro race as a whole, if permitted to go to itself, will invariably go back to barbaric lunacy.” 

Ellender organized a six-day filibuster to kill an anti-lynching bill, categorically voted against all civil rights legislation, voted to retain the poll tax, and joined Strom Thurmond and other segregationists in signing the 1956 Southern Manifesto that criticized the 1954 Brown decision desegregating public schools. Today, several Louisiana public schools and a dorm and library at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux are named after him, and he was inducted into the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in 1994.

John Stennis represented Mississippi in the Senate from 1947 to 1989. More restrained than his predecessor, Theodore Bilbo, Stennis carried on Bilbo’s segregationist, white supremacist agenda using the coded language of “states’ rights.” Stennis opposed anti-poll tax amendments, anti-lynching legislation, the Fair Employment Practices Committee, the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968. After Brown, Stennis proposed maintaining segregation by improving African American schools so that integration could be rendered unconstitutionally unnecessary, and he urged white Mississippians to abandon public schools rather than permit their children to attend classes with Black children. Stennis was among 19 Southern senators who signed the Southern Manifesto in defiance of Brown. Many state and federal institutions in Mississippi bear his name, including a hospital in DeKalb, a federal dam near Columbus, and the John C. Stennis Institute of Government and Community Development at Mississippi State University.

James F. Byrnes was an influential South Carolina politician and avowed segregationist who held high-level positions in state and federal government for more than four decades. As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate for more than two decades, Byrnes personally blocked a Senate investigation of a South Carolina lynching and opposed federal anti-lynching legislation, insisting that “rape is responsible, directly and indirectly, for most of the lynching in America.” When Byrnes was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1941, the NAACP opposed his confirmation in a telegram to the White House: “If Senator Byrnes at any time in his long public career failed to take a position inimical to the human and citizenship rights of 13 million American Negro citizens, close scrutiny of his record fails to reveal it.” Byrnes was confirmed to the Court, and later held the office of Secretary of State under President Harry Truman.

He remained a vocal opponent of integration throughout his term as South Carolina governor from 1951 to 1955. In his inaugural address, Byrnes proclaimed, “Whatever is necessary to continue the separation of the races in the schools of South Carolina is going to be done by the white people of the state. That is my ticket as a private citizen. It will be my ticket [as governor].” Since his death in 1972, Byrnes has been widely recognized; a building and a professorship at the University of South Carolina bear his name, as do Byrnes Auditorium at Winthrop University, Byrnes Hall dormitory at Clemson University, and James F. Byrnes High School in Duncan, South Carolina.

In the role of Dallas County Sheriff from 1955 to 1966, James Gardner (Jim) Clark was an intransigent and violent opponent of integration and the expansion of civil rights. Clark described the civil rights movement as an act of “Black supremacy,” and regularly wore a white button bearing the word “Never” in response to the protest anthem, We Shall Overcome. Clark dressed in military attire, wielded a .38-caliber pistol, and attacked activists with his nightstick and an electric cattle prod. He was often accompanied by a group of mounted volunteers armed with whips and clubs who beat and tear-gassed protestors at his command. On March 7, 1965, known as Bloody Sunday, Clark ordered his posse to beat hundreds of peaceful protesters attempting to march from Selma to Montgomery to demand voting rights for Black residents. After the 1965 Voting Rights Act enabled Dallas County’s Black residents to register to vote, Clark lost his 1966 re-election bid. In an interview in 2006, a year before he died at age 84, Clark said “I would do the same thing today if I had to do it all over again.”

Widely known for his segregationist views, Allan Shivers served as governor of Texas from 1949 until 1957. Unlike more outspoken politicians, Shivers avoided outright name-calling in favor of more carefully phrased white supremacist rhetoric. He was a staunch advocate of “state’s rights,” which he used to rationalize his refusal to implement federal desegregation orders. After Brown, Shivers expressed his intent to defy federal orders to integrate Texas public schools and warned that racial violence would inevitably result.

He gained national prominence in 1956 when the Mansfield school district near Fort Worth received Texas’s first desegregation order. An angry mob prevented three Black students from entering Mansfield High, and Shivers sent Texas Rangers to protect the mob and prevent the students from attending school. The Eisenhower administration, in the middle of a re-election campaign, did not intervene. Shivers’s action inspired Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus to adopt similar tactics at Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. Throughout his political career, Shivers defended segregation and stood as a leader and supporter of white opposition to racial equality.

Ross Barnett, a prominent segregationist and governor of Mississippi from 1959 to 1964, campaigned as a defender of white supremacy and declared, “The Negro is different because God made him different to punish him.” Barnett used state funds to support the segregationist White Citizens’ Councils, actively sought to arrest and jail Freedom Rider activists protesting illegal discrimination, and denounced constituents who asked federal agents to investigate a lynching.

Barnett is best remembered for attempting to stop a 29-year-old Black Air Force veteran named James Meredith from enrolling at the all-white University of Mississippi after Meredith won a federal lawsuit challenging segregation at Ole Miss. In 1962, on the day U.S. Marshals were to escort Meredith to campus, Barnett warned a segregationist crowd nearby that Ole Miss was “ready to be invaded” and issued “a call to arms.” The mob flooded the campus in violent riots that left two people dead and injured hundreds before they were quelled by federalized National Guard troops. The federal court held Barnett in contempt and imposed a large fine and jail sentence, but these penalties were never enforced and the charges were dropped in 1965. Reflecting on his role years later, Barnett said, “Generally speaking, I’d do the same things again.” 

The son of Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge, Herman Talmadge carried on the segregationist cause after his father died. During his 1948 gubernatorial campaign, Talmadge sought to disenfranchise as many African Americans as possible and told party leaders, “If we can’t have a white primary, we want as white a one as we can get.” As governor, Talmadge advocated for segregationist and racist policies, often framed as “states’ rights” issues, which had become a popular segregationist tactic. Talmadge appointed Klan members to public office, including Samuel Green, Grand Dragon of Georgia’s KKK, as Lieutenant Colonel and Aide-de-Camp, and Klansmen Sam Robert as head of the State Bureau of Investigation. Following Brown, Talmadge vehemently opposed integration, ominously warning that “blood will run in the streets of Atlanta” and declaring, “We intend to maintain separate schools in Georgia one way or another, come what may.” 

Isaac “I.” Beverly Lake was a prominent lawyer who fought school desegregation in North Carolina before joining the North Carolina Supreme Court. Lake unsuccessfully ran for governor in 1960 on a segregationist platform that publicly denounced “race-mixing.” He warned white families that integration would “destroy both their school system and their children’s pride in their racial heritage.” In 1957, Lake accused the NAACP of “trying to condition [white] children, even before they are old enough to be conscious of sex, to accept integration not only in the classroom, but in the living room and the bedroom as well.” As late as 1987, he declared it “a disgrace to have a state holiday for a man of deplorable character like Martin Luther King.” His portrait hangs in the North Carolina Supreme Court, and the North Carolina Bar Association and Wake Forest and Campbell University law schools give awards in his memory.

Elected on the strength of his opposition to integration and civil rights, Fielding Wright was governor of Mississippi from 1946 to 1952. To avoid the Supreme Court’s ban on whites-only primary elections, Wright called a special session of the Mississippi Legislature to pass a bill that gave party leadership discretion to approve or disapprove primary voters. In his 1948 inaugural address, Wright called for the South to break from the Democratic Party unless it opposed President Harry Truman’s civil rights program. Wright helped establish the States’ Rights Democratic Party, the “Dixiecrats,” to flex Southern segregationists’ political clout and thwart challenges to white supremacy. In 1948, he ran for Vice President alongside Strom Thurmond on the Dixiecrat ticket, which won some 1.1 million votes. Several Mississippi institutions bear his name, including the Fielding L. Wright Art Center at Delta State University and the Fielding L. Wright Science Complex at Mississippi Valley State University.