Strom Thurmond

Epic card · No. 9719

James Strom Thurmond (December 5, 1902 – June 26, 2003) was a United States Senator from South Carolina who served from 1954 to 1956 and from 1956 to 2003. An avid segregationist, he was the States' Rights Democratic Party ("Dixiecrat") candidate in the 1948 presidential election against Harry S. Truman and Thomas E. Dewey, finishing in third place with 2.4% of the popular vote. Thurmond was originally a Southern Democrat who turned to the Republican Party amid his support for presidential nominee Barry Goldwater and following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although he opposed civil rights legislation for most of his life, he moderated his stances starting from the 1970s. A staunch opponent of civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s, Thurmond completed the longest single-person Senate filibuster, at 24 hours and 18 minutes in length, in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In the 1960s, Thurmond voted against both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting...

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