Strom Thurmond Governor and U.S. Senator (1902–2003)
Impact and Legacy
The impact of Thurmond's articulation of states' rights during the civil rights struggle of the mid-twentieth century was dramatic. Thurmond formulated a strategy of southern resistance to the claimed federal power to introduce and enforce civil rights legislation protecting minorities and their rights over states' rights, which often threatened them. He based his modern theory of states' rights on the theories of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison established in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which were responses to what the authors deemed tyrannical powers of the federal government. Thurmond also refined John C. Calhoun's theory of state nullification of federal legislation into what he described in the Southern Manifesto as legitimate interposition over the Brown decision, opposing the “judicial usurpation” of “the rights reserved to the States and to the people, contrary to established law, and to the Constitution.” Thurmond and the allied...
