19. Desegregation was a liberal idea which split the Democratic party
Segregation was common practice in the United States through the 1950s, and it was not limited to the American South. It was common in many northern states, which included the existence of sundown towns, where blacks caught within city limits after dark were liable to be arrested. In 1948 President Harry Truman alienated a substantial portion of the Democratic party when he ordered the Armed Forces to become fully integrated. To say that there was resistance to implementing the President’s order, which he made through an executive order, is a gross understatement.
Southern Democrats, known at the time as the Dixiecrats, resisted the liberal notion of desegregation to the point that they split from the Democratic Party, and the solidly Democratic south became just as solidly Republican, a conservative bastion, even as a Democratic president – Lyndon Johnson – pushed for civil rights in the 1960s. The idea of peaceful desegregation disintegrated into race riots in the Jim Crow South which spread rapidly into the cities of the North during the 1960s as what had started as civil rights protests became an issue of racial superiority.