ANTI-TRUMAN CAMPAIGN

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25550, 19 July 1948, Page 7

ANTI-TRUMAN CAMPAIGN

Southern States’ Democrats NEW CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENCY (N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) (Rec. 10.30 p.m.) NEW YORK, July 17. Northern Democrats had decided on “a social revolution for the South that will reduce us to the state of mongrels,” said Mr Frank Dixon, a former Governor of Alabama, at the Southern Democratic Party convention at Birmingham, Alabama, to-day. Mr Dixon made the keynote speech to angry Southerners who had met with the avowed aim of taking the usually Democraticsolid South out of the regular party’s columns for the first time in 70 years. The purposes of the meeting were to defeat President Truman, whose civil rights programme set the South aflame earlier in the year, and to fight for States’ rights, particularly those affecting negroes. Amid rebel yells by the wildly enthusiastic crowd, Mr J. Strom Thurmond, Governor of South Carolina, was chosen as a States’ rights, anti-Truman Presidential candidate. Mr Fielding Wright, Governor of Mississippi, was chosen as a Vice-Presidential candidate. Both candidates were chosen by acclamation. The resolution nominating both men also called for another meeting of the Southern rebels on October 1. The Southerners had one last fling after their convention to-night, when with whoops and rebel yells, 55 young Mississippians who had attended the convention paraded Mr Truman in effigy through the lobby of a hotel and in the street. The dummy carried a sign across its chest: “Truman killed by civil rights.” The dummy was then taken and thrown across the front awning of the hotel.