was the opening salvo in the longer battle to open up the
political system to blacks, and the Court understood the
importance of loosening white control of political parties.
That decision was followed by Brown v. Board of
Education in 1954, in which the Supreme Court ruled that
state-mandated segregation of schools and other public
sites was unconstitutional. In 1962 the Court knocked away
another pillar of the political dominance of white elites:
legislative malapportionment. When a legislature is
malapportioned—as were the “rotten boroughs” in England
before the First Reform Act—some areas or regions
receive much greater representation than they should
based on their share of the relevant population.
Malapportionment in the South meant that the rural areas,
the heartland of the southern planter elite, were heavily
overrepresented relative to urban areas. The Supreme
Court put an end to this in 1962 with its decision in the
Baker v. Carr case, which introduced the “one-person, one-
vote” standard.
But all the rulings from the Supreme Court would have
amounted to little if they hadn’t been implemented. In the
1890s, in fact, federal legislation enfranchising southern
blacks was not implemented, because local law
enforcement was under the control of the southern elite and
the Democratic Party, and the federal government was
happy to go along with this state of affairs. But as blacks
started rising up against the southern elite, this bastion of
support for Jim Crow crumbled, and the Democratic Party,
led by its non-southern elements, turned against racial
segregation. The renegade southern Democrats regrouped
under the banner of the States’ Rights Democratic Party
and competed in the 1948 presidential election. Their
candidate, Strom Thurmond, carried four states and gained
thirty-nine votes in the Electoral College. But this was a far
cry from the power of the unified Democratic Party in
national politics and the capture of that party by the
southern elites. Strom Thurmond’s campaign was centered
on his challenge to the ability of the federal government to
intervene in the institutions of the South. He stated his
position forcefully: “I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen,
that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the
Southern people to break down segregation and admit the