Alabama Democratic Party
|
Alabama Democratic Party
|
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Chairperson | Nancy Worley |
| Headquarters | Montgomery, AL |
| Ideology | Centrism Modern liberalism |
| National affiliation | Democratic Party |
| Colors | Blue |
| Alabama Senate |
8 / 35
|
| Alabama House of Representatives |
33 / 105
|
| U.S. House of Representatives (Alabama) |
1 / 6
|
| U.S. Senate (Alabama) |
1 / 2
|
| Website | |
| aldemocrats.org | |
The Alabama Democratic Party is the affiliate of the Democratic Party in the state of Alabama. It is chaired by Nancy Worley.
Federally, Alabama has not voted for a Democrat for President since Jimmy Carter was the nominee in 1976. In Congress, Democrats hold one out of Alabama's seven seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and will hold one of the state's U.S. Senate seats starting in January 2018 after the election of Doug Jones in 2017. The only Vice President from Alabama was a Democrat, William Rufus King who ran with Franklin Pierce in 1852. However, King died less than two months into his term.
In the state legislature, it is now the minority party, having lost control in 2010 after 136 years. Democrats are also the minority party in statewide offices. Of 19 statewide appellate court positions, Democrats only maintained the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (Sue Bell Cobb) until Cobb's resignation in 2011.
Contents
Current elected officials[edit]
Member of Congress[edit]
U.S. House of Representatives[edit]
Statewide offices[edit]
State Legislature[edit]
- Senate Minority Leader: Quinton Ross
- House Minority Leader: Craig Ford
History of the party[edit]
Creation and antebellum period[edit]
Created during the 1830s under the leadership of figures such as William Rufus King, John Gayle and William Lowndes Yancey, the local Democratic Party took to represent the farmers and the merchants living in Northern Alabama, advocating individual rights and opposing growing centralisation, against the Whigs who represented the urban populations, the Black Belt planters and their businesses allies and who advocated a more active government in the domain of internal improvements.[1]
In Alabama, until the Civil War, the main question were the National Bank, the tariffs and the distribution of the former Indian lands, with slavery growing more and more in importance.
The Democratic candidates always won the gubernatorial and presidential elections in this state, excepted in 1845 when a dissident was elected governor and in 1860 when John Breckinridge won the state for the Southern Democrats.
Reconstruction[edit]
The end of the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves by the Thirteenth Amendment caused a major changement in the politics of Alabama, caused by the fact the recently freed slaves voted for the Republican party and elected Republican officials.[1]
To counter this trend, the Democratic leadership appealed to the White supremacist sentiments and racial solidarity among the White population, and used fraud and violence by the kands of the Ku Klux Klan and other paramilitaries, to win back the governorship in 1874 with George S. Houston.
The main issues in Alabama were taxation, the railroads and government reform, which provided the Democratic voters from the lower classes with occasions to challenge the Black Belt-Big Mule Coalition, the coalition of the planters from the Black Belt and the industrialists from Birmingham, first in the primaries of the party and then, after they failed, by joining the Populists and the Republicans in a biracial coalition the Democratic leadership broke through fraud and deal-making.
As part of the "Solid South"[edit]
In order to remove any challenge to their rule and to white supremacy, Alabama leadership enacted a new constitution in 1901, disenfranchising most of the African Americans and poor Whites, by the implementation of a poll tax, literacy tests and a grandfather clause; other dispositions they used in order to reduce the challenges to the Democratic party from other parties and independents were a sore-loser law and a loyalty pledge binding any participent to the Democratic primary to the Democratic candidates.
In Alabama, the main election was consequently the primaries, since winning them was tantamount to election; they opposed a conservative wing, led by the Black Belt-Big Mule coalition, and a liberal wing less concerned by race relations and wanted a more active government in providing services.
On 1904, the Alabama Democratic Party adopted a logo featuring a rooster and the words "White supremacy."
Since Reconstruction, the Democratic presidential candidate always won the state although, in 1928, Al Smith won by a far more close margin because of his Catholicism and his links with Tammany Hall, with some leaders even saying they would vote for Hoover.
Civil Rights Movement[edit]
The Great Migration of African Americans from the Deep South to states such as New York or Ohio, where they would exercise the franchise and where they were an electoral block, along with a switch of public opinion meant the National Democratic Party had to act against Jim Crow.
On 1948, after the inclusion of a civil rights plank in the party platform, several Southern delegates, among them half of Alabama's, walked out the convention and formed the States' Rights Democratic Party whose candidate for president was Strom Thurmond, who won Alabama as the local Democratic Party's presidential candidate instead of Harry Truman, who was not on the ballots in Alabama.
With the growing pression from the national Democratic party against segregation, the support for this party among white Alabamians began to wane.
During the United States presidential election of 1960, as a protest against the civil rights platforms of both national parties, the Alabama Democratic Party ran a slate of five Kennedy-committed electors and six unpledged electors, who voted for Harry F. Byrd.
Four years later, on 1964, Barry Goldwater was the first Republican to carry the state since Grant on 1872; Lyndon B. Johnson was not even present on the ballots and eleven unpledged electors ran on the Democratic ticket.[2][3]
Faced with the new Black voters given the franchise thanks to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Democratic leadership tried to attract these new voters by measures such as forming the Alabama Democratic Conference and replacing the "White supremacy" with "Democrats" on their logo;[4][5] nevertheless, the party remained divided on the inside between Loyalists, liberals or moderates "loyal" to the national Democratic party, and segregationists Regulars, and on the outside with the National Democratic Party of Alabama, a mainly Black and liberal party.[6][7]
The 1970's[edit]
The personality of George Wallace, who campaigned on shifting grounds, promising "segregation forever" to a White-dominated electorate and singing "We Shall Overcome" to a more inclusive electorate, helped to maintain the Democratic party in its paramouncy, without slowing too much the growth of the Alabama Republican Party.
The three factions eventually reunited in the main party on 1972.[8]
After Wallace[edit]
The retirement of Wallace on 1986 opened a bitter struggle for succeeding him.
Charles Graddick won the Democratic gubernatorial primaries but Bill Baxley appealed on the basis Graddick called Republicans to cross over for the runoff, forcing the leadership to either hold another runoff or chose Baxley as candidate for the Alabama gubernatorial election of 1986.
The decision from the leadership to run Baxley was deemed undemocratic by the electorate, leading to the election of Guy Hunt, the first Republican governor since the Reconstruction.
Since then, the Democrats lost more and more ground to the Republican, losing on 2010 the control of the Alabama Legislature.
Emblems[edit]
On 1904 the Alabama Democratic Party chose, as logo to put on its ballots, a rooster with the motto "White supremacy - For the right." Some objected to the rooster, such as J. Thomas Heflin, who found it "[failing] to impress the people with the dignity of the Democratic Party," prefering to use a woman holding the Constitution in scrolls upon which was marked "Here We Rest" without objecting to the motto itself.[9]
The presence of "White supremacy" on the Democratic logo and, as extenson, on the ballots themselves, was used as a symbol of the Black disenfranchisement in the South[10] and for the 1952 United States Presidential Election used against the Stevenson-Sparkman ticket by Thomas Dewey.[11]
On January 1966, over the objections of George Wallace and the Regulars, who feared the loss of White voters, the leadership decided, on a proposition from the Loyalists, helped by Charles W. McKay, the author of the "Nullification Declaration" against the Brown decision, who wanted to attrack Black voters recently enfranchised by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to replace "White supremacy" with "Democrats."[4][5]
Thirty years later, on 1996, the party dropped the rooster, citing racist and white supremacist connotations winked with the symbol.[12]
Chronology of leadership[edit]
Chronology of Chairs[edit]
- 1955-1966: Roy Mayhall
- 1966-1977: Bob Vance
- 1977-1980: George Lewis Bailes
- 1980-1984: Jimmy Knight
- 1984-1991: John Baker
- 1991-1992: Jack Hurley
- 1992-1996: Bill Blount
- 1996-1998: Joe Turnham
- 1998-2001: Jack Miller
- 2001-2005: Redding Pitt
- 2005-2011: Joe Turnham
- 2011-2013: Mark Kennedy
- 2013–present: Nancy Worley
Chronology of Executive Directors[edit]
- 197?-1983: Louise Lindblom
- 198?-1997: Al LaPierre
- 1998-2000: Giles Perkins
- 2000: Wade Perry
- 2000-2001: Phillip Kinney
- 2001-2003: Marsha Folsom
- 2003-2004: Mike Kanarick
- 2004-2011: Jim Spearman
- 2011-2013: Bradley Davidson
Notes and references[edit]
- ^ a b Cotter, Patrick R. "Democratic Party in Alabama". Encyclopedia of Alabama. Retrieved 2017-07-22.
- ^ "Alabama Expected To Choose Electors Backed by Wallace". The New York Times. 1964-05-03. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2017-12-09.
- ^ Denton, Herbert H. (October 21, 1964). "Flowers Attacks Wallace Democrats". The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved 2017-12-09.
- ^ a b "Alabama Democratic Party Strikes 'White Supremacy' From Its Motto". Ocala Star-Banner. Associated Press. January 23, 1966. p. 1. Retrieved July 22, 2017.
- ^ a b Ingram, Bob (January 21, 1966). "Loyalist Faction Wins; 'White Supremacy' Goes". Birmingham News. Retrieved July 22, 2017.
- ^ Wieck, Paul R. (August 3, 1968). "Southern Democrats: Not What They Used To Be". New Republic. Retrieved 2017-07-22.
- ^ Edmonds, Matthew C. "National Democratic Party of Alabama (NDPA)". Encyclopedia of Alabama. Retrieved 2017-07-22.
- ^ Mjagkij, Nina (2013-05-13). Organizing Black America. Routledge. p. 393. ISBN 1135581231.
- ^ "FACT CHECK: Did a State Democratic Party Logo Once Feature the Slogan 'White Supremacy'?". Snopes.com. 2017-09-25. Retrieved 2017-12-09.
- ^ Sears Henning, Arthur (November 29, 1940). "Alabama Ballot Boasts of White Supremacy". Chicago Tribune.
- ^ "Demos Run Under 'White Supremacy Tag in South". Dixon Evening Telegraph. October 9, 1952. p. 13. Retrieved December 9, 2017.
- ^ "Bad symbol removed". Times Daily. March 14, 1996. p. 7B. Retrieved July 22, 2017.
