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On Monday evening, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker began a marathon floor speech to break the record that the odious Dixiecrat Strom Thurman set when he filibustered the Civil Rights Act on 1957 for 24 hours and 17 minutes.

With then–Gov. Thurmond as their leader, the group broke off and created the Dixiecrat Party for the upcoming election.

Thurmond’s disdain for integration and the pursuit of civil rights, he claimed, came from his intense belief in states’ rights, which became the foundation upon which he built his 1948 “Dixiecrat” presidential campaign.

In 1948, Dixiecrat candidate Strom Thurmond, South Carolina’s governor, won 39 Deep South electoral votes opposing civil rights.

Kruse dismantles the belief that Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign invented the Southern Strategy by tracing it back to the Dixiecrat split with the Democrats in 1948.