United States presidential election in Mississippi, 1956
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All eight Mississippi votes to the Electoral College |
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The 1956 United States presidential election in Mississippi was held on November 6, 1956. Mississippi voters chose eight representatives, or electors to the Electoral College, who voted for President and Vice President.
Ever since the end of Reconstruction, Mississippi had been a one-party state dominated by the Democratic Party. The Republican Party was virtually nonexistent as a result of disenfranchisement among African Americans and poor whites, including voter intimidation against those who refused to vote Democrat.
From the time of Henry A. Wallace’s appointment as Vice-President and the 1943 Detroit race riots, however, the northern left wing of the Democratic Party became committed to restoring black political rights, a policy vehemently opposed by all Southern Democrats as an infringement upon “states' rights”. Consequently, the four states with the highest proportions of (disenfranchised) African-Americans in the populations listed South Carolina Governor James Strom Thurmond instead of national Democratic nominee Harry S. Truman as the “Democratic” nominee in the 1948 Presidential election. Although Thurmond easily carried South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, Truman won the election.
Nevertheless, demands for black civil rights continued to intensify during the following eight years, although the pressing issue of the Korean War meant that Southern Democrats did not run a third-party ticket in 1952; however dissatisfaction with Democrat Adlai Stevenson on Civil Rights meant Dwight Eisenhower (listed as an “Independent” on the 1952 Mississippi ballot) gained considerable support from the exclusively white electorate of black belt counties, despite having a virtually identical position on civil rights.
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