States' Rights As "code Word"
During the heyday of the African-American civil rights movement, the term "states' rights" was used as a code word by defenders of segregation. In 1948 it was the official name of the "Dixiecrat" party led by white supremacist presidential candidate Strom Thurmond. Democratic governor George Wallace, of Alabama, who famously declared in his inaugural address in 1962, "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!"—later remarked that he should have said, "States' rights now! States' rights tomorrow! States' rights forever!" Wallace, however, claimed that segregation was but one issue symbolic of a larger struggle for states' rights; in that view, which some historians dispute, his replacement of segregation with states' rights would be more of a clarification than a euphemism.
In 2010, Texas governor Rick Perry's use of the expression "state's rights", to some, was reminiscent of "an earlier era when it was a rallying cry against civil rights." During an interview with The Dallas Morning News, Perry made it clear that he supports the end of segregation, including passage of the Civil Rights Act. Texas president of the NAACP Gary Bledsoe stated that he understood that Perry wasn't speaking of "states' rights" in a racial context; but others still felt offended by the term because of its past misuse.
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Famous quotes containing the words rights, code and/or word:
“I have known no experience more distressing than the discovery that Negroes didn’t love me. Unutterable loneliness claimed me. I felt without roots, like a man without a country ...”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 10 (1962)
“...I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and tired and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)
“Every living language, like the perspiring bodies of living creatures, is in perpetual motion and alteration; some words go off, and become obsolete; others are taken in, and by degrees grow into common use; or the same word is inverted to a new sense or notion, which in tract of time makes an observable change in the air and features of a language, as age makes in the lines and mien of a face.”
—Richard Bentley (1662–1742)