Lucius Lamar Vs. Strom Thurmond Essay Example

Lucius Lamar vs. Strom Thurmond

Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II (1825-1893), was an American statesman and judge. In Lamar graduated from Emory College in 1845 with a law degree. He was elected a member of the Georgia House of Representatives in 1853.

Lucius returned to Mississippi in 1855, and two years later became a member of the National House of Representatives, where he served until December 1860, when he withdrew to become a candidate for election to the secession convention of Mississippi where he drafted the Mississippi ordinance of secession. He resigned his professorship from the University of Mississippi to be a lieutenant-colonel in the Confederate Army in the spring of 1861. In 1862, he was appointed by Confederate President Jefferson Davis as the special commissioner of the Confederacy to Russia.

In 1866 he returned to the University of Mississippi where he was professor of ethics, metaphysics and law. From 1873 to 1877 he was again a representative in Congress and joined the U.S Senate from 1877 to 1885. Lamar served as United States Secretary of the Interior from 1885 to 1888 and become an associate Justice I the Supreme court from 1888 until his death in 1893. In Congress Lamar fought the silver and greenback craze and argued forcibly against the protective tariff; in the department of the interior he introduced various reforms; and on the Supreme Court his dissenting opinion in the Neagle Case is famous. But he is perhaps best known for the part he took after the Civil War in helping to effect reconciliation between the North and the South.

James Strom Thurmond (1902 –2003) was an American politician who served as a United States Senator. Thurmond represented South Carolina in the United States Senate from 1954 to 2003, at first as a Democrat and then as a Republican. He was opposed to the 1964 Civil Rights to end segregation and enforce the voting rights of African-Americans. After his death, it was later revealed that he had fathered a mixed race daughter, Essie Mae, with his family's maid, a 16-year-old black girl when he was 22.

After the U.S. formally entered World War II, Thurmond resigned from the bench to serve in the U.S. Army, rising to Lieutenant Colonel. Thurmond was elected Governor of South Carolina in 1946 and in 1948, he became a candidate for president on the third party ticket of the States' Rights Democratic Party in response to President Harry S. Truman efforts in instituting civil liberties, but Truman was reelected. In 1952, The Democratic Party leaders blocked Thurmond from receiving the nomination to the Senate in 1954 due to his support for a Republican candidate, and he ran as a write-in candidate, becoming the first person to be elected to the U.S. Senate as a write-in candidate against ballot-listed opponents.

In 1964, he switched his party affiliation to the Republican Party from the Democratic party due to the latter’s increasing support for Civil Liberties. He played an important role in South Carolina's support among white voters for the Republican presidential candidates.

Thurmond appointed an African American, Thomas Moss to his staff in 1971. In 1983, he supported legislation to make the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. a federal holiday. However, Thurmond never explicitly renounced his earlier views on racial segregation.