James Strom Thurmond Sr. (December 5, 1902 – June 26, 2003) was an American politician who represented South Carolina in the United States Senate from 1954 to 2003. Before his 47 years as a senator, he served as the 103rd governor of South Carolina from 1947 to 1951. Thurmond was officially a member of the Democratic Party in the Senate until 1964, when he joined the Republican Party. He had earlier run for president in 1948 as the Dixiecrat candidate in opposition to Democratic president Harry S. Truman, receiving over a million votes and winning four states.
A staunch opponent of civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s, Thurmond completed the longest single-person Senate filibuster, at 24 hours and 18 minutes in length, in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In the 1960s, Thurmond voted against both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Despite his support for Jim Crow laws, Thurmond denied the accusation that he was a racist by insisting he was a supporter of states' rights and an opponent of excessive federal authority.