Sen. Strom Thurmond Timeline
Published 8:00 pm, Wednesday, December 4, 2002
Significant dates in the life of Strom Thurmond:
_1902: James Strom Thurmond is born in Edgefield, S.C. The area around rural Edgefield has given rise to 10 South Carolina governors.
_1923: Thurmond graduates from Clemson College (now Clemson University) with a bachelor of science degree in horticulture. For the next several years he teaches high school near his boyhood home.
_1924: Thurmond is commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army reserve. He also is elected to the Edgefield County Board of Education - the youngest school board member in South Carolina history. He takes correspondence courses in law and in 1930 passes the South Carolina bar. He serves as county schools superintendent from 1929 to 1933.
_1933: He is elected to the state Senate as a Democrat, attending national conventions and voting for Franklin D. Roosevelt. He serves from 1933 until 1938, when he becomes a state circuit judge.
_1944: Thurmond takes part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy as part of the 82nd Airborne Division. After seeing action in both Europe and the Pacific, he returns home a lieutenant colonel with a fistful of medals including the Bronze Star, Purple Heart and the French Croix de Guerre.
_1946: He is elected governor of South Carolina. In 1947 he marries Jean Crouch, one of his secretaries. She is 21; he is 44.
_1948: Upset over President Truman's civil rights plank in the Democratic Party platform, Southerners leave the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia and hold their own convention in Birmingham, Ala., as States' Rights Democrats. There they nominate Thurmond as their presidential candidate. The "Dixiecrat" ticket carries Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. Truman is re-elected.
_1954: He becomes the first person elected to the U.S. Senate as a write-in candidate. He resigns in 1956 to fulfill a campaign promise and runs for the post again, this time as the Democratic nominee.
_1957: Setting a record, Thurmond filibusters for 24 hours and 18 minutes to prevent a vote on housing legislation he denounces as "race mixing." The bill passes despite the filibuster. By now Thurmond's segregationist credentials are well-established, having opposed Truman's civil rights plank and in 1956 helping to draft the "Southern Manifesto" opposing the Supreme Court's order desegregating schools. Later in his career he changes his stance toward civil rights legislation, supporting some measures and in 1970 becoming the first Southern senator to hire a black staffer.
_1964: Thurmond switches to the Republican Party to support the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater. South Carolina, which had not elected a Republican since Reconstruction, re-elects Thurmond in 1966. Over the next few decades, the solidly Democratic South swings to the Republican party.
_1968: Eight years after the death of his first wife, Thurmond marries Nancy Moore, a former Miss South Carolina. She is 25; he is 66. They raise four children. In presidential politics, Thurmond helps Richard Nixon implement his "Southern Strategy" and counter a third-party bid by George Wallace.
_1981: Thurmond, now a senator for a quarter of a century, serves as Senate president pro tempore, a mostly honorary title that puts him third in the line of presidential succession. He serves until 1987, and again from 1995 until 2001.
_Dec. 5, 1996: At 94, Thurmond becomes the oldest serving member in Senate history. He chairs the Armed Services Committee from 1995 until January 1999.
_May 25, 1997: Thurmond becomes the longest serving member of the Senate at 41 years and 10 months. In September 1998 he casts his 15,000th vote, only the second Senator to do so. A lifelong fitness buff, his health begins to decline in the late 1990s. He is treated for prostate cancer in 1999.
_Oct. 2, 2001: Thurmond collapses on the floor of the Senate. A month later, he moves to Walter Reed Army Medical Center so doctors can better monitor his medication.
_Dec. 5, 2002: Thurmond marks his 100th birthday. The Air Force names a C-17 cargo plane "The Spirit of Strom Thurmond," to be based in South Carolina.
Sources: U.S. Senate, Clemson University, AP reports.