Thurmond's Times' Obit
Adam "Asshole" Clymer has a thorough, interesting, and generally fair obit of Strom "Sperm" Thurmond in today's New York Times.
Despite the role of civil rights in his political evolution and his record-breaking filibuster of 24 hours and 18 minutes against the civil rights bill of 1957, Mr. Thurmond always insisted he had never been a racist, but was merely opposed to excessive federal authority.
Despite Thurmond's later switch on integration, the idea that his–and other segregationists'–dedication to states' rights was unrelated to race is laughable, especially when one recalls statements such as this one cited by Clymer:
Running for president in 1948 as what the press called a Dixiecrat, he said that "on the question of social intermingling of the races, our people draw the line." And, he went on, "all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement."
In 2001, Reason Contributing Editor Charles Oliver reviewed Manisha Sinha's provocative book, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina which convincingly argues, as Oliver summarizes,:
…that Southern "states' rights" ideology was formed with the express purpose of defending slavery. Indeed, antebellum Southerners were quick to use national power, at the expense of states' rights, to defend slavery. From 1789 to 1860, the South dominated the national government, and the "Slave Power," as critics called it, readily used the federal government to protect and advance its interests.
Oliver's review, which also treats When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession, by Confederate apologist Charles Adams, is online here and worth reading.