Longest-serving US senator dies at 100
In seven decades of politics, Strom Thurmond helped rewrite the history of the South and the nation, gaining fame and infamy as an arch-segregationist who took fellow Dixiecrats into the party of Abraham Lincoln but then came to support the Martin Luther King holiday.
He is best remembered for a third-party presidential run in 1948. Southern Democrats nominated their own candidate, upset over President Harry Truman's support of civil rights. Thurmond carried four southern states, good for 39 electoral votes. Truman won the election anyway.
