<P> In addition to the splits in the Democratic Party, the population movements associated with World War II had a significant effect in changing the demographics of the South . More than 5 million African Americans migrated from the South to the North and West in the second Great Migration, lasting from 1940 to 1970 . Starting before WWII, many had moved to California for jobs in the defense industry, as well as to major industrial cities of the Midwest . </P> <P> With control of powerful committees, during and after the war, Southern Democrats gained new federal military installations in the South and other federal investments . Changes in industry, and growth in universities and the military establishment, in turn attracted Northern transplants to the South, and bolstered the base of the Republican Party . In the post-war Presidential campaigns, Republicans did best in those fastest - growing states of the South that had the most Northern transplants . In the 1952, 1956 and 1960 elections, Virginia, Tennessee and Florida went Republican, while Louisiana went Republican in 1956, and Texas twice voted for Dwight D. Eisenhower and once for John F. Kennedy . In 1956, Eisenhower received 48.9% of the Southern vote, becoming only the second Republican in history (after Ulysses S. Grant) to get a plurality of Southern votes . </P> <P> The white conservative voters of the states of the Deep South remained loyal to the Democratic Party, which had not officially repudiated segregation . Because of declines in population or smaller rates of growth compared to other states, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and North Carolina lost congressional seats from the 1950s to the 1970s, while South Carolina, Louisiana and Georgia remained static . Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president in 1952, with strong support from the emerging middle class suburban element in the South . He appointed a number of Southern Republican supporters as federal judges in the South . They in turn ordered the desegregation of Southern schools in the 1950s and 1960s . They included Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges John R. Brown, Elbert P. Tuttle, and John Minor Wisdom, As well as district judges Frank Johnson and J. Skelly Wright . However, five of his 24 appointees supported segregation . </P> <P> The "Year of Birmingham" in 1963 highlighted racial issues in Alabama . Through the spring, there were marches and demonstrations to end legal segregation . The Movement's achievements in settlement with the local business class were overshadowed by bombings and murders by the Ku Klux Klan, most notoriously in the deaths of four girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing . </P>

Supporters tended to be in the south and west