Note: Graham’s Senate seat has never been occupied by anyone *but* a white man.
Before Graham, it was held for almost 50 years by Strom Thurmond.
Running for president 9 years earlier, Thurmond had this to say (from @CrespinoJoe's great biography):
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DooX_r7WwAAwUiD.jpg)
"To hell with the Constitution," Blease shouted, if it "steps between me and the defense of the virtues of white women."
"Ours is the government of the white man," he said in 1848, opposing the addition of Mexican citizens to the US body politic, after war between the 2 countries.
But in appealing to white men’s sense of grievance and entitlement, he was invoking ideas with a long and malign history – perhaps nowhere more so than in his native South Carolina. /x