AS A white Southerner who voted in the 1948 presidential election, I think Sen. Trent Lott and the resultant commentary are giving 1940s-style white Southern segregationists a bad name.

I lived in Georgia in 1948. It and six other of the 11 states of the old Confederacy voted for President Harry Truman. We Crackers gave the president three times as many votes as we gave Mr. Thurmond. That was a predominantly white vote, too. Most Southern blacks were still disenfranchised then, and many if not most, of those who weren't voted Republican.

Most white Southerners and many blacks were segregationists. Some just believed in keeping the races apart out of racist instincts. Others felt segregation was wrong but was so strongly - and often violently - supported by the mean-spirited, selfish white populace that integration efforts would not be helpful, and, in fact, bring more peril to blacks.

Others felt desegregation was right, but premature. Among those were many who knew just how cruelly unequal were facilities and resources. But they saw in separate-but-equal segregation an achievable first step toward integration.

Black education was abysmally under-financed, especially in rural counties. If the South, out of fear of federally imposed "race-mixing," would create equal schools, it would hasten the day when a large black middle class would emerge. That, allied with the white minority in favor of eventual desegregation, would be able to control local and state government policy.

Some segregationists were liberal connivers. They believed in separate but equal as a ploy. Few counties in the Deep South could afford two equal school systems. Faced with high costs and heavy taxation, the theory went, every Southerner left of the KKK would opt for integration.

So being a segregationist in 1948 was not necessarily something one should have to apologize for.

But Strom Thurmond's States' Rights Democrats were not about states' rights and segregation. They were about something much uglier. As Jack Bass and Marilyn W. Thompson wrote of the party's presidential nominee, in their generally sympathetic biography Ol' Strom:

"As Thurmond made clear, the heart of the matter involved race - his defense of white supremacy. He used the term 'States Rights' in no other context." White supremacy was a political theory that treated an entire race as forever subservient, even less than human.

The man Senator Lott wished had been elected president has been quoted repeatedly in the past couple of weeks this way:

"All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement." Mr. Thurmond said that to his new party's nominating convention.

The most revealing words at the convention were in the keynote address by former Alabama Gov. Frank Dixon. He said Truman's proposed civil rights legislation would "reduce us to the status of a mongrel, inferior race, mixed in blood, our Anglo-American heritage a mockery."

This was said just three years after the end of World War II, Nazism, the Master Race. The party that had been dubbed "Dixiecrats" sounded a lot like Dixiekrauts.

Mr. Lott said that if Mr. Thurmond had been elected president in 1948 the United States would not have had "all these problems" we've had. He's right in one sense. We would have had different problems, at least in the years immediately after his swearing in. We may even have had a Civil War II.

And bayonets would have done again what they did a century before. And then, delayed but not stopped by the lost cause presidency of Mr. Thurmond, the nation would have kept moving toward what it has become - a nation in which even Republican states' righters who get very few black votes, no matter what they say or do, will not abide a political leader who gives the appearance of being a throwback to the bad segregationists of the 1940s.

Theo Lippman Jr. is a retired editorial writer for The Sun who lives in Delaware.