Strom Thurmond (R-SC)
The former Democrat turned Republican after he could not prevent the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act with his filibuster which lasted for 24 and 18 minutes. Strom was the trail blazer for other white supremacists who left the Democrats and found their new home in the GOP.
Elected to the Senate in 1933, Strom also railed against the Federal Government interfering in states rights, to enforce Anti-Lynching Laws, fighting hard to protect that beloved spectator sport that Christians stopped to participate in on their way home from church on Sundays.
Strom is still a sitting Senator, well actually he requires his aides to prop him up--so he can vote how ever Trent Lott tells him to vote. And totter him into the senate full of presumably sane people, who pretend that he is something other than senile and decrepit, and that his vote actually represents something other than a rubber-stamp for the most extremist, racist, anti-civil rights factions in the republican party.
It is said that with Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms and Dick Armey leaving congress this year, that it's the end of and era. We can only hope so.