Aaron Henry, chair of the MFDP delegation, speaks before the Credentials Committee at the 1964 DNC. Credit: Library of Congress
In late August 1964, 68 members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party — made up of maids, ministers, farmers, painters, mechanics, and schoolteachers — took on President Lyndon B. Johnson and the entire Democratic Party. They demanded the segregationist Mississippi delegates to the Democratic National Convention not be seated and that, instead, they be seated as the only truly delegates.
The convention was a seminal moment for the Southern Freedom Movement, clarifying the limits of ruling-class acceptance of the social and economic vision of the Black Liberation Movement. The struggle at the convention in 1964 shaped the contours of the approaches on how to challenge, gain and exercise power that would rock the country in the late ‘60s and 70’s including at the 1968 Democratic convention.
Revisiting how this movement of poor and working people from Mississippi took on the elite clique that ran the country, to transform their own futures, holds numerous lessons for movements of poor and working people looking to do the same today.
Mississippi Goddam
In Mississippi, according to MFDP leader and farm laborer Fannie Lou Hamer, Blacks were “excluded from everything … but the tombs.” Eighty-five percent lived in poverty, one-third were sharecroppers, tenant farmers or farm laborers. Only 7% of Mississippi’s Black population were registered to vote, most of those were too scared to cast a ballot.
Mississippi was controlled by 100 white plantation owners. Their exploitation of Black farmers created tremendous profits, as much as a 57% return on their original investment. They ruled through a nexus connecting law enforcement, government, the Democratic Party and the Klu Klux Klan.
A new and unsettling force
Local organizers like Fannie Lou Hamer who was a timekeeper on a cotton plantation, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) came together in a campaign for voting rights. The young freedom fighters merged with southern Black communities, picking “cotton with them” living on “cornbread and grease and Kool Aid.” They laid on floors together as “the Klan rode by their house firing guns” and standing up to racists “with murder in [their] eyes.”
They were met with beatings, bombings and murders. Where naked terrorism failed, authorities manipulated the registration process frustrating all but a few attempts to join the voter roll. “We were organizing against the entire state apparatus of Mississippi,” said Mississippi native and SNCC organizer Lawrence Guyot. “We had to nationalize the issue.”
They decided to set up a political instrument that, according to SNCC’s Mississippi project director Bob Moses, “would be responsible to the people … an organization that they actually controlled.”
Freedom Democrats
The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was founded in April 1964. Meetings were held across the state to build it. According to a volunteer, “Hundreds of people risked their lives and jobs to come.” Victoria Gray, a party leader from Hattiesburg, described the atmosphere: “We were doing our politicking; we were making our speeches … It was the most exciting thing.”
All organizing was under the cloud of Klan-police repression. In Neshoba County alone, 11 were lynched in the spring and early summer, including three civil rights workers. In Greenwood, police deputized Klansman, including Byron De La Beckwith who assassinated Medgar Evers in 1963. Despite this, 2,500 gathered in early August for a convention. “Proud people sitting purposefully under their county signs…Leflore, Sunflower, Amite…just…the names themselves, every one resonant with memories of sacrifice, bloodshed and struggle.”
They championed the right to vote “without fear,” “freedom to learn, to attend good schools,” and freedom from “hunger and want.” MFDP rejected anti-communism and collaborated with anyone willing to help, even if they were “reds.”
They chose to challenge the segregationist Mississippi delegation to the DNC based on party rules. A convention challenge offered a chance to dramatize the brutality of the Mississippi establishment to a national audience and strike the segregationist establishment.
President Johnson’s dilemma
The president was the majority choice of the powers behind the political throne. The Democratic national treasury had benefited heavily from, according the New York Times, “‘fat cat donors.” Even many Republican business executives favored President Johnson over his opponent, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Johnson was favored by elites for his centrism, maintaining the general status quo that had been quite profitable for business, with just enough given to labor to generally keep the peace.
Johnson had righted the ship after the JFK assassination, and, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, seemed to be handling the push for equal rights. He had also remained “tough on the commies,” engineering the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify U.S. intervention in Vietnam.
The convention was a chance to wrap it all up in a bow and crush Goldwater in a landslide.
The Mississippi challenge was the fly in the ointment. Segregationists were already defecting to Goldwater in many states but Johnson was confident he could hold a chunk of the South. However if the Mississippi “regulars” were ejected for the MFDP, Southern delegates would walkout en masse, giving Goldwater a new lease on life.
Further, it threatened to create a new power center less controllable by party elites. As SNCC leader James Forman detailed:
The power base operating for SNCC…involved not only the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party … It also had the political and moral support of many students, churchmen, radicals … Americans moved to action by indignation about the…denial of the right to vote in the South … these forces … not only disturbed Democratic officials but also disrupted the old arrangements between … the Democratic Party and the white-dominated liberal-labor leadership circles. If this newly emerging political force … were allowed to grow in strength, its influence…would further weaken the influence of the old-time brokers between the masses of black people and the Democratic Party. That possibility signaled danger … for they could not control us.
Boardwalk brawl: Part I
Nine state delegations and 25 members of Congress had pledged their support to the MFDP. President Johnson was so worried he had the FBI send a 27-man team of agents to spy on the MFDP, using press credentials provided by NBC and report directly to the White House. The MFDP delegation and allies from SNCC and CORE kept up a permanent presence on the boardwalk and around the convention hall, lobbying delegates and holding vigil.
The first battleground was the Credentials Commission. While unlikely to prevail there, if the MFDP could get 10% of members on its side, sympathetic state delegations could put it on the floor for a debate, and in an open floor fight, broadcast on national TV and radio they might win. The MFDP had lined up testimony which included their delegation and other civil rights leaders.
Fannie Lou Hamer stepped up to the microphone and stated, “It was the 31st of August in 1962 that eighteen of us traveled … to try to register to become first class-citizens.” She detailed that the failed attempt had raised a commotion. “My husband came and said the plantation owner was raising Cain because I had tried to register…the plantation owner came, and said, Fannie Lou…if you don’t go down and withdraw your registration” she would have to leave her job at the plantation. “I…told him, I didn’t try to register for you. I tried to register for myself. I had to leave that same night.”
She moved on to June 1963, where she and ten others traveled to a voter registration workshop. Upon their return they were arrested, and tortured. “I was carried … into another cell where they had two Negro prisoners. The State Highway Patrolman ordered the first Negro to take the blackjack.”
Then, all of a sudden, Hamer disappeared from TV. A “firebell” had gone off in the White House and Johnson quickly called a press conference to knock Hamer off the networks. However, the president miscalculated. That evening, network news played the rest of her testimony to an even larger audience:
After the first Negro had beat until he was exhausted, the … Highway Patrolman ordered the second Negro to take the blackjack. The second Negro began to beat … I began to scream and one white man got up and began to beat me in my head … all of this on account we want to register, to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America.
Overnight, hundreds of telegrams poured into the convention, demanding the MFDP be seated. After this, it seemed, MFDP would have their minority report.
Boardwalk brawl: Part II
Johnson, moved to plan B, a “compromise.” Senator Hubert Humphrey was desperate to be president one day. He was also the Democrat most identified with civil rights and labor causes. Johnson promised him the VP slot, but only if he could keep the Negroes in line. Humphrey lined up United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther, the NAACP, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a few other “friendly congressmen,” Bayard Rustin and assorted church leaders to try to strong-arm the MFDP.
The compromise had various elements, but it came down to the MFDP getting two seats, not as voting delegates, but as “guests,” and a promise that in 1968 the DNC would bar segregated delegations. Unsurprisingly, the MFDP rejected the compromise. Johnson turned up the heat. Reuther called Joe Rauh, MFDP attorney, and told him if the compromise wasn’t accepted, his lucrative labor law practice was finished. He also called Dr. King, telling him, “Your funding is on the line.”
In a last ditch effort, a meeting was organized at a local church. The MFDP delegates heard from a long line of speakers. Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March on Washington, and participant in the first ever Freedom Ride in 1947 — for which he did time on the chain-gang — told the delegates, “You must accept the compromise.” Even Dr. King spoke, elliptically, in favor of compromise. Still, the Freedom Democrats held fast, no compromise. As Hamer put it: “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats!”
Endgames
Without a compromise, amidst Johnson’s threats, most of the support for the MFDP melted away among delegates, making a floor fight impossible. The “regular” delegates refused to pledge loyalty to Johnson, and also were not seated, so, in the end, there simply was no Mississippi delegation.
MFDP delegates briefly sat in their state’s section, but were quickly removed by security, the next night, all the seats under the “Mississippi” sign were removed. Johnson was nominated by acclaim and the convention moved on. Johnson himself reveled in the success, flying back to his Texas ranch to celebrate. Among MFDP delegates, “some were dejected while others were angry, and still others were ready to move on. Everyone had learned something.”
In the aftermath there was an expansion of independent Black political activity, especially in Alabama, where SNCC would help form the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, whose logo was a Black Panther, later adopted by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale for their party of the same name.
CORE, similarly, began to embrace more independent Black political organization. Armed self-defense, always a reality in the South, became more openly embraced. Students who had come from all over the North and West to assist in Mississippi became the backbone of the growing movement against the war in Vietnam. The anti-McCarthyite attitude cultivated by SNCC helped lead to the growth and circulation of radical ideas among millions of those engaged with the movement.
Alongside the assassination of Malcolm X, the Watts Uprising, Dr. King’s efforts to integrate the Chicago suburbs, the growing war in Vietnam, and the revolutionary processes in Cuba and China contributed to a deepening challenge to the status quo. One that would be on full display in the 1968 DNC. Where Johnson had been forced out due to Vietnam and massive protests against the Democrats were met with extreme violence from Chicago police. Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed earlier that year for daring to lead poor people towards a vision of a sort of socialism, and the Black Panther Party had skyrocketed to fame with their revolutionary vision.
While it wasn’t quite clear at the time, the Atlantic City convention was an inflection point. It marked a shift into a more confrontational phase of “the sixties.” Where the interests of capital were challenged by various increasingly radical visions of social reform and in some cases revolution. In our current moment, it has left us a legacy that helps guide us today.
First and foremost, it’s a striking confirmation of the ability of poor and working class people to organize and take on powerful forces under their own leadership. Secondly, the ruling class concedes to reform due not to benevolence, but duress and when the demands become too much they will move, viciously, to close down the political space for progress. Third, any social movement looking to make change must avoid all unprincipled compromise. Expediency is always counseled to those looking to shake things up, but it’s rarely the way to shift the political winds.
