Search Results

This chapter discusses the four years of tension within the Georgia Democratic Party during Lester Maddox's time as governor. Despite early attempts by Loyalists and the national leadership to reach an accommodation with Maddox, mutual suspicions and differing priorities led to four years of open confrontation, culminating in rival delegations being sent by Maddox and his Loyalist opponents to the 1968 Democratic National Convention. After 1968, the national party began to move against Maddox and other Regulars. By 1970, a series of “New South” Democrats won gubernatorial elections—including Jimmy Carter in Georgia—promising racial peace, marking a critical moment in postwar southern politics.

The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was hounded by controversy stemming from protests of the country’s foreign policy, particularly the war in Vietnam. Civil rights activists in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi initiated three Credentials Committee hearings at the convention. The activist coalition from Mississippi had carefully followed the national Democratic Party’s rules for the establishment of an integrated, representative party, while the state’s official delegation had blatantly disregarded these provisions. The Georgia challengers managed to receive half of their state’s delegate seats for the convention, but Alabama’s delegation was not seated at all. On August 27, 1968, Fannie Lou Hamer spoke on behalf of the Alabama delegation at the Chicago convention. This chapter reproduces Hamer’s speech, in which she confronted the Democratic Party for its hypocrisy.

Soon after the 1964 Democratic National Convention, an interracial coalition of Mississippi politicians including Pat Derian, Hodding Carter III, and Charles Evers came together to ensure that the 1968 challenge to seat an integrated delegation from their state would be successful. The group, known as the Loyal Democrats of Mississippi, realized their goal by strictly adhering to the national Democratic Party’s guidelines and by securing a broad base of support from local branches of the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, the Black Mississippi Teachers Association, and the Black Prince Hall Masons. Many original members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party initially refused to join the Loyalist coalition, but eventually did in the face of dwindling resources and waning support. On May 22, 1969, Fannie Lou Hamer testified before the Democratic Reform Committee in Jackson, Mississippi. This chapter reproduces Hamer’s testimony, in which she expressed her disappointment with the Democratic Party while offering suggestions as to how it could improve.

Founded in April 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) sought to show that the blacks of Mississippi would be willing to vote if given the opportunity. Knowing that the white power structure would deny blacks that opportunity, the MFDP selected their own delegates, from the precinct level up to the state convention held on August 5, in Jackson. The MFDP delegation arrived in Atlantic City, New Jersey on August 21 for the Democratic Party’s National Convention. The following day, Fannie Lou Hamer testified before the Credentials Committee at the Democratic National Convention. This chapter reproduces Hamer’s testimony, in which she recounts her first attempt to register to vote, her employer’s angry reaction and the violence that ensued, and her brutal beating inside a jail in Winona, Mississippi. Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration offered the MFDP delegation two at-large seats for Aaron Henry and Edwin King, which the party rejected.

In July 1972, Fannie Lou Hamer traveled to the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida despite her deteriorating health. Hamer’s health took a turn for the worse in January of that year, when she collapsed from “nervous exhaustion” as she walked a picket line near her home. She convalesced over the next seven months. This chapter reproduced Hamer’s “speech” delivered at the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach. It was actually a seconding speech for the nomination of Texas’s Frances Farenthold as vice presidential candidate.

Detailing the journey from the foundation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to its seating challenge at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, this chapter analyses the role out-of-state forces and organizers with broad strategic visions within the Movement—especially Moses—played in the Challenge’s realization, which helps to appreciate more fully why Moses and SNCC-workers felt so betrayed by what transpired in Atlantic City.Through new primary documents and Moses’ own recollections, it features the people whose advice Moses followed and the degree of Moses’s and SNCC’s structural support in realizing the Challenge while simultaneously demonstrating how its success depended on grassroots leadership, thereby underscoringthe tensions between Moses’s conception of leadership and (political) reality. The chapter concludes with an examination of the short term and long term effects of ‘Atlantic City’ on Moses, President Lyndon Johnson, the movement at large, COFOand the Mississippi movement. The beginning of the end, it captures the breakdown of internal unity, but also underscores the MFDP’s significance for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

On July 27, 2004, just a little over two months after the fiftieth anniversary of the seminal Supreme Court decision on the case of Brown v. Board of Education that overturned a 1896 ruling permitting segregation by declaring that separate educational institutions for African Americans and whites was inherently unconstitutional, an African American took the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Boston to deliver the keynote address. Barack Obama was a virtually unknown state senator from Illinois who was running for a seat in the U.S. Senate. His advisers had lobbied the Democratic National Committee for a prominent speaking role for their candidate at the Convention. During his speech, Obama was consciously constructing a vision of a post-partisan and post-racial United States for the twenty-first century. In speaking of the need for a ‘new birth of freedom’, Obama harked back to the dark days of the Civil War and the words that contributed to the transformation of the carnage at Gettysburg to a renewal of the American promise, implying that he desired the same for the twenty-first century.

Chapter Seven charts the turbulent Democratic National Convention through the experience of Hubert Humphrey, the onetime champion of American liberalism. In Chicago, the Democratic Party came apart on national television: delegates feuded on the convention floor, peaceniks caused trouble on the streets of Chicago, and police employed wanton violence in the name of “law and order.” Humphrey emerged with the nomination, thanks to the loyal party machinery, but the Democrats appeared doomed. Humphrey bore much of the responsibility: he chose a safe nomination by letting Lyndon Johnson dictate the party plank on Vietnam. His weakness intensified the displeasure of the party’s liberal anti-war wing, and neither Humphrey nor the Democratic Party ever fully recovered.

This chapter examines the political maneuverings of Northern Democrats over the issue of slavery during the June 1852 Democratic National Convention in Baltimore. Delegates to the Democratic National Convention began congregating a month in advance to meet, scheme, and negotiate. Thirty-one states meant thirty-one delegations, with each state casting as many votes as it had presidential electors. But many states sent far more than their voting delegates. The South expected to command the convention as it always had. If Northern Democrats wanted to influence the proceedings, or possibly receive a nomination, they would have to cater to the South and convince them of their continued fidelity. This chapter first discusses the Democratic National Convention before turning to the campaigns for the 1852 elections. It then considers Northern Democrats' focus on cabinet appointments and patronage as well as their views concerning loyalty to the pro-Southern party agenda and abolitionism. It also explores how President Franklin Pierce addressed mounting Southern suspicion and mobilized Northern opposition, both from doughfaces and activists with antislavery sentiment.

This chapter examines James Buchanan's victory in the 1856 Democratic national nominating convention held in Cincinnati and what it means for the South. In February 1856, Jesse Bright and John Slidell put into action their plans to make Buchanan the next president of the United States. Bright and Slidell were soon joined by fellow Northern Democrats Judah P. Benjamin and James Bayard. While Bright and Slidell sought to punish Franklin Pierce for his patronage decisions, as well as elevate a true proslavery conservative, Benjamin and Bayard were eager to advance their personal careers. This chapter first provides an overview of the 1856 Democratic National Convention before discussing the results of the 1856 elections, in which the central issue was slavery and Southern power. It then considers Bright's reelection troubles in Indiana and Buchanan's attempts to repair the factionalism within the Northern Democratic Party. It also explores Buchanan's executive actions regarding patronage and political awards as well as foreign policy and territorial acquisition.

This chapter examines the Northern Democratic Party's disastrous showing in the 1858 elections and the division that beleaguered the party. It discusses the Democratic regulars' conflict with Stephen Douglas and his fellow dissidents and how Northern Democrats fared in elections in Indiana, Pennsylvania, New York, and Illinois. It also considers the weakening of Northern Democrats in the Thirty-Fifth Congress and their positioning for the 1860 elections. Finally, it provides an overview of the Thirty-Sixth Congress and the 1860 Democratic National Convention in Charleston, South Carolina. It shows that by 1860, the Northern Democracy had withered after free state voters came to recognize the lie of Democratic rhetoric and the antidemocratic, proslavery agenda of the South.

This chapter examines the fate of the Northern Democratic Party after 1860. Democrats assembled in Charleston on April 23, 1860 for the national convention. Regular Democrats scored a victory on the second day of the convention with the election as permanent chairman of Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts, while day three saw a major triumph for Stephen Douglas's group. This chapter discusses the results of the 1860 Democratic National Convention and the 1860 elections and considers what happened to Northern Democrat notables such as James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce after the period. It argues that the Northern Democratic Party's efforts to please the Southern party bosses, purge their ranks of antislavery sentiment, and convince free state voters of the benevolence of the Slave Power, combined with their proslavery legislation and rhetoric, fractured and split the party, paved the way for Republican ascension and Southern secession, tore the nation apart, and led to civil war.

This chapter examines how the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) elected sixty-eight delegates to go to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City to challenge the seating of the all-white official Mississippi Democratic Party. National press coverage of the MFDP's planned challenge enflamed white supremacists. Harassment and attacks escalated during the two weeks leading up to the Democratic National Convention. Fannie Lou Hamer herself received death threats over the phone almost daily. But the delegates and their supporters remained focused on their goal: lobbying Credentials Committee members and DNC state delegations to seat the MFDP instead of the Mississippi Regular party delegation. They also held protests and vigils, handed out promotional literature, and gave impromptu talks on the boardwalk to illuminate race relations and the conditions in Mississippi.

The author reflects on the revolutionary posturing that he and many other draft resisters adopted during the late 1960s. He describes himself as anti-Leninist and a pacifist, even as his commitment to nonviolence was starting to waver. Here he talks about what New Left authors Barbara and John Ehrenreich called the “new specter of revolutionary students” that was emerging worldwide in 1968; the involvement of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones in the 1968 discussions and debates about revolution; the conflicts within the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its sentiments against the Progressive Labor Party; Cornell SDS’s efforts during the summer; the rise of a renewed feminist movement throughout the United States and within the New Left; and the antiwar demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Finally, he recounts the Budapest conference between American radicals and Vietnamese revolutionaries.

This chapter looks into the Democratic National Convention that returned to Chicago in 1996. It describes the Convention as the first presidential-nominating convention to be held in Chicago since the infamous and nationally televised 1968 Democratic National Convention. The chapter mentions Michael Bilandic, a shy, careful, competent, and hardworking lawyer, who succeeded Richard J. Daley as mayor of Chicago in 1976. It investigates how Bilandic kept Chicago on a straight course, even if he did not provide dynamic leadership. It also recounts Bilandic's undoing due to the fabled Blizzard of 1979, in which record-breaking snowstorms hit Chicago and caused a cold spell that kept the snow on the ground for fifty days.

Chapter Four focuses on Atlanta’s rise as a global black city and the idea of black global citizenship through foreign and domestic policies as seen through U.S. Presidents, from John F. Kennedy to Jimmy Carter. When Andrew Young was elected as the city’s second black mayor during the 1980s, he inherited numerous social ills and a pernicious financial crisis. When President Ronald Reagan cut federal funding to American cities, Young found it necessary to fund and expand the city through foreign investments and neo-liberal forms of urban renewal and gentrification. Most of Atlanta’s black community saw a business-minded and globetrotting mayor promoting purported progress and the black Mecca image. Yet, Young had no plan to deal with issues pertinent to the poor as mayor and his “citizen of the world” persona was not a good look for Atlanta’s working class and poor black communities, as it seemed that he did not embody their interests. Young used his savior-faire and political influence to refashion a city worthy of hosting the 1988 Democratic National Convention and the Centennial Olympiad. The Democratic National Convention served as the dress rehearsal for the Centennial Olympiad and from this event it was clear that Atlanta was indeed a new city with the black Mecca image at its center, worthy of hosting events on the world’s stage. However, Atlanta’s overwhelmingly poor and black citizens did not share this vision of their city nor were they at the center of the commercial branding of the America South. The significance of this is that once again, the issue of class within the black community presents itself as more divisive than cohesive.

This chapter argues that a diverse array of American social movements in the late 1960s regarded the city as a crucial terrain of struggles for visibility, empowerment and self-determination, while in much of American public discourse the city had come to represent the nation’s troubles. 1968 marked the peak of the fraught discourse of ‘urban crisis’ that had developed out of the postwar dynamics of urban disinvestment, government-subsidized white suburbanization, black migration and racialized inner-city poverty. The eruption of riots in black urban neighbourhoods in more than a hundred cities following Martin Luther King’s assassination crystallized a view of the city as the kernel of America’s lawlessness, anger and violence. Meanwhile, the protests and ‘police riot’ outside the Chicago Democratic National Convention in August indicate how the contestation of urban space functioned within countercultural and social protest movements. This chapter argues that these urban visions and urban confrontations exerted a powerful influence over American politics and culture into the 1970s and beyond.

Born in New York City in 1903, Kathleen Scofield Louchheim was a talented poet and Democratic activist. Louchheim became a delegate from Washington D.C. to the Democratic National Convention in 1948 and served as an alternate member of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) four years later. Perhaps her biggest break came in 1953 when she was appointed Director of Women’s Activities for the DNC, a position she used to encourage women to get involved in all levels of politics. On November 17, 1961, she spoke at the National Council of Negro Women in Washington D.C. This chapter presents Louchheim’s speech, in which she talked about the interracial work that awaits American women and the “weapons” they needed in this endeavor. She also praised Robert Kennedy’s handling of civil rights despite the fact that Bob Moses and other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were languishing in a jail in McComb, Mississippi.

In April 1972 and January 1973, Dr. Neil McMillen, professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi, interviewed Fannie Lou Hamer at her home in Ruleville, Mississippi. This chapter reproduces the interview, which offers insights into Hamer’s local activism, the Freedom Farm Cooperative, as well as her continued campaign for school integration and voting rights. Hamer also talked about the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s 1964 challenge, the party’s subsequent relationship to the Loyal Democrats of Mississippi delegation, the 1972 Democratic National Convention, her trip to Africa, and her past and present relationships with local and national politicians as well as civil rights leaders.