Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party

Books by Jack Newfield

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Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party

& the 1964 Democratic National Convention

A Perspective by Jack Newfield

The coalition-versus-insurgent organizing issue was crystallized at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. To honky-tonk Atlantic City came the anti-Establishment Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party: sixty-four poor rural Negroes and four white integrationists. Their only credentials, as Murray Kempton wrote, were “their wounds and their faces.” They came to challenge the right of the regular segregationist delegation and to represent Mississippi at the convention. The MFDP said they represented the 850,000 unregistered Negroes of the Magnolia State.

At first it seemed as if the poor petitioners’ challenge would be brushed aside as a rude intrusion of Lyndon Johnson’s ceremonial coronation. But forty-eight hours before the convention opened, the credentials committee held a nationally televised hearing that shamed the nation’s conscience, already in mourning for the murders of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner.

Joseph Rauh, former leader of the ADA and the MFDP lawyer, told the committee, “I have only an hour to tell you a story of moral agony that could take years.”

Edward King, the oft-beaten white minister at Tougaloo College, said, “We do not apologize for not holding our convention in Neshoba County.”

Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, and James Farmer all testified for the Freedom Democrats. Before the day was out liberal Democrats like Congresswoman Edith Green and Senator Wayne Morse had been won to the MFDP’s side. The rude intrusion suddenly became a specter threatening to tear the Democratic Party open.

The intrigues of the next seventy-two hours are lost in the half truths of sleepless men. While thousands of students and civil-rights workers kept vigil on the boardwalk, intricate negotiations were undertaken by Rauh, Hubert Humphrey (whose own vice presidential hopes were in the balance), and the national civil-rights leadership. By Tuesday morning the President offered the MFDP two seats at-large plus a guarantee that all future convention delegations would be integrated.

There followed a dramatic caucus in a Negro church, where Roy Wilkens, Walter Reuther, Wayne Morse, Martin Luther King, and Bayard Rustin came to urge the delegation of cotton-choppers and maids to accept the two-seat compromise as an “incredible triumph.” James Farmer took an agnostic position, while James Forman and Bob Parris of SNCC urged rejection of the “back-of-the-bus” compromise. The delegates finally voted unanimously to reject the compromise.

The liberals, civil-rights leaders, and Social Democrats were shocked. One of them said, “Those fools snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.” They suddenly realized the New Radicals were uncompromising Utopians who would not abide by all the rules of polite protest. They realized there was revolutionary feeling within the movement, and that the anti-leader anarchism was real and ran deep.

For their part, SNCC and the MFDP discovered their liberal friends cared more about the threat of Goldwater and the ambitions of Humphrey than about the absolute morality of a cause; they discovered that even the best liberals, those who sometimes supported civil disobedience, would at some point divide politics and morality and bend their knees to reality.

In the months that followed, Atlantic City became an irrational watershed—or Krondtadt—for both the Social Democrats and the New Left. People who had not been there, like Irving Howe and Nat Hentoff, chose up sides. No one seemed to disagree with his political allies who had been there. The decision against the compromise became a metaphor whereby everyone defined the emotional intensity of his radicalism. Those who opposed the compromise were branded irrational, destructive, and nihilistic. Those who supported it were labeled sell-outs, lackies of the President, betrayers of the radical creed. The Socialists decided the students needed a political education about how to function in the grown-up world of realpolitik, and the students decided the Social Democrats’ coalition would always turn on the poor as it had in Atlantic City.

All of this was unnecessary and tragic. There were good people on both sides of the dispute; there seems to be no right and wrong position, no great principle involved. Certainly the great principle the New Left claims was at stake—decision-making by the poor—is a myth. The SNCC workers almost handpicked the MFDP delegation in Mississippi, and controlled it while at the convention.

The unreal and unnecessary nature of the Atlantic City debate, I think, extends to most of the furor over coalition politics as opposed to what SDS calls “the creation of popular left opposition.” Both are needed.

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updated 23 July 2008