Meanwhile, the MFDP was preparing to battle the president. On August 6 the young party held its state convention in Jackson, drawing a crowd of 2,500. There they laid out their strategy for the national convention and selected a delegation of sixty-four blacks and four whites. The leaders of the group were Aaron Henry, Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray, Ed King, and Annie Devine.
“When I got back to Washington …, the White House suddenly realized that we had a strategy that was pretty hard to beat,” says Washington lawyer Joe Rauh, who had agreed to act as the MFDP’s counsel without compensation. The Johnson administration was warning supporters throughout the nation to stay in line, including United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther. Senator Humphrey, who was seeking the vice-presidential nomination, called Joe Rauh. “He’d say, ‘Joe, just give me something to tell the president,’ Rauh recalls. “I said, ‘Why don’t you tell him I’m a dirty bastard and completely uncontrollable?’ And he said, ‘Well, the president wouldn’t like that …’ And I said, ‘Well, then you’ll have to think of what to tell him yourself, because that’s the only thing I can think of telling him …’
Mississippi Freedom Summer 1964
Registering voters was an important part of Freedom Summer. But even more importantly, the volunteers brought a sense of hope and support to black Mississippians. Through the many freedom schools, freedom clinics, freedom theaters, and other efforts, many blacks in Mississippi developed a renewed sense of pride and self-worth.
Tired of Injustice: An Interview with Dave Dennis
David Dennis headed CORE’s Mississippi staff during the 1964 Freedom Summer and served on the steering committee of the Council of Federated Organizations.
After the bodies of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were found, there was a basic concern about cooling things down because the country was angry … I was going to give the eulogy [for James Chaney] at the church in Meridian. I had been approached by my people from the national office of CORE and others to make sure that the speech given was calm. I agreed to do that.
Then, when I got up there and I looked out and saw little Ben Chaney [the slain James’ young brother], things just sort of snapped … [I couldn’t] talk about things getting better, and how we should do it in an easy manner with nonviolence.
You cannot make a man change by speaking a foreign language; he has to understand what you’re talking about. This country operated then and still operates on violence. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—that’s what we respect … So I just stopped and said what I felt. There was no need to stand in front of that kid, Ben Chaney, and lie to him.
Excerpts from Dave Dennis’ eulogy for James Chaney
… I feel that he has got his freedom and we are still fighting for it. But what I want to talk about right now is the living dead that we have right among our midst, not only here in the state of Mississippi, but throughout the nation. Those are the people who don’t care. [And] those who do care but don’t have the guts enough to stand up for it. And those people who are busy up in Washington and other places using my freedom and my life to play politics with. That includes the president on down to the governor of the state of Mississippi … as I stand here I not only blame the people who pulled the trigger or did the beating or dug the hole with the shovel. I blame the people in Washington, D.C., and on down in the state of Mississippi for what happened just as much as I blame those who pulled the trigger. Because I feel that, one hundred years ago, if the proper thing had been done by the federal government of this country … we wouldn’t be here today mourning the death of a brave young man like James Chaney.
… You see, I know what is going to happen. I feel it deep in my heart—when they find the people who killed those guys in Neshoba County … they [will] come back to the state of Mississippi and have a jury of all their cousins and aunts and uncles. And I know what they are going to say: “Not guilty.” Because no one saw them pull the trigger. I’m tired of that! … I look at the young kids here, that is something else I grieve about. Little Ben Chaney here and others like him …
I don’t grieve for James Chaney. He lived a fuller life than many of us will ever live. He’s got his freedom, and we’re still fighting for ours. I’m sick and tired of going to the funerals of black men who have been murdered by white men …
I’ve got vengeance in my heart to night, and I ask you to feel angry with me. I’m sick and tired, and I ask you to be sick and tired with me. The white men who murdered James Chaney are never going to be punished. I ask you to be sick and tired of that. I’m tired of the people of this country allowing this thing to continue to happen …
I’m tired of that old suggestion that Negroes ought to go back to Africa. I’m ready to go back to Africa the day when all the Jews, the Poles, the Russians, the Germans and the Anglo-Saxons go back where they came from. This land was taken from the Indians, and it belongs just as much to us Negroes as it does to any other group …
We’ve got to stand up. The best way we can remember James Chaney is to demand our rights. Don’t just look at me and go back and tell folks you’ve been to a nice service. Your work is just beginning. If you go back home and sit down and take what these white men in Mississippi are doing to us … if you take it and don’t do something about it … then God damn your souls!
Stand up! Those neighbors who were too afraid to come to this service, pick them up and take them down there to register to vote! Go down there and do it! Don’t ask that white man if you can register to vote! Just tell him: “Baby, I’m here!” Stand up! Hold your heads up! Don’t bow down anymore! We want our freedom NOW!
“I got a lot of pressure right up to the convention time,” recalls Rauh, “but what the heck—it was a lot of fun, and I was going to eat whether they pressured me or not, so I went ahead with the fight.”
The goal of that fight was to get the MFDP delegation seated at the convention instead of the white Mississippians. To do so, they would first have to convince just eleven of the more than one hundred members on the convention’s Credentials Committee to vote for sending the MFDP’s request to the convention floor. But once the proposal was raised, a simple voice vote would be too subject to the interpretation of those doing the count, who were allies of the president. To get a fair hearing before the entire convention, the MFDP would have to convince eight state delegations to call for a roll-call vote, not a voice vote, on the MFDP’s proposal. This was the “eleven-and-eight” procedure the new party’s delegates intended to follow—the strategy that Rauh termed “pretty hard to beat.”
Fannie Lou Hamer, a leader of the MFDP.
Rauh helped the MFDP prepare testimony for the convention’s Credentials Committee. They would illustrate how Mississippi segregationists kept blacks from voting. “At that time, only six percent of blacks [in Mississippi] were registered to vote,” Rauh recalls, “and only about two percent of them actually voted, so this was the perfect case to take to the convention.”
Meanwhile, the all-white Mississippi Democratic party launched an attack on the MFDP. At the request of the state’s attorney general, a state court banned the new party within the state, saying that it could “cause irreparable damage to the public.” Lawrence Guyot, chairman of the MFDP’s executive committee, was arrested and sent to jail two days before the start of the convention on a charge dating back to January, when he had been involved in a demonstration. On August 22, the day the convention began in Atlantic City, Mississippi’s government labeled the MFDP a “Communist organization.”
On the first day of the convention, the MFDP took its case to the national Democratic party’s Credentials Committee. Fannie Lou Hamer was the star witness, invoking memories of Medgar Evers’ assassination, James Meredith’s battle to gain admission to Ole Miss, and the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. “If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” she said. “Is this America? The land of the free and the home of the brave? Where we have to sleep with o
ur telephones off the hook, because our lives be threatened daily?” She also told of the abuse she had suffered in retaliation for attending a civil rights meeting. “They beat me and they beat me with the long, flat blackjack,” said the farm woman. “I screamed to God in pain. My dress worked itself up. I tried to pull it down. They beat my arms ‘til I had no feeling in them.” Then Hamer broke down and wept, in front of the network television cameras that were providing live national coverage of the testimony. Rita Schwerner, widow of the slain CORE worker, sat next to Hamer while waiting to testify.
President Johnson, watching the proceedings on television, was furious. He had envisioned an untroubled gathering climaxing in his triumphant nomination. Now the order and unity of the Democratic National Convention was being threatened by sixty-eight rural Mississippians, most of them black, most of them poor, and all of them as stubborn as a Dixie mule about what Lawrence Guyot later called “the righteousness of their position.” LBJ ordered White House aides to phone the television networks and announce that a presidential press conference would begin immediately.
The cameras stopped rolling in Atlantic City as Johnson’s press conference preempted the live convention coverage. The president told the television audience that he predicted a mostly tranquil convention, but that he would oversee a suspenseful contest for the vice-presidential nomination. He did not succeed, however, in blacking out all TV coverage of the testimony. That night, evening news programs ran film footage of Hamer’s heartrending appeal to the Credentials Committee. The committee was soon swamped with phone calls and telegrams from angry Americans.
Senator Humphrey asked his protege, Minnesota attorney general Walter Mondale, to head a credentials subcommittee in charge of mediating the MFDP dispute. “They [the MFDP] were pushing on an open door in terms of preventing a future lily-white segregated delegation,” Mondale recalls. “The tough question was always, How do we handle it? What should be the best way to resolve this? One theory was you just take the black delegation and seat them, kick the white delegation out … Well, that didn’t solve any long-term problems. It didn’t establish any rule of law for civil rights, and if all it [was] going to be [was] a fight, black against white, one winning, one losing, there was no hope for a healthy political party. So the question was, How to do it?”
Humphrey and Mondale, with White House approval, offered a compromise. The white Mississippi Democrats would be seated if they would swear their loyalty to the ticket, but so would two MFDP delegates, Aaron Henry and Ed King, who would not officially represent Mississippi but would be considered delegates “at-large.” The mediators also proposed a resolution calling for southern Democrats to integrate future delegations.
On Monday night, all but three members of the white Mississippi delegation stormed out of the convention; they would not pledge allegiance to a party that consorted with blacks. Nor would the MFDP representatives accept the two-seat compromise; they all wanted to be seated.
On Tuesday, Joe Rauh tried to secure a postponement of the Credentials Committee’s vote on the compromise. He wanted time to convince MFDP delegates Bob Moses and Aaron Henry to agree to it. Mondale agreed to the delay, but the credentials panel wanted to act immediately. Joe Rauh remembers the scene. “Have you ever been in a lynch mob?” he says. “Because if you haven’t, you haven’t seen anything like this. A hundred people shouting, ‘Vote! Vote! Vote!’ while I’m talking. I finally had to say, ‘It’s your rudeness that’s the problem. I’ve got a right to speak. I’ve got the floor. You ought to shut up …’ ‘Vote! Vote! Vote!’ It [was] like a machine in there. And it … mowed me down.” The committee voted to approve the Mondale compromise.
The MFDP still hoped to force its challenge to a roll-call vote before the full convention, but Johnson sent his political allies onto the convention floor to threaten delegates with reprisals if they failed to toe the line on the MFDP. The “eleven-and-eight” strategy had fallen apart; the convention at large voted to endorse the compromise.
Bob Moses and other MFDP leaders were in a hotel room meeting with Humphrey when they saw Mondale and Rauh on television as the deal was approved. “Bob Moses lost his cool,” Rauh remembers. “It … was like hitting him with a whip—a white man hitting him with a whip. [He felt] everyone had ratted on him … So that evening when we were on the news, I said we would continue to fight but I also said this is a great victory which will end up with a new Democratic party, because of the promise that there will never be a lily-white [delegation] again.
“Bob got on [TV] and said you cannot trust the political system—‘I will have nothing to do with the political system any longer.’” Fannie Lou Hamer told television reporters that granting only two seats to the MFDP represented “token rights, on the back row, the same as we got in Mississippi. We didn’t come all this way for that mess again.” Hamer didn’t quit. On Tuesday night she led the MFDP contingent, with convention passes borrowed from sympathetic delegates, onto the convention floor. There they took the vacant seats allocated for the Mississippi Democrats, but guards soon arrived to haul the activists away.
An angry Johnson then instructed party officials to remove all but three of the seats in the Mississippi section, and to reserve those seats for the three regular Democrats who had not walked out.
Aaron Henry, who like Rauh now favored acceptance of the compromise, arranged a meeting the next day. Arguments for and against the proposal were voiced, and some civil rights leaders asked the MFDP to approve the plan, arguing that the new party should compromise to reinforce its alliance with white liberals. Martin Luther King, Jr., told the delegates that the choice they were about to make was the greatest decision they would ever have to make. Unswayed by the procompromise arguments, the MFDP delegates rejected the plan.
The MFDP’s political tactics could not have been more unconventional. Praying on the convention floor, the delegates fought with the strength of their convictions.
“Those unable to understand why we were not accepting the compromise …,” says MFDP delegate Victoria Gray, “didn’t realize we would have been betraying those very many people back there in Mississippi whom we represented—not only people who had laid their lives on the line, but many who had given their lives … [People] said to us, ‘Take this [the compromise], and then next time, you know, there’ll be more.’ I thought about the many people for whom there was not gonna be a next time … It made no sense at all, with all the risk being taken, to accept what we knew for certain to be nothing and go back home to God only knows what … You may get home and not have a house. You may get home and a member of your family may be missing … So you know, we [were] not going to accept anything less than the real thing.”
Wednesday night, the MFDP delegates again marched onto the convention floor with borrowed passes. This time, there were no empty seats, so they stood in the space where the seats had been. Before television cameras, Fannie Lou Hamer vigorously denounced the party for its treatment of her fellow black Mississippians. “Mrs. Hamer [always] spoke from the heart,” recalls Bob Moses. “When she spoke at Atlantic City in front of the national TV, she spoke the same way … what you felt when she spoke and when she sang was someone who was opening up her soul and really telling you what she felt … I think one of the most beautiful things about the movement in Mississippi was that it enabled a person like Mrs. Hamer to emerge.” A spiritual leader of the delegation, Hamer led rousing renditions of freedom songs right on the convention floor.
At the convention, one reporter asked Hamer if she was seeking equality with the white man. “No,” she said. “What would I look like fighting for equality with the white man? I don’t want to go down that low. I want the true democracy that’ll raise me and that white man up … raise America up.”
The fight between the two Mississippi camps had dominated the convention. Some sources say that Johnson’s selection of Hubert Humphrey as his running mate may have depended on how the senator handled the MFDP challenge
. Throughout the ensuing presidential campaign, Johnson had to face angry southerners still upset over the convention. Most Mississippi Democrats supported Republican Barry Goldwater, while the overwhelmingly black MFDP campaigned for Johnson. Some Democrats feared that the GOP might take the entire South in the election. In fact, the Republicans won only six states—Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—while Johnson won the remaining forty-four.
From Sharecropper to Lobbyist: The Political Awakening of Fannie Lou Hamer
… My parents were sharecroppers and they had a big family. Twenty children. Fourteen boys and six girls. I’m the twentieth child. All of us worked in the fields, of course, but we never did get anything out of sharecropping. We’d make fifty and sixty bales and end up with nothing.
I was about six years old when I first went to the fields to pick cotton. I can remember very well the landowner telling me one day that if I would pick thirty pounds he would give me something out of the commissary: some Cracker-jacks, Daddy Wide-Legs, and some sardines. These were things that he knew I loved and never had a chance to have. So I picked thirty pounds that day. Well, the next week I had to pick sixty and by the time I was thirteen I was picking two and three hundred pounds.
… Well, after the white man killed off our mules, my parents never did get a chance to get up again. We went back to sharecropping, halving, it’s called. You split the cotton half and half with the plantation owner. But the seed, fertilizer, cost of hired hands, everything is paid out of the cropper’s half. My parents tried so hard to do what they could to keep us in school, but school didn’t last but four months out of the year and most of the time we didn’t have clothes to wear. I dropped out of school and cut corn stalks to help the family.
Eyes on the Prize Page 29
