Humphrey's reputation as a champion for all Americans is so great that they named a professional sports stadium after him, an entire school of public affairs, and even a civil rights award.
Some of his quotes are wonderfully crafted phrases evoking the truest democratic ideals:
"What do we want for people? Human dignity, personal expression and fulfillment, justice, freedom."
Wow....
"When we say, 'One nation under God, with liberty and justice for all', we are talking about all people. We either ought to believe it or quit saying it ."
Awesome....
"I am not here to judge whether people are locked in poverty because of themselves or because of the society in which they live. All I know is that they are there and we are trying to do something about it."
Inspiring....
"We cannot use a double standard for measuring our own and other people's policies. Our demands for democratic practices in other lands will be no more effective than the guarantees of those practiced in our own country."
Beautiful words of liberty!
Yes, so much of what forms the base for the special place for Northern Liberals to attack and critique all that is wrong in America can be found in the timeless inspiration of Hubert H. Humphrey.
That is, of course, until we look at 1964.
Blacks trying to end segregation in Mississippi carried their cause to the 1964 Democratic National Convention. They demanded that their mostly black delegation replace Mississippi's all-white group at the Atlantic City, New Jersey gathering. The 36-year-old man given the job of helping broker a compromise was then-Minnesota attorney general Walter Mondale. [Five years ago] in Minneapolis, Mondale recounted the confrontation. He invited to the event several of those who bitterly opposed the compromise.
Lawrence T. Guyot, Jr. was a field organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi in 1964 when he was elected chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. He was selected to be among the challenge delegation to Atlantic City, but was arrested on charges related to a demonstration eight months earlier.
Mondale says President Lyndon Johnson saw the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's demand to replace the all-white delegation from their state as a threat to his bid for the presidency.
Mondale: He was afraid that seating the Freedom Democrats would incite a walkout of southern and border states and hand the election to Barry Goldwater. The confrontation made headlines because the challenge mounted by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was broadcast on national television.
Hamer: My name is Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer.
Hamer's accounts of Mississippi blacks being beaten, arrested, and killed for trying to register to vote shocked people. Many Americans were unaware of Mississippi's laws which forced separation of the races.
Hamer: Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hook because our lives been threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in America?
Hamer and her fellow Freedom Party members won support at Atlantic City from national party delegates who were ready to vote to seat them.
Freedom Party founder Lawrence Guyout Jr. says that set off some hardball lobbying of delegates from supporters of Lyndon Johnson.
Guyout: A delegate from California was called and told, "Look, your husband can be a federal judge, just stop voting for the Freedom Democratic Party."
The politicking taking place in hotel rooms away from the convention floor was also bare-knuckled.
The Reverend Edwin King, a white minister and a founder of the Freedom Democratic Party remembers the meeting with Hubert Humphrey, United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther, Martin Luther King Jr., and a handful of others. King says Humphrey described Fannie Lou Hamer as an unacceptable spokeswoman for black people.
King: And then Mr. Humphrey said, "Look at her the way she dresses, her grammar, this is not the kind of person white America needs to see representing black people."
King says Humphrey's words may have been his own, President Johnson's or possibly even the view of other blacks concerned about the momentum of the civil rights movement. He recalls when Martin Luther King Jr. said he favored seating the Mississippi Freedom Party, union president Walter Reuther turned in King's direction. King: And then to Martin almost wagging his finger in Martin Luther King's face, he said, "Remember who pays for you."
Reuther, King says, was referring to union money donated to pay the bail of jailed civil rights workers.
After four days of talks, Walter Mondale says, the compromise offered the Mississippi Freedom Party was two at-large delegates who they would not be allowed to choose and a promise the Democrats would not accept segregated delegations at future conventions. The compromise was rejected by both sides.
Fannie Lou Hammer shouted, "We didn't come all this way for no two seats!" And the all-white Mississippi delegation walked out. Bitterness deepened when it was learned Johnson had more than two dozen FBI agents and paid informants tailing the Freedom Party throughout the convention. link http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/200002/11_olsond_mondalelectures/
Wait, there's more:
In the summer of 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, or "Freedom Democrats" for short, was organized with the purpose of challenging Mississippi's all-white and anti-civil rights delegation to the Democratic National Convention of that year as not representative of all Mississippians. Hamer was elected Vice-Chair. The Freedom Democrats' efforts drew national attention to the plight of African-Americans in Mississippi, and represented a challenge to President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was seeking the Democratic Party's nomination for a second term; their success would mean that other Southern delegations, who were already leaning toward Republican challenger Barry Goldwater, would publicly break from the convention's decision to nominate Johnson — meaning in turn that he would almost certainly lose those states' electoral votes in the election.
Hamer, singing her signature hymns, drew a great deal of attention from the media, enraging Johnson, who referred to her in speaking to his advisors as "that illiterate woman".
Hamer was invited, along with the rest of the MFDP officers, to address the Convention's Credentials Committee. She recounted the problems she had encountered in registration, and the ordeal of the jail in Winona, and, near tears, concluded:
"All of this is on account we want to register [sic], to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings - in America?"
In Washington, D.C., Johnson panicked, calling an emergency press conference in an effort to divert press coverage away from Hamer's testimony; but many television networks ran the stunning speech unedited on their late news programs that night. The Credentials Committee received thousand of calls and letters in support of the Freedom Democrats.
Johnson then dispatched several trusted Democratic Party operatives to attempt to negotiate with the Freedom Democrats, including Senator Hubert H. Humphrey (who was campaigning for the Vice-Presidential nomination), Walter Mondale, Walter Reuther, and J. Edgar Hoover. They suggested a compromise which would give the MFDP two seats in exchange for other concessions, and secured the endorsement of Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for the plan. But when Humphrey outlined the compromise, saying that his position on the ticket was at stake, Hamer, invoking her Christian beliefs, sharply rebuked him:
"Do you mean to tell me that your position is more important than four hundred thousand black people's lives? Senator Humphrey, I know lots of people in Mississippi who have lost their jobs trying to register to vote. I had to leave the plantation where I worked in Sunflower County. Now if you lose this job of Vice-President because you do what is right, because you help the MFDP, everything will be all right. God will take care of you. But if you take [the nomination] this way, why, you will never be able to do any good for civil rights, for poor people, for peace, or any of those things you talk about. Senator Humphrey, I'm going to pray to Jesus for you."
Future negotiations were conducted without Mrs. Hamer, and the compromise was modified such that the Convention would select the two delegates to be seated, for fear the MFDP would appoint Hamer.link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Lou_Hamer
There is still more ...
Nowhere does her spirit come through more clearly than in Mills' account of the 1964 challenge Hamer and others leveled at the Democratic delegation sent to the presidential convention in Atlantic City. The challengers persuasively claimed that they represented thousands of disenfranchised African-Americans who had been denied their right to participate in the political process. The Democratic presidential candidate, Lyndon Johnson, and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey, Mills recounts, dragged their feet on addressing the challengers' claims, only belatedly offering a weak compromise that Hamer and some others fiercely opposed.
"I question America," Hamer memorably said during hearings on her group's challenge of the white-only delegation. link http://http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0452270529/002-7179445-2504030?v=glance
We're not quite done yet ...
While the Freedom Democratic Party buses headed for Atlantic City, where the convention was held along a garish boardwalk, LBJ plotted to employ the party’s leading liberals to undermine the FDP challenge. Hubert Humphrey, the hero of the 1948 civil rights debate, was dispatched to stop these Mississippi black people from taking the promise too seriously. The Humphrey plan encountered trouble as plain Democratic delegates from northern states were moved by the eloquent testimony from sharecroppers like Fannie Lou Hamer. Humphrey lectured the arriving Freedom delegation that LBJ “will not allow that illiterate woman to speak from the floor of the convention” .
Walter Reuther, leader of the United Auto Workers, was flown by private jet to help quell the Freedom challenge, hoping that Johnson would nominate Humphrey as vice president. “We can reduce the opposition to this to a microscopic fraction so they’ll be completely unimportant”, he pledged.
The Humphrey compromise failed to meet the test of either participatory democracy or political realignment. It boiled down to offering two delegate-at-large seats to the Freedom Democrats while seating the official segregationist party and promising to reform the process four years later. “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats”, said Mrs. Hamer. We came to bring our morality to politics, not politics to our morality, said Bob.l i n k http://http://www.tomhayden.com/socmov2.htm
Some civil rights hero, ¿huh?
At the moment of truth, when a group of brave Black citizens fought to pull themselves up from the muck of ignorance that the Dixicrat establishment had tried to bury them under vís-a-vís no social services whatsoever (quality education, quality health care, quality housing, equality before the law) and exercise their Constitutional right to have their voices heard in selecting representatives from their home state, Humphrey saw only his chance at Blair House threatened and attacked accordingly.
Hubert H. Humphrey
The "H" stands for "hypocrite."
