convention, Aaron Henry and Fannie Lou Hamer headed a delegation of
sixty-eight ‘Freedom Democrats’ who backed Lyndon Johnson and chal-
lenged the seating of the state’s regular Democratic organization. The regulars
not only excluded blacks but rejected Johnson’s candidacy and the national
party’s platform. Many regulars preferred the conservative Republican candi-
date, senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who voted against the new Civil
Rights Act. A parade of Freedom party witnesses testified on live television
to the state’s brutality. The most riveting account came from Hamer, who
sobbed as she spoke for Mississippi’s disfranchised black majority. ‘Is this
America?’ she asked. ‘The land of the free and the home of the brave? Where... our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human
beings?’
Johnson blew his stack over Hamer’s plaintive plea. With blacks backing
him, Johnson needed white southerners to win reelection and press his Great
Society reforms. Johnson felt heat first from Alabama governor George
Wallace, whose maverick campaign for the presidency had done well before
collapsing, and then from black rioting in Harlem and elsewhere. He well
remembered that Harry Truman’s reelection was imperiled when South
Carolina governor Strom Thurmond and other Dixiecrat delegates stormed
out of the Democratic convention. Southern governors warned Johnson that
if Hamer’s group sat with the Mississippi delegation there would be a replay
of that 1948 walkout. To divert the cameras from ‘that illiterate woman,’ the
president fooled the networks by calling an impromptu press conference to
announce the end of a railroad strike. When the networks later showed
Hamer’s taped testimony during prime time, a deluge of calls and telegrams
demanded that MFDP be seated.
Johnson was not through yet. He directed senator Hubert Humphrey, the
foremost champion of civil rights in Congress, to resolve the dispute in the
Mississippi delegation or forget becoming the party’s vice presidential candi-
date. Humphrey likewise leaned on his protégé, Minnesota attorney general
Walter Mondale, who sat on the credentials committee. If Mondale wanted
to succeed Humphrey as senator, he would have to hatch a plan acceptable
to the convention. J. Edgar Hoover was assigned to tap the telephones of King,
SNCC, and MFDP delegates to gain information that would force a compro-
mise. UAW president Walter Reuther was to cut off contributions to SCLC
and to dismiss company attorney Joe Rauh unless each accepted a compro-
mise. Johnson barely got his way. The compromise required that Mississippi
regulars support the nominees while MFDP would get two token at-large
votes chosen by the credentials committee and a promise to ban segregated
state delegations at future conventions. Fannie Lou Hamer was blackballed.
The compromise drew a mixed response. All but three Mississippi regulars
walked out, as did most of Alabama’s. Within MFDP, a fierce debate raged.
110 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT