Freedom Summer 111Bayard Rustin, who believed in pragmatic politics as well as mass action, saw
the liberal Johnson as the best hope for black progress. Rustin, joined by
Martin Luther King and James Farmer, conceded that the compromise was
‘not what any of us wanted, but it’s the best we could get.’ SNCC and most
of the MFDP delegation spurned the deal as an insulting sellout of 400,000
black Mississippians at the hands of their ostensible friends, northern white
liberals. The normally cool Moses became livid, shouting at Humphrey, ‘You
tricked us!’ Freedom Democrat Annie Devine rejected the compromise
because it ‘would let Jim Crow be.’ She declared that there ‘ain’t no Demo-
cratic party worth that. We’ve been treated like beasts in Mississippi. They
shot us down like animals. We risked our lives coming here.’
Despite MFDP’s repudiation of it, the agreement worked out well on the
surface. The convention renominated Johnson by acclamation, adopted a
strong civil rights plank, and named Humphrey as Johnson’s running-mate.
Although Mississippi and four other deep South states went Republican in
the 1964 election, Johnson won the greatest landslide in American history,
thanks in part to the 94 per cent of blacks who voted Democratic. Mondale
replaced Humphrey in the Senate. Subsequently, Johnson rammed more
path-breaking civil rights and anti-poverty legislation through Congress.
These reforms boosted Mississippi’s black voter registration to 62 per cent, a
twelve-fold increase. As promised, the Democratic party in 1968 denied party
regulars from Mississippi their seats because of racial discrimination, and
MFDP took its rightful place. In the long run, however, the white South
abandoned the Democratic party, making it problematic for Democrats to
win the White House.
The disillusionment over the Democratic convention ruptured the civil
rights movement. Henceforth, a demoralized SNCC divided in two with the
more militant branch demanding racial separatism and embracing self-
defense, which violated cardinal principles of King’s crusade. Cleve Sellers
explained that ‘Never again were we lulled into believing that our task was
exposing injustices so that the “good” people of America could eliminate
them.... After Atlantic City, our struggle was not for civil rights, but for lib-
eration.’ Stokely Carmichael believed that whites, including liberals, would
never grant blacks justice, so, as SNCC’s new chairman, he called for the
organization to expel white members, including deeply committed activists
like Bob Zellner [Doc. 16, p. 153]. Freedom Summer marked the end of
SNCC’s efforts to appeal to the nation’s conscience and the opening of a more
confrontational chapter in the movement.