Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for president to thunderous applause as the party’s convention closed in Chicago. Politicos say Harris’ selection—the first female, Black, South Asian woman to accept the nomination—is a very long throw from where the nation was 60 years ago when voting rights workers Unita Blackwell and Fannie Lou stormed the Democratic National Convention to protest the state’s violently segregated Mississippi Democratic Party.
Sixty years is a long time for many people, but Pennsylvania Western University Associate Professor Rhonda A. Matthews says she’d anticipated the nomination of someone like Harris to take even longer.
“Given the way this country feels about women, in general, and Black women, specifically, I am surprised. I never thought I would see it. I thought it would take my daughter’s generation before we saw it.”
Mississippi has rarely been a two-party state. Except for the transitional period between the 1960s and 1990s, one party has always overwhelmingly dominated statewide offices and legislative seats. Then and now, that power is inextricably tied to race. The conclusion of the Civil War brought a brief chapter of true democracy with the onset of Reconstruction, but Democrats long remained an authoritarian regime that violently excluded Black Americans who dared participate.
Powerful cotton planters who had whipped the state into joining the Confederacy still owned their sprawling plantations after the Civil War, and their terrorist KKK agents overwhelmed the fledgling Reconstruction system with riots and violence. White people, furious at the prospect of genuine democracy, attacked public buildings occupied by duly-elected Black politicians. They attacked a crowd of more than 1,500 Black Republicans and their families at a political rally in the Mississippi town of Clinton in 1875, culminating in the infamous Clinton Massacre. A historic marker at the site of the attack refers to the event as a “riot” and counts only nine people among the dead, but historians claims white mobs hunted down and assassinated 50 to 100 men, women, and children over the following days.
In neighboring Louisiana, a nearly identical mob of more than 150 white men surrounded the Colfax courthouse and fired weapons and a cannon into the building, attacking legitimately-elected Black politicians and their staff. When the Colfax courthouse occupants surrendered, the mob continued to fire upon them, and lynched others. White terrorists murdered between 60 to 150 African Americans in the attack.
A racist U.S. Supreme Court threw out the convictions of the Colfax murderers in their infamous 1876 United States v. Cruikshank decision, officially removing 14th Amendment protections from the actions of individuals. That decision left lynching murders to be prosecuted by local sheriffs and police chiefs, many of whom were sympathetic to Ku Klux Klan violence, or even themselves Klan members.
After the supreme court surrendered federal prosecution of murder and terrorism, the all-white Democratic Party in the South became a ceiling of fists punching down upon the states' Black population. Mississippi joined the ranks of the Democratic Party's “Solid South.” And for more than a century, the South mostly excluded non-white voters and politicians. That was, until the antics of Blackwell, Hamer and their companions.
Old Battle for a New America
By 1964, workers with the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), consisting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP, were already working the Mississippi Delta, tutoring Black residents on how to register to vote and organize against systemic disenfranchisement. But voting could only go so far in a one-party political system if the dominant party flagrantly locked out certain races.
Even as new Black registrants began to surmount onerous poll taxes and poll tests in 1964, Mississippi’s Democratic Party leadership was still barring Black people from participating in state party meetings. The restrictions ensured only white members would represent the party at national conventions and select party candidates. It was soon obvious the next step in COFO’s voting rights fight would have to include challenging the party’s legitimacy as a democratic body. Workers like Blackwell founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as a counter to the bigoted “official” party to give new Black voters something to sign up for.
As part of its “Freedom Summer” campaign of 1964, MFDP upstarts challenged the bigoted state party by claiming status as the “only democratically constituted body of Mississippi citizens” and holding duplicate precinct and county meetings. With its army of Freedom Summer students and SNCC volunteers MFDP workers gathered “freedom registration” signatures among potential voters to pick delegates. From there, organizers intended to route the all-white Democratic Party at the 1964 national convention in Atlantic City.
"We wanted all of the seats, or half, of the delegation that was representing Mississippi," Blackwell said in an interview.
The MFDP delegation contained almost 70 members, including, Blackwell, Fannie Lou Hamer, Hartman Turnbow and many other local civil rights figures. All were determined to either supplant entrenched national party bigots or broadcast their racism to the world stage. Members had prepared a theatrical seizure and replacement before national cameras wasn’t without risk. Even the ride to Atlantic City caught drama. In her book “Barefootin’: Life Lessons from the Road to Freedom,” Blackwell claims the MFDP’s interstate bus had to crash through a Klan roadblock in Tennessee to safely reach their Atlantic City destination.
After arriving and booking hotel rooms (with five to six members to each room) representatives converged on the convention floor and began circulating an alternative to the segregationist party's political platform. They also fraternized with other state delegations, parading the official party’s explicit racism before national voters.
Blackwell claims in her book she targeted the delegations of Wisconsin and Minnesota. She said in a separate interview she also met with the Democratic delegation of Iowa.
“We told them about things that happened in our state and how we were denied the right to participate in the political process and then asked them for their support when the MFDP challenge went to the floor of the convention for a vote,” Blackwell wrote in Barefootin'.
“I told about going to the courthouse and being denied the right to register to vote and having crosses burned in my yard. I told about how our people were being killed and how we’d been denied work … how we had no money. I told it all. ‘The white people have taken away everything they could from us,’ I said, ‘but they haven’t taken away our dignity.”
Blackwell said her two assignment states, Wisconsin and Minnesota, voted to support the MFDP, as did many other states.
The MFDP’s plot complicated the less-racist objectives of the larger party, however. Democratic President Lyndon Johnson would sign the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965 the very next year, but at the time of the convention, the Texas Democrat was desperate to placate his party’s racist Dixiecrat enclave, including delegates inside his own state of Texas. Johnson’s nomination was not nearly as smooth as that of Kamala Harris, who enjoyed wide, near instantaneous support from party factions after months of slumping poll numbers under incumbent President Joe Biden. The Democratic Party of Johnson’s day was a tattered umbrella struggling to cover both anti-war progressives and generations of putrid Dixiecrat bile. Johnson needed as much support as possible to survive Democrat competitors, and openly encouraging subversive MFDP maneuvers on the convention floor was no way to curry Dixiecrat favor. He went so far as to interrupt Hamer's widely circulated convention speech.
"I'll never forget the president, Johnson had a message to the people, because that was the only person who could cut off Miss Hamer because every TV station across this nation was listening to the credential committee ... and Miss Hamer had captured the United States, and he knowed it," Blackwell said.
Minneapolis Attorney General Walter Mondale and the Democratic Party Credentials Committee attempted to meet racists halfway by arranging for the MFDP to get two powerless “at-large” seats amid an all-white Dixiecrat wing. Freedom party workers were already anticipating the sell-out and refused.
"We had a meeting in Jackson, Mississippi, and the people told us that when we left there on them two buses headed to Atlantic City ... that if we didn't get half of those seats ... just tell them to keep them all and come on back home, Blackwell said.
"Betrayal" From Above
Blackwell, Fannie Lou Hamer and other members of MFDP’s Delta delegation were surprised that notable Black leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., NAACP head Roy Wilkins and SCLC director Andrew Young pressed for them to accept the compromise. They promised extraordinary measures from Johnson if he won the White House without MFDP interference, but members balked.
Mississippi branch NAACP head Aaron Henry and white Mississippi activist and Delta Ministry Founder Rev. Ed King were promised the two seats, but sided with Blackwell, Hamer and the rest of the Mississippi delegation against the compromise.
Blackwell said she personally considered the compromise “throwing some scraps out to the dogs.”
"They came to (our hotel) door, told us what it was, and gave it to us, and we said 'nope! That hotel was jumping that night," she said.
The segregated state delegation appeared damaged regardless of the MFDP’s decision. Forced to confront their rank racism before party peers from more civilized states, white Mississippi delegates lost their taste for participation and left many of their seats unoccupied the following day. Some members of the MFDP moved up and took their abandoned seats. It was a sign of things to come for the Democratic Party.
Dixiecrat separatists shrank from the sudden national spotlight, and they petulantly abandoned the Democratic Party that year with white Mississippi voters overwhelmingly choosing Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in November. Mississippi Gov. Paul Johnson, himself a Democrat, did not endorse the party's candidate that year. White Mississippi preferred Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed poll taxes and businesses refusing customer service based on race.
But overt segregation, at least, was slipping out of fashion nationally. Goldwater went on to lose the general election in 1964, leaving Johnson to usher in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and push the U.S. to more fully embrace its democracy ideals.
Speeches from Harris and supporters at the recent DNC venue in Chicago whipped audiences into a joyful furor of unity this week, but the media bonanza of sermons and castigation at the Atlantic City convention in 1964 preceded a much different response. The Democratic Party began restructuring at the national level, making itself more inclusive of race and gender while Mississippi Dixiecrats, (who were already disenchanted with the party passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964) fled to the Republican Party in earnest after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Members filed away, caboosing GOP dog-whistles to restrain federal desegregation efforts. Racist philanderers like U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond (who championed segregation while assaulting and impregnating underage Black maids) blazed the Dixiecrat trail to the GOP. The flight of racists continued throughout the next four decades. And as of 2024, race largely determines party membership in Mississippi, with most African Americans voting Democratic and the Republican Party being a near homogeneous party of white voters. The nearly homogenous, white face of the Mississippi GOP spread to the national party in the following decades, leaving many modern GOP group photos woefully short of pigment.
Many Black voters in the Democratic Party, however, say they’re happy with Hamer and Blackwell’s hard work.
“Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's courageous stand at the 1964 Democratic National Convention … pav[ed] the way for future generations,” said Rep. Zakiya Summers, D-Jackson. “Kamala Harris … stands on a platform built by the relentless efforts of those who fought to make the Democratic Party truly represent all Americans."
Matthews confirms she, too, is sitting in the warm glow of promise, hopeful that Harris will go on to claim the White House in November.
“I’m excited about what we’re seeing this week at the DNC. I think what it looks like is the potential beginning of significant change in the body politic,” Matthews says. “What lot of folks are looking for, as they watch this (celebration), I think they’re anticipating a system change, because that’s the only thing that’s going to make a difference in people’s lives for the better. I think a lot of folks may be tired of incremental changes. And what this week looks like is the possibility of large-scale significant change.”
She is not so naïve to take moral growth as granted, however. This is still a nation created by slave-owners, she says, and a country that “discusses Thomas Jefferson as if he is a moral actor.”
“I’m under no illusions about this country and the systems under which we toil,” Matthews says. “I’m a person who’s studied politics since I was 10. I have always been hopeful, but I know which country I live in.
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