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Humphrey's convention speech changed US politics

"Into the Bright Sunshine" explores the legacy of Hubert H. Humphrey's pivotal address to the 1948 Democratic National Convention.

MINNEAPOLIS — This month marks the 75th anniversary of Hubert H. Humphrey's bold move to push fellow Democrats to embrace civil rights, a pivotal moment in American political history detailed in Samuel Freedman's new book "Into the Bright Sunshine."

The book's title is a reference to the most iconic phrase in Humphrey's speech to the 1948 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, with read as follows:

"The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadows of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights!"

It came at a time when national Democrats were trying to walk a tightrope between endorsing civil rights without alienating Southerners in the party.

"Up until this 1948 Convention, the Democratic Party had never fully endorsed," Freedman, a Columbia University journalism professor, told KARE.

"FDR's coalition included a lot of liberals and organized labor, but there was also a whole wing of Southern segregationists in the party. And to appease them they had never dared to have the party fully come down on the side of civil rights."

The party's official platform had avoided outright endorsing fair employment laws, desegregating the military, voting rights, and condemnation of lynching.  Humphrey and his allies were determined to change that in 1948.  That stance put them at odds with President Harry Truman, who was locked in a tight race that year with New York Governor Thomas Dewey.

"Harry Truman wanted a civil rights plant that had vague fuzzy language so that the Southern wing could say, 'This lets us have states' rights,' which was their euphemism for the Jim Crow system."

Most of the vintage newsreels of that convention show Harry Truman at the podium accepting his party's nomination but don't show Humphrey's speech.  The Minnesota Historical Society's collection includes silent, color film of Humphrey speaking and seated on the convention floor clowning around with the state's future governor Orville Freeman.

Despite that happy outward demeanor, Humphrey was under extreme pressure from people who feared his rhetoric and the civil rights plank he championed would divide the party and cost Truman the election.

"The Dixiecrats, the southern segregationists, had said that if Harry Truman is renominated and there’s any civil rights language of consequence in the party platform they’re walking out," Freedman explained.

"In fact, they already reserved a bunch of railroad cars to take them to Alabama to have their own third-party convention."

Most Minnesotans of a certain age remember Humphrey as a United States Senator, Lyndon B Johnson's vice president, and a presidential candidate who lost a tight race to Richard Nixon in 1968.  He took on the nickname of "the happy warrior" for carrying the progressive banner in national politics, often against the odds.

But at the time of that 1948 convention, he was the mayor of Minneapolis, a 37-year-old politician with very little national buzz.

"He was a kid! The people tried to intimidate him by saying that. They called him 'pipsqueak.' Truman wrote in his diary he was a crackpot. One of Truman’s top floor managers at the convention when up to Humphrey before the speech and said, 'If you do this your career is over.'"

History shows that Humphrey didn't back down. At the time, however, the fate of his plank was unknown. Unlike modern conventions, there was actual drama.

"You actually had votes on both of those planks at the convention. That’s why it was so incredibly dramatic because in real time we had about 60 million people listening on the radio and 10 million watching on TV, which had just begun to cover conventions in 1948 for the first time."

When the civil rights plant passed many Southern delegates walked out of the convention and formed the Dixiecrat third party. That was the beginning of the South's transformation into a Republican stronghold.

Truman squeaked out an upset victory over Dewey running on the party's civil rights platform. And protecting the rights of racial and religious minorities became part of the party's identity.

"Although Harry Truman had not wanted to run as a civil rights candidate, he was left no choice but to do that.  And two weeks after the election he desegregates the armed forces and desegregates the federal workforce," Freedman said.

"These are two really underappreciated, really pivotal moments in civil rights history."

Freedman said he was drawn to the story of Humphrey's push for civil rights because not much had been written about that moment in time. 

Most people are familiar with the peaceful civil disobedience of Black civil rights advocates of the 1950s and legal milestones in desegregation such as the Supreme Court's "Brown v Topeka Board of Education" ruling. But Humphrey's decision to push the Dems toward civil rights is often overlooked.

Humphrey, first as a US Senator and later as vice president, worked to pull together the votes necessary to help pass landmark federal legislation of the 1960s, including the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act.

"He was fighting a battle on behalf of inclusive multi-racial interreligious democracy against a more restrictive, bigoted version of who belongs in America," Freedman asserted.

"Once the Democrats embrace civil rights, they become the kind of party we recognize now, this multi-racial coalition very much oriented towards the rights of racial and religious and now, sexual minorities."

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