[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 101 (Friday, July 24, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1431-E1435]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     TRIBUTE TO HUBERT H. HUMPHREY

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. JAMES L. OBERSTAR

                              of minnesota

                    in the house of representatives

                         Friday, July 24, 1998

  Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to former Vice 
President Hubert H. Humphrey.
  Fifty years ago this week, Harry S. Truman was nominated for the 
Presidential ticket at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia. 
Another profoundly memorable event occurred at that same convention in 
1948; Hubert A. Humphrey, then the Mayor of Minneapolis and candidate 
for Senate from the State of Minnesota, delivered a speech on civil 
rights that is remembered today for its eloquence, its vision, and its 
idealism.

[[Page E1432]]

  Many events across the country contributed to the advancement of 
civil rights during the past half century, including Rosa Parks' 
courageous refusal to sit in the back of the bus, the landmark Civil 
Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and dramatic acts of civil disobedience 
in the deep south. But it was Hubert Humphrey's principled challenge at 
the 1948 Democratic National Convention that catapulted civil rights to 
the top of the nation's agenda and launched what became a 16-year 
national dialogue on a race relations and racial injustice, culminating 
in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
  Hubert Humphrey's clarion call to conscience on that night 50 years 
ago rings as fresh and energizing today as it did then, when he 
challenged convention delegates and the nation to overturn social 
conventions and traditions that not only deprived a whole segment of 
the American public their rightful place in our economy and society, 
but even denied an honest, forthright discussion of race in America.
  The galvanizing appeal of then-Mayor Humphrey both inspires and 
challenges us now today, as it did 50 years ago: ``There are those who 
say to you--we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are 172 
years late. There are those who say--this issue of civil rights is an 
infringement on states' rights. The time has arrived for the Democratic 
Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly 
into the bright sunshine of human rights.''
  Those words jolted American politics like a lighting strike and 
stirred the nation's conscience to a national debate on civil rights 
policy. Although divided, the convention delegates ultimately voted to 
endorse a new and timely commitment to civil rights. The party's 
decision to take a strong stand on civil rights inspired citizens 
throughout the nation and gave new life, purpose and charisma to the 
civil rights movement.
  Last month, the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the 
University of Minnesota recognized the 50th anniversary of its 
namesake's landmark speech made by Hubert H. Humphrey at the 1948 
Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. Journalist Bill Moyers, NAACP 
Chair Julian Bond, Author Richard Rodriguez, and former Mississippi 
Governor William Winter spoke on the legacy of the civil rights 
movement since 1948. I am pleased to share with my colleagues the 
personal remembrance that journalist Bill Moyers offered at the 
Institute's forum last month on Hubert Humphrey's influence on civil 
rights.

       When Steve Sandell invited me to the Twin Cities for this 
     occasion, I accepted on the spot.
       Hubert Humphrey made a difference to my life. He was the 
     friend who toasted me on my 30th birthday and the mentor who 
     nurtured my political sentiments. Some of you will remember 
     that it was Senator Humphrey who first proposed that young 
     Americans be offered the chance to serve their country abroad 
     in peace and not just in war. Newly arrived in Washington, I 
     read his speeches on the subject and liberally borrowed from 
     them for the speech I helped to write for Senator Lyndon B. 
     Johnson during the campaign of 1960 when, at the University 
     of Nebraska, he proposed what we called ``a youth corps.'' 
     Two weeks later, on the eve on the election, Senator John F. 
     Kennedy called for the creation of the Peace Corps. This, 
     too, was a speech that owed its spiritual lineage to Hubert 
     Humphrey.
       After the election I finagled my way on to the Peace Corps 
     Task Force, where it was my privilege to work with Senator 
     Humphrey on the legislation that turned the idea from 
     rhetoric to reality. Somewhat later President Kennedy 
     nominated me to be the Peace Corps' Deputy Director. The 
     nomination ran into trouble on the Senate floor when Senator 
     Frank Lausche of Ohio announced that ''a 28-year-old boy 
     recently out of college'' was being given too much 
     responsibility, too fast, at a salary far too high for 
     someone so green behind the ears. Now, Senator Lausche was 
     probably right about that (although I had informed him during 
     the committee hearings that I was not a mere 28, I was 28 and 
     a half!), but it didn't matter; he was no match for Hubert 
     Humphrey, who rushed to the floor of the Senate not only to 
     defend me but to champion the cause of youth in public 
     service: ``I know this man well,'' Senator Humphrey said of 
     me. ``I have spent countless hours with him on the Peace 
     Corps legislation. He was in my office hour after hour 
     working out the details the period of the hearings on the 
     legislation and the markup on the legislation. If I know any 
     one member of this Government, I know Bill Moyers'' (Some of 
     you who knew Hubert H. Humphrey knew there should have been a 
     fourth ``H'' in his name--for hyperbole. But the hyperbole 
     felt good to those on whom it was showered).
       And then . . . Hubert Humphrey took off, his words 
     rocketing across the Senate chamber: ``Did not Pitt, the 
     younger, as a rather young man, prove his competence as Prime 
     Minister of Great Britain? He did not have to be 50, 60, or 
     65. He was in his twenties. I invite the attention of my 
     colleagues to the fact that most of the great heroes of the 
     Revolutionary War period . . . were in their twenties and 
     early thirties . . . That many great men in history, from 
     Alexander to Napoleon, achieved greatness when they were in 
     their twenties . . . that the average age of the signers of 
     our Declaration of Independent was 36. I do not wish to use 
     any invidious comparisons, but I have seen people who have 
     lived a long time who have not learned a great deal, and I 
     have seen people who have lived only a short time who have 
     learned a very great deal. I think we should judge persons, 
     not by the calendar, but by their caliber, by the mind and 
     heart and proven capacity . . .  My good friend from Ohio 
     said that when this nomination comes to the floor of the 
     Senate he will be here to speak against [it]. . . just as 
     surely, I say the Senator from Minnesota will be here to 
     speak in favor of [it].''
       He was, and he did. And I have been indebted to him ever 
     since. I wish he knew my grandchildren are growing up in his 
     state, and I wish he could see who is here tonight to 
     commemorate one of the great acts of courage in politics, 
     when the mayor of Minneapolis turned the course of American 
     history.
       It was the summer of 1948, July . . . three weeks after the 
     Republicans triumphantly nominated Thomas E. Dewey and began 
     measuring the White House for new drapes. The dispirited 
     Democrats met in Philadelphia resigned to renominating their 
     accidental president, Harry Truman. Truman had surprised many 
     Americans earlier that year when he had demanded Congress 
     pass a strong civil rights package, but now he and his 
     advisers had change their tune. A strong civil rights plank 
     in the party platform, they were convinced, would antagonize 
     the South and destroy Truman's changes to reelection. The 
     spectre of a bitter fight dividing the convention was all the 
     more frightening to the Democrats since for the first time 
     ever television cameras were making their debut on the 
     convention floor and the deliberations would be carried out 
     in broad daylight. So the party leaders decided to back away 
     from a strong civil rights stand and offer instead an 
     innocuous plank not likely to offend the South.
       The mayor of Minneapolis disagreed. Hubert Humphrey was 37. 
     After graduating magna cum laude from the University of 
     Minnesota he and his young wife Muriel Buck--``Bucky'', he 
     called her--had gone to Louisiana for Humphrey to earn his 
     master's degree. What they saw there of the ``deplorable 
     daily indignities'' visited upon Southern blacks was 
     significantly responsible for his long commitment to the 
     politics of equal opportunity. He came back to Minneapolis to 
     run for mayor . . . was defeated . . . ran a second time . . 
     . and won. Under his leadership the city council established 
     the country's first enforceable Municipal Fair Employment 
     Practices Commission. He sent 600 volunteers walking door to 
     door, to factories and businesses, schools and churches, to 
     expose discrimination previously ignored. Their report, said 
     Mayor Humphrey, was ``a mirror that might get Minneapolis to 
     look at itself.'' He saw to it that doors opened to blacks, 
     Jews, and Indians. He suspended a policeman for calling a 
     traffic violator ``a dirty jew'' and even established a human 
     relations course for police officers at the University of 
     Minnesota. What Humphrey preached about civil rights, he 
     practiced. And what he practiced, he preached.
       So he arrived at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia 
     fifty years ago with convictions born of experience. As a 
     charismatic and articulate spokesman for the liberal wing of 
     the party he was named to the platform committee, and when 
     after a ferocious debate that very committee voted down a 
     strong civil rights plank in favor of the weaker one 
     supported by the White House, Humphrey agonized over what to 
     do. Should he defy the party and carry the fight to a 
     showdown on the convention floor? The pillars of his own 
     party said no. ``Who does this pip-squeak think he is?'' 
     asked one powerful Democrat. President Truman referred to him 
     as one of those ``crackpots'' who couldn't possibly 
     understand what would happen if the south left the party. It 
     was a thorny dilemma.\1\ If Humphrey forced the convention to 
     amend the platform in favor of a stronger civil rights plank, 
     the delegates might refuse, not only setting back the 
     fledgling civil rights movement but making a laughing stock 
     of Hubert Humphrey and spoiling his own race for the Senate 
     later that same year. On the other hand, if he took the fight 
     to the floor and won, the southern delegates might walk out 
     and cost Harry Truman the Presidency.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     \1\ My own recollections were rekindled by three books I 
     highly recommend: Carl Solberg's biography of Humphrey; 
     Robert Mann's ``The Walls of Jericho'' and Hubert Humphrey's 
     own memoir, ``The Education of a Public Man.'' I am indebted 
     to them and to my colleague, Andie Tucher, for their 
     contributions to this speech.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
       As he wrote in his memoir: ``In retrospect, the decision 
     should have been easy. The plank was morally right and 
     politically right. . . . [But] clearly, it would have grave 
     repercussions on our lives; it could make me an outcast to 
     many people; and it could even end my chances for a life of 
     public service. I didn't want to split the party; I didn't 
     want to ruin my career, to go from mayor to `pipsqueak' to 
     oblivion. But I did want to make the case for a clear-cut 
     commitment to a strong civil rights program.''
       Years later he recalled the dilemma in a conversation with 
     an old friend, who said to him, ``That sounds like the 
     politics of a nunnery--you'd rather have been right than been 
     president.'' ``Not at all,'' Humphrey shot

[[Page E1433]]

     back. ``I'd rather be right and be president.'' Which might 
     explain in part, said the friend, why he never was.
       It sounds like so little now. Here's exactly what the plank 
     said: ``We call upon Congress to support our President in 
     guaranteeing these basic and fundamental rights: (1) the 
     right of full and equal political participation; (2) the 
     right to equal opportunity of employment; (3) the right of 
     security of person; and (4) the right of equal treatment in 
     the service and defense of our nation.''
       It sounds like so little. All people, no matter what their 
     skin color, he was saying, had the same right to vote, to 
     work, to live safe from harm, to serve their country. But 
     it's hard to remember now, half a century later, how radical 
     those 50 words really were. In 1948 the South was still a 
     different country. Below the Mason and Dixon line--or, as 
     some blacks called it, the Smith and Wesson line--segregation 
     of the races was rigorously upheld by law and custom, 
     vigorously protected by violence if necessary. To most 
     whites, this system was their ``traditional way of life,'' 
     and they defended it with a holy fervor. To most blacks, 
     ``tradition'' meant terror, oppression, humiliation, and, 
     sometimes, death.
       Take a minute to revisit with me what life was like for 
     black Americans in the late nineteen-forties, when Hubert 
     Humphrey was facing the choice between dishonoring his 
     conscience and becoming a pipsqueak. Every day, all over 
     America but particularly in the South, black people were 
     living lives of quiet desperation. The evidence was 
     everywhere.
       You see it in the numbers, the raw measurements of the 
     quality of life for black people. Flip open the Census 
     Bureau's volumes of historical statistics and look under any 
     category for 1948 or thereabouts. Health, for instance. Black 
     people died on average six or seven years earlier than 
     whites. Nearly twice as many black babies as white babies 
     died in their first year. And more than three times as many 
     black mothers as white mothers died in childbirth.
       Or take education. Young white adults had completed a 
     median of just over twelve years of school, while blacks 
     their age had not gotten much past eighth grade. Among black 
     people seventy-five or older--those who had been born during 
     or just after slavery times--fewer than half of them had even 
     finished fourth grade.
       Look at the standard of living. The median family income 
     for whites was $3310, for blacks just over half that. Sixty 
     percent of white agricultural workers were full owners of 
     their farms and about a quarter were tenants, while for 
     blacks, the numbers were almost exactly opposite; only a 
     quarter of blacks owned their own farms, and 70% were 
     tenants. You could go on and on.
       You see it throughout the popular culture, full of cartoony 
     creatures like Stepin Fetchit, Amos 'n' Andy, and Buckwheat, 
     but you could look till your eyes ached for a single strong, 
     admirable, human black character in a mainstream book or 
     movie. There's a scene in one of the most beloved movies ever 
     made, Casablanca, in which Bogart's lost love, the beautiful 
     Ingrid Bergman, walks into Rick's Cafe and says to Claude 
     Rains ``The boy who's playing the piano--somewhere I've seen 
     him . . .'' She's referring, of course, to Dooley Wilson, who 
     at nearly fifty was almost twice Bergman's age . . . but in 
     those days, to white eyes, it was okay to call a black man a 
     ``boy''.
       You see it in a slim book written by Ray Sprigle, an 
     adventurous reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. With a 
     shaven head and a deep Florida suntan he traveled through the 
     south in 1948 posing as a black man to see what life was 
     really like on the other side of the color line. Throughout 
     his trip his black hosts told him horrific stories of 
     indignities, humiliations, lynchings, and murders. While 
     nothing untoward happened to Sprigle himself, it was because, 
     as he put it, ``I gave nobody a chance. That was part of my 
     briefing; `Don't jostle a white man. Don't, if you value your 
     safety, brush a white woman on the sidewalk.' So I saw to it 
     that I never got in the way of one of the master race. I 
     almost wore out my cap, dragging it off my shaven skull 
     whenever I addressed a white man. I `sirred' everybody, right 
     and left, black, white and in between. I took no chances. I 
     was more than careful to be a `good nigger.' ''
       You see it in the work of even such thoughtful observers as 
     Willie Morris, who in his memoir of growing up in Mississippi 
     during the '40s recalls his complicated and mysterious 
     relationship with the black people of his town, a 
     relationship that warped and scarred both black and white. As 
     a small child, he says, he had learned the special vocabulary 
     of racism: that `` `keeping house like a nigger' was to keep 
     it dirty and unswept. `Behaving like a nigger' was to stay 
     out at all hours and to have several wives or husbands. A 
     `nigger street' was unpaved and littered with garbage.'' He 
     writes of casual cruelties like the time he hid in the bushes 
     until a tiny black child walked by, then leaped out to kick 
     and cuff the child. ``My heart was beating furiously, in 
     terror and a curious pleasure,'' he says frankly. ``For a 
     while I was happy with this act, and my head was strangely 
     light and giddy. Then later, the more I thought about it 
     coldly, I could hardly bear my secret shame.'' In the small 
     town where I grew up in East Texas, there were high school 
     kids--classmates of mine--who made a sport out of ``nigger-
     knocking.'' Driving along a country road they would extend a 
     broom handle out of the rear window at just the right moment 
     and angle to deliver a stunning blow to an unsuspecting black 
     pedestrian. Then they'd go celebrate over a few beers. While 
     I never participated, it was my secret shame that I never 
     tried to stop them.
       There was a study done in 1946 by the Social Science 
     Institute at Fisk University, the black college in Nashville, 
     about white attitudes toward black people. In interview after 
     interview, average citizens throughout the south never talked 
     of overt violence or flaming hatred--but their detached and 
     imperturbable calm was in some ways even more grotesque than 
     physical violence. Listen to their voices:
       A woman teacher in Kentucky: ``We have no problem of 
     equality because they are in their native environment. If we 
     permitted them to be equal they wouldn't respect us. We never 
     have any riots because their interests are looked after by 
     the white people.''
       A housewife in North Carolina: ``They are as lovable as 
     anyone in a lower order of life could be. . . . I had to go 
     see an old sick woman yesterday. We feel toward them like we 
     do about our pets. I have no horror of a black man. Why, some 
     of them are the nicest old black niggers. They are better 
     than a barrel of monkeys for amusement.''
       A businessman in North Carolina: ``I have a feeling of 
     aversion toward a rat or snake. They are harmless but I don't 
     like them. I feel the same toward a nigger. I wouldn't kill 
     one but there it is.''
       Or a mechanic in Georgia: ``During the war I was stationed 
     at a northern naval yard. The southern Negro was given the 
     same privileges as white men. He was not used to it, and it 
     ruined a good Negro. In the south he is treated as a nigger 
     and is at home here. He knows his treatment is the best for 
     him. . . . We have a good group around here. It's years and 
     years since we've had a lynching. It's not necessary to lynch 
     them. The sheriffs in this county take more care of the darky 
     than the white man.''
       By now these words are probably making you twist and cringe 
     in your seats. I have trouble forcing them out of my mouth. 
     But these words, and others like them, were the coin of the 
     realm in 1948. After more than two centuries of slavery and 
     nearly another of Jim Crow segregation, black people were 
     still struggling to realize their most basic rights as human 
     beings, let alone as citizens. The framers of the 
     Constitution made their notorious decision in 1787 that for 
     census purposes each black American--nearly all of whom were, 
     of course, slaves--would count as three-fifths of a person. 
     In the minds of many white Southerners in 1948, that fraction 
     still seemed about right.
       Yet something was beginning to change, and the old ways 
     were coming under tough new challenges. The steadfast but 
     quiet resistance long practiced by many southern blacks was 
     now being strengthened by a new development: thousands of 
     black veterans were coming home from Europe and the Pacific.
       These men had fought for their country--some had even 
     fought for the right to fight for their country, not just to 
     dig ditches and drive trucks and peel potatoes for their 
     country. They had served in a segregated army that had 
     accepted their labor and their sacrifice without accepting 
     their humanity. Some of them had come home heroes, others had 
     come home embittered, and many had also come home determined 
     that things would be different now--that they had earned the 
     respect of their fellow Americans and it was time they got 
     it. And that started at the ballot box--a tool both practical 
     and symbolic in the struggle to ensure their status as full 
     citizens.
       All over the South, where for decades blacks had been 
     systematically harassed, intimidated, or overtaxed to keep 
     them from voting, intense registration drives for the 1946 
     campaigns had swelled the rolls with first-time black voters. 
     And the white supremacists were fighting back. Sometimes it 
     was brute and random violence: in Mississippi a group of 
     black veterans was dumped off a truck and beaten up. In 
     Georgia two black men, one a veteran, were out driving with 
     their wives when they were ambushed and shot by a mob of 
     whites. The mob then shot the women, too, because they had 
     witnessed the crime. In South Carolina, a black veteran 
     returning home by bus after fifteen months in the South 
     Pacific angered the driver with some minor act that struck 
     the man as uppity. At the next stop the soldier was taken off 
     the bus by the local chief of police and beaten so badly he 
     went blind. Permanently. Under pressure from the NAACP, 
     something unusual happened: the chief was put on trial. Then 
     normalcy returned. The chief was acquitted, to the cheers of 
     the courtroom.
       But the demagogues also made deliberate efforts to stop the 
     black vote--by whatever means necessary. In Georgia, Gene 
     Talmadge ran for governor and won, on a frankly, even 
     joyfully racist platform. ``If I get a Negro vote it will be 
     an accident,'' he declared, and his machine figured out ways 
     to challenge and purge the rolls of most of them. The few 
     brave black voters who went to the polls anyway often paid 
     dearly for their rights; one, another veteran, the only black 
     to vote in Taylor County, was shot and killed as he sat on 
     his porch three days after primary, and a sign posted on a 
     nearby black church boasted ``The first nigger to vote will 
     never vote again.''
       In Mississippi, Theodore Bilbo was re-elected to the Senate 
     with the help of a campaign of threats and violence that kept 
     most black people home on Election Day. ``The

[[Page E1434]]

     way to keep the nigger from the polls is to see him the night 
     before,'' Bilbo was fond of saying. But this time black 
     voters fought back and filed a complaint with the Senate. 
     Nearly two hundred black Mississippians trekked to Jackson--
     and its segregated courtroom--to testify about the myriad 
     pressures, both subtle and brutal, that had kept them from 
     voting. But their eloquent testimony failed to convince the 
     honorable members. Bilbo was exonerated by the majority of 
     the committee members--despite (or perhaps because of) having 
     used the word ``nigger'' seventy-nine times during his own 
     testimony. It was a toxic word, a poisonous and deadly word. 
     And it was still prevalent as a term of derision in the early 
     1960's. In August 1964, following the death of his father, 
     the writer James Baldwin said on television: ``My father is 
     dead. And he had a terrible life. Because, at the bottom of 
     his heart, he believed what people said of him. He believed 
     he was a nigger.''
       So when Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota stood up at the 
     Democratic convention in Philadelphia and urged the delegates 
     to support his civil rights plank, he could have had no doubt 
     how ferociously most southern delegates would oppose his 
     words--and how desperately all southern citizens, white and 
     black, really needed to hear them. It was a short speech and 
     it took less than ten minutes to deliver--doubtless some kind 
     of record for the man whose own wife reportedly once told 
     him, ``Hubert, you don't have to be interminable to be 
     immortal.''
       Most of the time he couldn't help being interminable. 
     Someone said that when God passed out the glands, Hubert took 
     two helpings. He set records for the number of subjects he 
     could approach simultaneously with an open mouth. One day, at 
     a press conference in California, his first three answers to 
     questions lasted, respectively, 14, 18, and 16 minutes. No 
     one dared ask him a fourth question for fear of missing 
     dinner!
       But in Philadelphia in 1948, Hubert Humphrey delivered a 
     short speech. And these not interminable words became 
     immortal because they were right. He had agonized, he had 
     weighed the odds as any politician must--remember he was a 
     politician, and this was a time when the way to get ahead was 
     not to go back on your party. But now he was listening to his 
     conscience, not his party, and he was appealing to the best, 
     instead of the basest, instincts of his country, and his 
     words rolled through the convention hall like ``a swelling 
     wave.''
       ``There are those who say to you--we are rushing this issue 
     of civil rights. I say we are 172 years late. There are those 
     who say--this issue of civil rights is an infringement on 
     states rights. The time has arrived for the Democratic party 
     to get out of the shadow of state's rights and walk 
     forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.''
       We know of course what happened when he finished. A mighty 
     roar went up from the crowd. Delegates stood and whooped and 
     shouted and whistled; a forty-piece band played in the 
     aisles, and the tumult subsided only when Chairman Sam 
     Rayburn ordered the lights dimmed throughout the hall. The 
     platform committee was then overruled and Humphrey's plank 
     voted in by a wide margin, and all of Mississippi's delegate 
     and half of Alabama's stalked out in protest. The renegades 
     later formed the Dixiecrat party on a platform calling for 
     ``the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of 
     each race,'' and nominated Strom Thurmond for their 
     candidate. ``There's not enough troops in the Army to break 
     down segregation and admit the Negro into our homes, our 
     eating places, our swimming pools, and our theaters,'' 
     Thurmond would declare on the campaign trail, and a majority 
     of the voters in South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, and 
     Louisiana agreed with him.
       But Harry Truman didn't lose. The Minneapolis Star got it 
     right the morning after the convention when it said 
     Humphrey's speech ``had lifted the Truman campaign out of the 
     rut of just another political drive to a crusade.'' Harry 
     Truman won--and the southern walkout to protest civil rights 
     actually ended up helping the civil rights agenda. If a 
     Democrat could go on to win the presidency anyway, even 
     without the solid South behind him, then the segregationist 
     stranglehold on the party was clearly weaker than advertised, 
     and even the most timid politician could see that supporting 
     civil rights might not be a political death sentence after 
     all. Not bad work for the mayor from Minneapolis. The late 
     Murray Kempton once said that ``a political convention is 
     just not a place from which you can come away with any trace 
     of faith in human nature.'' This one was different, because 
     Hubert Humphrey kept the faith. There were other forces at 
     work of course. Just this week the Star Tribune said rightly 
     that it would be misleading to suggest the democratic ship 
     turned on a few eloquent phrases from a young upstart, or 
     that the party had experienced a moral epiphany. Politics is 
     rarely that simple or intentions that noble. There were other 
     forces at work--the need of America during the Cold War to 
     put its best face forward, the need for Democrats to 
     consolidate their hold on the northern industrial states, 
     those returning black veterans. But it would be equally wrong 
     to underestimate what Hubert Humphrey did. An idea whose time 
     has come can pass like the wind on the sea, rippling the 
     surface without disturbing the depths, if there is no voice 
     to incarnate and proclaim it. In a democracy a moral movement 
     must have its political moment to crystalize and enter the 
     bloodstream of the nation, so there can be no turning back. 
     This was such a moment, and Humphrey its embodiment.
       But nineteen forty-eight wasn't the end of the struggle, of 
     course; it turned out to be just the beginning. Sixteen years 
     later, in 1964, Lyndon Johnson, another accidental president, 
     staked his reputation on getting a comprehensive Civil Rights 
     bill passed into law. And Hubert Humphrey, now Senator 
     Humphrey, was the man assigned the gargantuan challenge of 
     shepherding the bill through Congress in the face of a 
     resolute southern filibuster. Once again I was privileged to 
     work with him. By now I had become President Johnson's policy 
     assistant, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was our chief 
     imperative.
       By then the face of the segregated South had changed--
     somewhat. The landmark Supreme Court decision Brown vs. Board 
     of Education had given legal aid and comfort to the long 
     moral crusade to open the public schools to all races, while 
     courageous activists were putting their own bodies on the 
     line in determined efforts to desegregate the buses, the 
     lunch counters, the beaches, the rest rooms, the swimming 
     pools, and the universities of the South.
       But all the court decisions and sit-ins in the world had 
     not changed the determination of the diehard segregationists 
     to defend their vision of the South ``by any means 
     necessary,'' and the few federal laws on the books were too 
     weak to stop them. A lot of this story, while awful, is 
     familiar; we may think we have a pretty good idea what was at 
     stake when Hubert Humphrey made his second great stand for 
     civil rights. We've all seen the photographs and the 
     television images; we all know about the ugly mobs taunting 
     the quiet black teenagers outside the schools and inside the 
     Woolworths, we know about the beatings and attack dogs and 
     fire hoses, we know about the murders. During Freedom 
     Summer--the very same summer the Senate completed work on the 
     civil rights bill--Mississippi endured 35 shootings, the 
     bombing or burning of 65 homes and churches, the arrest of 
     one thousand activists and the beating of eighty, and the 
     killing of three volunteers with the active connivance of the 
     Neshoba County sheriff's department, their bodies bulldozed 
     into an earthen dam.
       But we don't know as much about another, more silent tactic 
     of white resistance that was just as oppressive, and in some 
     ways maybe even more effective than the violence. I mean the 
     spying, the smearing, the sabotage, the subversion, all 
     carried out by order of the highest officials in states 
     across the south.
       We were reminded of the twisted depths of official 
     segregation just this spring, when after decades of court 
     battles Mississippi was ordered to open the secret files of 
     something called the State Sovereignty Commission. This was 
     an official government agency, bountifully funded with 
     taxpayer money, lavished with almost unlimited police and 
     investigative powers, and charged with upholding the 
     separation of the races. Most of the southern states had 
     similar agencies, but Mississippi had a well-deserved 
     reputation as the worst of the bad.
       I've seen some of those Sovereignty Commission files. I've 
     read them. And I understand how a longtime activist in 
     Jackson could recently tell a reporter I know, ``These files 
     betray the absolute paranoia and craziness of the government 
     in those times. This was a police state.''
       The Commission devoted astonishing amounts of effort, time, 
     and money to snooping into the private lives of any citizens 
     who supported civil rights, who might be supporting civil 
     rights, or whom they suspected of stepping over the color 
     line in any way. It tracked down rumors that this northern 
     volunteer had VD and that one was gay. It combed through 
     letters to the editor in local and national newspapers, and 
     wrote indignant personal replies to anyone who held a 
     contrary opinion. It sent agents to a Joan Baez concert at a 
     black college to count how many white people came, and posted 
     people at NAACP meetings to write down the license numbers of 
     every car in the parking lot. It stole lists of names from 
     Freedom Summer activists and asked the House Un-American 
     Activities Committee to check on them. It went through the 
     trash at the Freedom Houses and paid undercover informants to 
     report on leadership squabbles and whether the white women 
     were fornicating with the black men.
       The most incriminating documents were purged long ago, but 
     buried deep in those files is still ample evidence of 
     violence and brutality. I am haunted by the case of a black 
     veteran named Clyde Kennard. When he insisted on applying to 
     the local college, one that happened to be for whites only, 
     he was framed on trumped-up charges of stealing chicken feed 
     and sent to Parchman, the infamous prison farm, for seven 
     years. While there he developed colon cancer and for months 
     was denied treatment. Eventually, after prominent activists 
     brought public pressure to bear on the governor, Kennard was 
     released, but it was too late. In July 1963, a year before 
     the passage of the Civil Rights Bill, Clyde Kennard died 
     following surgery. He was 36 years old.
       Reading these files you are struck not only by the 
     brutality but by the banality of the evil. You find in them 
     the story of a divorced mother of two who was investigated 
     after the Commission heard a rumor that her third child was 
     fathered by a black man. An agent arrived to interview 
     witnesses, confront the man, and look at the child. ``I had

[[Page E1435]]

     a weak feeling in the pit of my stomach,'' he reported; he 
     and the sheriff ``were not qualified to say it was a part 
     Negro child, but we could say it was not 100 percent 
     Caucasian.'' After that visit, the woman's two older boys 
     were removed from her custody.
       You can read about how a local legislator reported to the 
     Commission that a married white woman had given birth to a 
     baby girl with ``a mulatto complexion, dark hair that has a 
     tendency to `kink,' dark hands, and light palms.'' A doctor 
     and an investigator were immediately dispatched to examine 
     the child, then shelled out $62 for blood tests to determine 
     its paternity. The tests came back inconclusive but a couple 
     of months later shots were fired at night into the family's 
     home and a threatening letter signed by the KKK, referring to 
     ``your wife and Negro child,'' showed up on their doorstep. 
     They moved out immediately.
       It was crazy--and it was official. This was the rampant and 
     unchecked abuse of state power turned against citizens of the 
     United States of America. And this was the background music 
     to Lyndon Johnson's 1964 Civil Rights bill, which called for 
     the integration of public accommodations, authorized the 
     attorney general to sue school districts and other segregated 
     facilities, outlawed discrimination in employment, and 
     further protected voting rights. When Hubert Humphrey 
     accepted the assignment as floor manager for this bill, he 
     knew how crucial as well as how difficult it would be to 
     gather enough votes to end the southern filibuster; no one 
     had ever managed to invoke cloture with a civil rights bill 
     before. He also knew his own career was again on the line, 
     since LBJ was using the assignment to test Humphrey's 
     worth as his vice presidential candidate.
       The filibuster began on March 9 and went on, it seemed, 
     forever. But Humphrey was prepared and organized. A couple of 
     times during those long months of debate I slipped into the 
     gallery of the Senate to watch him lead the fight. The same 
     deep fire of justice that burned in him at the 1948 
     convention, burned within him still. He was utterly 
     determined. He had regular strategy meetings. He issued a 
     daily newsletter. He enlisted one colleague to focus on each 
     title of the bill. He schmoozed and bargained with and coaxed 
     and charmed the key men whose support he needed. He persuaded 
     the Republican Leader, Everett Dirksen, to retreat from at 
     least 40 amendments that would have gutted the bill. He 
     orchestrated the support of religious organizations until it 
     seemed the corridors and galleries of Congress were 
     overflowing with ministers, priests, and rabbis). ``The 
     secret of passing the bill,'' he said, ``is the prayer 
     groups.'' But the open secret was Hubert Humphrey. As Robert 
     Mann reminds us in The Walls of Jericho,'' his good humor and 
     boundless optimism prevented the debates from dissolving into 
     personal recrimination. Once again he kept the faith. As he 
     told his longtime supporters at the ADA after more than two 
     months of frustration and delay, ``Not too many Americans 
     walked with us in 1948, but year after year the marching 
     throng has grown. In the next few weeks the strongest civil 
     rights bill ever enacted in our history will become the law 
     of the land. It is not saying too much, I believe, to say 
     that it will amount to a second Emancipation Proclamation. As 
     it is enforced, it will free our Negro fellow-citizens of the 
     shackles that have bound them for generations. As it is 
     enforced, it will free us, of the white majority, of shackles 
     of our own--for no man can be fully free while his fellow man 
     lies in chains.''
       As we know, his skills and commitment paid off. Seventy-
     five days later, on June 10, the Senate finally voted for 
     cloture with four votes to spare. A California senator, 
     ravaged with cancer, was wheeled in to vote and could manage 
     to vote yes only by pointing to his eye. After cloture ended 
     the filibuster, the bill passed by a wide margin. On July 2 
     President Johnson signed it.
       During all that time Hubert Humphrey broke only once--on 
     the afternoon of June 17, two days before the historic vote. 
     Summoned from the Senate floor to take an urgent call from 
     Muriel, he learned their son Robert had been diagnosed with a 
     malignant growth in his throat and must have immediate 
     surgery. There in his office, Hubert Humphrey wept. As his 
     son struggled for his life and the father's greatest 
     legislative triumph was in sight, Hubert Humphrey realized 
     how intermingled are the pleasure and pain of life.
       We talked about this the last time I saw Hubert Humphrey. 
     It was early in the summer of 1976. He came to our home on 
     Long Island where I interviewed him for Public television. We 
     talked about many things . . . about his father who set such 
     high standards for the boy he named Hubert Horatio; about his 
     granddaughter Cindy (a little pixie, he called her); about 
     waking up on the morning after he had lost to Richard Nixon 
     by fewer than 511,000 votes out of 63 million cast; about the 
     tyrannies of working for Lyndon Johnson (Said Humphrey of 
     Johnson: ``He often reminded me of my father-in-law and the 
     way he used to treat chilblains. Grandpa Buck would get some 
     chilblains and he said the best way to treat them was put 
     your feet first in cold water, then in hot water. And 
     sometimes [with LBJ] I'd feel myself in hot water, then I'd 
     be over in cold water. I'd be the household hero for a week 
     and then I'd be in the dog house.'')
       We talked about the necessity of compromise and the 
     obligation to stand firm against the odds, and the difficulty 
     of making the distinction. We talked about the life-
     threatening illness he had himself recently endured and what 
     kept him going through the vicissitudes of life. Growing up 
     out here on the great northern plains had made a difference, 
     he said: ``I used to think as a boy that in the Milky Way 
     each star was a little place, a sort of light for somebody 
     that had died. . . . I used to go pick up the milk--we didn't 
     have milk delivery in those days--I'd go over to Dreyer's 
     Dairy and pick up a gallon of milk--I can remember those 
     cold, wintry nights and blue sky, and I'd look up and see 
     that Milky Way and I'd think every time anybody died they got 
     a star up there. And all the big stars were for the big 
     people. You know, like Caesar or Lincoln. It was a childhood 
     fantasy. But it was a comforting thing.''
       He was called ``The Happy Warrior'' because he loved 
     politics and because of his natural ebullience and 
     resiliency. I asked him: ``Some people say you're too happy 
     and that this is not a happy world.'' He replied: ``Well, 
     maybe I can make it a little more happy . . . I realize and 
     sense the realities of the world in which we live. I'm not at 
     all happy about what I see in the nuclear arms race . . . and 
     the machinations of the Soviets or the Chinese . . . the 
     misery that's in our cities. I'm aware of all that. But I do 
     not believe that people will respond to do better if they are 
     constantly approached by a negative attitude. People have to 
     believe that they can do better. They've got to know that 
     there's somebody that's with them that wants to help and work 
     with them, and somebody that hasn't tossed in the towel. I 
     don't believe in defeat, Bill.''
       He lost some elections in his long career, but Hubert 
     Humphrey was never defeated. More than any man I know in 
     politics, he gave me to believe that in time, justice comes . 
     . . not because it is inherent in the universe but because 
     somewhere, at some place, someone will make a stand, and do 
     the right thing, and seizing the helm of history will turn 
     the course of events.
       So the next time you look up at the Milky Way, look past 
     the big stars, beyond the brilliant lights so conspicuous 
     they can't be missed . . . the Caesars and the Lincolns . . . 
     and look instead for the constant star, a sure and steady 
     light that burns from some deep inner core of energy . . . 
     and remember how it got there and for whom it shines. He was 
     one of your own.

     

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