[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.
____________________