The Explosion of Civil Rights onto the National Stage 60 Years Ago at the Dem. National Convention

Hubert Humphrey gave one of the most courageous political speeches ever given, at the 1948 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. It came at a time when African Americans were routinely discriminated against in every aspect of life, frequently terrorized, and prevented from voting in the American South, with virtually complete impunity.

Harry Truman was running for a second Presidential term, and his campaign was in deep trouble. Though Truman had earlier proposed a strong civil rights plank for the Democratic Party platform, his advisors had become nervous about that idea, afraid that prominent mention of civil rights in his campaign would cause Truman to lose the electoral votes of the Southern states.

Hubert Humphrey, Mayor of Minneapolis at 37 years of age, arrived in Philadelphia as a long time aggressive civil rights advocate and member of the platform committee. Failing to get the platform committee to vote for a strong civil rights platform, Humphrey faced a momentous decision. Should he go against his Party and take the fight to the floor of the convention? Doing so could cost him his political career if he failed. Or if he succeeded in getting a strong civil rights plank into the platform, it could cause the Democrats to lose the South in November, resulting in the election of a Republican President. And that could also cost him his career.


The speech

Humphrey decided that civil rights was too important to let the opportunity pass. Here are some excerpts from his speech of July 14, 1948:



Aftermath of the speech

Bill Moyers, in a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Humphrey’s speech (described in his new book, “Moyers on Democracy”), describes what happened next:


Harry Truman did indeed lose much of the South that year. Mississippi’s delegation and half of Alabama’s delegation walked out of the convention, and a Southern racist third party (the States Rights Democratic Party) was formed in protest, which carried Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and part of Tennessee. Yet, Truman came from behind in the last weeks of the campaign to win a popular vote 50% to 45% victory and a 303-189 electoral vote victory over Thomas Dewey. Moyers explains the significance of that:


Humphrey continued to fight for civil rights as a Senator from Minnesota. In 1964 he played the primary role in shepherding President Johnson’s Civil Rights Act through Congress. The next year, as Johnson’s Vice President, he helped with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965


Disenfranchisement of African American and other Democratic voters in current day Presidential elections

Unfortunately, the widespread disenfranchisement of African-American voters is back with a vengeance, though different methods have been devised to accomplish it.

Florida 2000
The sordid story of how George W. Bush and his helpers stole the 2000 Presidential election in Florida is too long and complicated to describe here. I partially described it in two previous posts.

But without a doubt, most of the stolen votes were the result of an electronic voter purge of legal voters who were mostly African-Americans. Greg Palast thoroughly describes that story in his book, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy”. The first chapter of that book is titled “Jim Crow in Cyberspace: The Unreported Story of How they Fixed the Vote in Florida” (See pages 6-44).

It’s a long story, but the bottom line details are this: In the run-up to the 2000 election, George W. Bush’s brother Jeb, the Governor of Florida, hired a database company known as ChoicePoint, with the purported purpose of scrubbing the Florida voter roles of ex-felons who were not legally allowed to vote in Florida. ChoicePoint eventually purged the Florida voter roles of 97,500 voters under their contract with Florida, prior to the 2000 Presidential election. A highly disproportionate number of those voters were African-American (54%), and an even higher disproportionate number of them (90%) were Democrats.

The only problem was that, as Palast showed, only about 5,500 of those voters were really ineligible to vote according to Florida law. About 40,000 were ex-felons who had the right to vote under Florida law, and about 52,000 were merely close computer matches of ex-felons. This was no accident. ChoicePoint had informed the Governor’s office that under the existing computer program they were asked to run, many close computer matches would be disenfranchised as well as actual felons. They were told to go ahead with it anyhow.

In other words, approximately 92,000 voters were illegally and purposely disenfranchised under this system, and the vast majority of those were Democrats. In an election that was decided by 537 votes…. well, figure it out. And as we all know, George W. Bush was awarded Florida’s 25 electoral votes when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the stopping of the Florida recount, which gave Bush a 5 point electoral vote victory.

Ohio 2004
In 2004 it was Ohio that gave George Bush his victory. As with Florida in 2000, the Ohio Governor’s Office, under Kenneth Blackwell, hired a private company (Diebold) to handle much of its voter registration.

Following up on reported voter registration anomalies and discrepancies, Victoria Lovegren researched the problem and posted a report at Ohio Vigilance about what she found. In summary, she identified the purging, apparently illegal, of 165,224 voters from Cuyahoga County alone, for no other rationale than that they hadn't voted recently. Dr. Lovegren notes in her report that this practice violates the National Voting Rights Act. Perhaps the most troublesome aspect of these reports is that the purging appears to have been done discriminately, that is, with no specific criteria for who would be purged.

Mark Crispin Miller’s book, “Fooled Again – How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)”, sheds additional light on how voters were disenfranchised in 2004. In that book, Miller recounts his conversations with Denise Shull, a poll checker in Summit County. During the course of her work on Election Day, Shull noted that approximately 10% to 20% of registered Democratic voters on her list were not on the official list of registered voters. Furthermore, these voters were described as ardent Democrats, as long time voters in the area, AND most of them were not voting. A possible reason for their not voting is suggested by an encounter that Shull had with one of these voters as the voter (or more precisely, non-voter) was leaving the polls. This voter was simply told that she couldn’t vote and was given a phone number to call. And even more disturbing, Shull noted three of her fellow Democratic volunteers who described to her very much the same phenomenon occurring at the polling places where they worked that day. What effect would this have had on the net vote count?

The purging of voters in Cleveland alone would have resulted in a net loss to Kerry of about 46 thousand votes. Targeting of Democratic voters in Cleveland could have been done relatively easily, since Cleveland is heavily Democratic (voted 83% for Kerry, 16% for Bush in 2004), and many precincts in Cleveland voted more than 90% for Kerry. In order to target Democratic voters in Cleveland, one would merely have had to pick out those precincts with a history of voting 90% or more for Gore in the last election.

Voter purging in Summit County (where Denise Shull worked) would ordinarily have been expected to have been much less efficient (for fraud purposes) than voter purging in Cuyahoga County, because only 57% of its voters were Democrats. But Miller’s book describes a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in Akron, Summit County, in the summer of 2004. The only things stolen were two computers with Democratic campaign-related information on them. A similar break-in occurred three months later in Lucas County, and was described by the Toledo Blade. One can guess that with voter information obtained from these computers, the targeting of Democratic voters in these two counties could have been made a lot more efficient than it would have been without that information.

Elsewhere, 2004
The above descriptions focus on Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 because those are the states that made the difference in George Bush’s electoral victories in those two years. However, as demonstrated in Miller’s book, voter disenfranchisement was not by any means limited to Ohio in 2004. From “Fooled Again”:


Miller then goes on to relate the details of the ballot shredding operations, etc. that Sproul conducted.


The bottom line

In the last few election cycles we seem to have taken a major step backwards from the advancements in voting rights of the 1960s. This has monumental implications for the future of democracy in our country. The Democratic Party – the party of the people in our country today – cannot hope to win many elections as long as minority voters and other Democrats are widely targeted for disenfranchisement. Or alternatively, they would need to move substantially towards the center in order to win elections under those circumstances.

Rather than moving to the center, it would be far better if Democrats would begin again to demonstrate the courage that the Party showed in the mid-20th Century, as many Democratic leaders decided it was way past time to move closer to the ideals on which our nation was founded.

The outrages described above have never been punished. Worse yet, they have barely been dealt with at all. This problem will not just go away, as long as the perpetrators know that they can engage in these activities with impunity. Democrats had better find a way to adequately address this problem. Especially, they had better do all they can to prevent widespread disenfranchisement of voters on Election Day 2008 – and beyond.

on Version20.08: Voter ID laws.

It's somewhat different than what I discuss in my OP, as the issues I talk about here are blatantly illegal, whereas voter ID laws have been to some extent sanctified by a recent Supreme Court decision. I can't see why, as I don't see much difference between the recent voter ID laws and the poll tax, which is unconstitutional. But that's the reality that we have to deal with.

Maybe the Mayor of SF

Thanks for the historical references.

I thought I would just mention that, because I agree that Humphrey was a great Democrat, but a lot of Democrats shit on him in the 1960s. The Kennedy clan could not forgive him for running against JFK. Bobby Kennedy stated as one of his goals the destruction of the political career of Humphrey. People like Hunter S. Thompson were used by the Republicans to portray Humphrey as worse than the Republicans. This in turn alienated African-American voters who had just won their voting rights. Who knows what might have happened to the Democratic Party had Blacks not felt that their voices were being ignored on the national level?

The way that Nixon and Buchanan successfully played divide and conquer politics and turned Democrats against Humphrey in the late 1960s is exactly the same as the strategy they are using now to split up the Democratic Party---and I am beginning to think that you have to have been alive in the 1960s and have witnessed the insanity that gripped out Party then to recognize it.

If people could just overcome this one tactic, people would take back this country.

I'm afraid that that could throw the election to McCain.

The big issue was the war, and McGovern was aggressively against it.

Humphrey may or may not have been a hawk on the Vietnam War. As VP he must have felt obligated to support his President, which he did for the most part. Many liberals/progressives were upset with him because of that. I would never have said that he was the same as Nixon, but certainly it would be fair to say that he was a war hawk compared to McGovern. On the other hand, being VP during a very unpopular war where your President has an inflexible approach and just doesn't know that it's time to leave, must be a very difficult situation to be in.

Also, I did not like Humphrey's repeated and very negative attacks against McGovern. Quite clearly that hurt McGovern's campaign quite a bit and was at least in large part responsible for the Nixon landslide. I have to say that Humphrey was blinded by ambition there.

None of that detracts from the heroic role that he played in the civil rights movement. He deserves a great deal of credit for that. I guess that some people just have a weakness when it comes to ambition.

especially important this year. Thank you.

New to posting here, I think I would have preferred two separate diaries, since the historical background is vital in itself, but the current voter suppression background needs a fullscale light shone on it.

Mark Crispin Miller and greg Palast are heroes.

MCM and Palast certainly are heroes. Thank God that some investigative reporters are doing an excellent job for us.

Welcome to DU. :toast:

should keep an eye on the voter roles as they're registering their voters. If they check often enough they can probably identify otherwise serious problems before they become uncorrectable. If we don't identify these problems until Election Day or after, as happened in 2000 and 2004, it's unlikely that we will be able to affect the outcome of the election.