A book review about Hubert Humphrey: 'Into the Bright Sunshine' by Samuel Freedman
Cross posing from Editorial and Other Articles
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016357336
After losing in 1968 he found himself losing not only the election but any vestige of the respect and goodwill he had once enjoyed.
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Such derision is regrettable and undeserved, argues Samuel G. Freedman, who believes that Humphrey is one of the most consequential figures in the modern American political story. But it isn’t the failed presidential candidate that interests Mr. Freedman in “Into the Bright Sunshine” so much as the young mayor of Minneapolis who on July 14, 1948, because “good conscience, decent morality demands it” (as Humphrey himself put it), made the Democratic Party confront the issue of civil rights.
What Humphrey said on that day, Mr. Freedman reminds us, came long before both Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision desegregating schools, and the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. These two events, he says, are “commonly and incorrectly understood as the beginnings of the civil rights movement.” Mr. Freedman, a former reporter for the New York Times who teaches at Columbia University, would put the beginnings at Humphrey’s 1948 speech, which anticipated later civil-rights legislation. “What he said on that day set into motion the partisan realignment that defines American politics right up through the present.”
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But where did this evangelism on civil rights come from? It was rather witnessing Jim Crow while a graduate student and teaching fellow at Louisiana State University in 1939-40 that changed his outlook and anchored his political self-definition. By the time he headed back to Minnesota a year later, he had a calling. “No one, I thought, could view black life in Louisiana without shock and outrage,” he recalled. “Yet its importance to me was not only what I saw there and what my reaction was to southern segregation. It also opened my eyes to the prejudice of the North.”
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When Humphrey promised to raise the issue of racial equality on the floor of the convention no matter what, Southern segregationists and Truman loyalists alike were incredulous. “Who is this pipsqueak?” asked Sen. Scott Lucas of Illinois. Behind the scenes the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Sen. Howard McGrath, threatened to end Humphrey’s career if he continued to make trouble. The plan to pursue civil-rights advocacy looked, writes Mr. Freedman, like “a suicide mission.”
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