Documenting the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
Because the political climate in Mississippi in the 1960s excluded African-Americans from mainstream political life, civil rights leaders founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in 1964. They conceived it as an alternative to the state's segregated, all-white official Democratic Party and a way to give black Mississippians experience in political organizing.
The MFDP registered members, held conventions, ran candidates for office, and selected delegates to the 1964 Democratic National Convention, where they intended to challenge the state's white supremacist delegation. The party's leaders hoped the challenge would expose the evils of segregation to a national audience during the nationally televised Atlantic City convention in August 1964.
'Is This America?'
During the third week of August 1964, the MFDP delegates, lawyers and supporters arrived in Atlantic City for the Democratic National Convention. During their televised testimony before the party's Credentials Committee, America watched as delegates told of beatings, drive-by shootings, fire-bombings and other reprisals for attempting to register to vote. Martin Luther King was among those who testified. Delegate Fannie Lou Hamer, tears streaming down her face, asked rhetorically, "Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave?"
Support poured in from around the nation, and demonstrators filled the Atlantic City boardwalk for days. But President Lyndon B. Johnson feared that losing the support of Southern Democrats by seating the MFDP might undermine his re-election. Working behind the scenes, party officials pressured members of the Credentials Committee to deny the MFDP challenge. Johnson's nominee for vice president, Hubert Humphrey, offered a "compromise" that the MFDP and the white delegation both rejected. When the segregationists walked out of the convention in protest, the MFDP delegates attempted to occupy the abandoned seats but party officials excluded them.
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