BRIAN: If you're just tuning in, this is BackStory. We're marking the arrival of the Democratic and Republican national conventions with a look back at the history of conventions in America.
ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON: We've got to as we approach these conventions and people get excited, it's easy to forget how forgettable they are and when I say forgettable, I mean right afterwards.
BRIAN: This is a person who knows a thing or two about conventions. She's attended plenty of them.
ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON: I'm Eleanor Holmes Norton. I represent the District of Columbia in the House of Representatives. So I have gone to conventions before, but there has never been a convention as memorable certainly for me and I think in many ways for our country as the '64 convention.
ED: 1964. It was a big year, especially for the civil rights movement. Lyndon Johnson had signed the civil rights act in July, but at the same time, voter registration efforts in Mississippi were being met with violent opposition. This was the summer that three civil rights workers there, two of them from out of state, had been murdered and the bodies weren't found for weeks afterwards. Leslie McLemore was a sharecropper's son in Mississippi who had just graduated from college and he was active with local voter registration efforts.
LESLIE MCLEMORE: The state of Mississippi had been saying to the world that our Negroes in Mississippi are happy. They do not wish to vote. They do not wish to participate. It is these outside agitators that are causing all of the problems.
BRIAN: Civil rights workers hatched a plan to show that blacks in Mississippi did want to be part of the political process and could be effective. They were going to bring the struggle to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.
ED: All of Mississippi's delegates to the convention that year were white, which is to be expected because the state's democratic party was firmly controlled by segregationists and blacks were systematically prevented from voting.
BRIAN: So civil rights workers created a new party within the old democratic party. They called it the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. And with legal guidance from Eleanor Holmes Norton who was fresh out of law school, they meticulously followed the official party rules to elect a separate slate of delegates to the convention. Sixty-four of the delegates were black, four were white. Leslie McLemore was among them.
LESLIE MCLEMORE: Quite frankly, our expectations were at the end of this process that we would be the legitimate, bonafide, recognized democratic party in Mississippi and recognized by the National Democratic Party. We had built, we thought, a very strong case.
ED: So the delegates traveled to Atlantic City and began making that case. They set up tables on the boardwalk and shared stories about disfranchisement home. Inside, they lobbied other delegates. And the high point came in testimony before the credentials committee by the vice chair of the Freedom Democrats. A former sharecropper who had become one of the movement's most powerful speakers.
FANNIE LOU HAMER: Mr. Chairman and to the credentials committee. My name is Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer and I live at 626 East Lafayette Street, Ruleville, Mississippi.
LESLIE MCLEMORE: It was a packed room because all the networks, the three networks, you know, were there then, recording what was going on because this was really a big deal. And I was standing actually in one of the corners of the meeting room with congressman Adam Clayton Powell from New York.
BRIAN: Fanny Lou Hamer told the story of being confronted by her plantation boss after she had tried to register to vote.
FANNIE LOU HAMER: He said if you don't go down and withdraw your registration, you will have to leave. And then if you go down and withdraw that you still might have to go because we're not ready for that in Mississippi. And I addressed him and told him I didn't try to register for you, I tried to register for myself. I had to leave that same night.
ED: She also told the story of her arrest for riding on a bus, where some of the passengers attempted to use the white facilities in a bus station.
And it wasn't too long before three white men came to my cell. One of these men was a state highway patrolman and he said, "We're going to make you wish you was dead."
LESLIE MCLEMOREAnd she describes that beating of how her skin turned black because the guys were beating her with the billy clubs.
FANNIE LOU HAMER: All of this on account of we want to register to become first-class citizens and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hook because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in America? Thank you.
LESLIE MCLEMORE: I was crying and as I looked around the room, other people were crying. So I was thoroughly convinced that we would be seated. I mean why wouldn't we be seated?
BRIAN: The answer to that question had less to do with the credentials committee than it did with politics. Sitting on top of the party ticket was Lyndon Johnson, the incumbent president. Now Johnson was pro civil rights, but Johnson was also the quintessential politician. He worried that supporting the Freedom Democrats would alienate his Southern base. So Johnson told Senator Hubert Humphrey, one of the leading advocates for civil rights, that if Humphrey could prevent a white Southern walkout, it would secure him the number two slot on the party's ticket.
Humphrey took the bait. He and Walter Mondale, the party leader, offered the Freedom Democrats a compromise.
ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON: We got two delegates, which was considered by everybody except us a breakthrough.
LESLIE MCLEMORE: And people were essentially saying to us that you people really don't understand what you've done, that you've upset the national political apple cart. That you have done things here that no other group was able to do. And most of them, obviously, were saying to us that you really should accept the compromise, that you've done something quite remarkable.
ED: The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party rejected the compromise. In the words of Fannie Lou Hamer, "We didn't come all this way for no two seats because all of us is tired."
Fifteen years later, Norton traveled to Mississippi on official business. She was greeted by Aaron Henry. He had been one of the founders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Now he was the chairman of the Democratic Party of Mississippi.
ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON: That is a straight line from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. I think in hindsight if you had asked Aaron Henry, he would say, "Well, I think we did some good there in 1964."
BRIAN: Guys, I just want to make one, very quick point. What these folks were trying to do in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was follow the rules. In fact, dot every I, cross every T. There must be a longer history here of those who want to get in, are playing by the rules. Those who are already in look at these folks as troublemakers or worse.
PETER: Yeah, Brian. It really goes back to the fundamental question of legitimacy. And I think what we need to keep in mind is that people are very conservative. We know the way things are supposed to happen. If we're going to have a revolution, for instance in early America, it's because we know that our traditional rights are being violated. And they said the reason we're doing this, the people are meeting in this extraordinary convention, is because ordinary government has been shut down. We don't have any choice.
And so yeah, you've got to dot those I's and cross those T's exactly because you have to appear to yourselves and to your fellow Americans in this case to be doing the right thing, to be legitimate. And that's what the people who wrote state constitutions did. They formed conventions.
ED: Peter, you're describing exactly another moment in American history and weirdly enough, it's secession you're talking about. You know, the most radical thing that's ever been done in this country, the attempt to dismember the United States, followed in a very peculiar sort of way all of the forms of conventions and constitutions. And you think about sort of the best example of this is Virginia in 1860-61. They're looking at the beginnings of the Confederate States of America, which are a little bit rag-tag down there in South Carolina and Georgia.
And they said, no. Folks, let's take a deep breath. Let's pause. Let's embody the traditions of our ancestors. Let's have a convention. Let's bring people from every county in Virginia. Let's come together in the capitol. Let's let everybody have their say. Let's let this be publicly documented. Let's let delegates come from the confederate states and let's talk with our friends from the United States and decide what we're going to do.
But while they debate this week after week after week, there are people rioting in the streets of Richmond, saying come on, enough already. You know? This is a revolution. And all we're doing is recovering the traditions handed down to us by our forefathers. And that's why the symbol of the confederacy is George Washington.
BRIAN: Now ironically, skip ahead a few years, the confederacy has been defeated, the states of the former confederacy are now trying to become part of the United States of America and the congress says if you're going to do that, you're going to have to go through all the forms again. You're going to have to elect delegates to new conventions and those delegates must include African American men, as well. And you're going to come together in conventions where everybody can see you, pass new constitutions that acknowledge the end of slavery and your acceptance of the 14th amendment. And when you have done that, when you have dotted all the I's and crossed all the T's, then you may become Americans again.
So as you can see, Brian, to answer your good question, it goes right back to the founding and it goes through the defining crisis at the middle of American history. Maybe you can help us figure out what happened after 1964. If I'm not mistaken, that would be '68 and if I'm not mistaken, some big stuff happened in the 1968 convention.
BRIAN: That's right, Ed. What we're talking about is the 1968 National Convention of the Democratic Party held in Chicago. And a lot of democrats had given up on the conventional process. In fact, they say very explicitly, look, African Americans did everything by the book and they didn't get seated in 1964. Ironically, even though African Americans were seated in the 1968 convention, things had moved much more quickly in the streets. Demands were much higher. Demands now were for black power, not just for dotting the I's and crossing the T's.
While the convention droned on inside, ultimately nominating Hubert Humphrey, the real action was out in the streets of Chicago, where later a commission investigating what happened concluded that the Chicago police rioted.
PETER: But Brian, it is after all the question of who are the people? And I think what protestors draw attention to when they believe that the political process is fundamentally failing is the unrepresentativeness of institutions including nominating conventions. You want in and you push hard and you say I've been playing according to the rules, but when you feel it's hopeless, when you feel the whole system is rigged against you, then in the name of the people, you take to the streets.