When Humphrey was elected Minneapolis mayor in 1945, he became known for fighting racism and antisemitism, creating a Human Relations Council and supporting a fair employment law. By 1948, when he was invited to speak at the convention, the Democratic Party was split between Northerners who largely embraced civil rights and Southerners who used states’ rights to justify segregation within their borders.
Earlier that year, Truman had called on Congress to deliver a strong civil rights package. But as the convention drew near, and as Truman’s popularity languished, he and his advisers fretted about alienating Democrats’ “Solid South.”
“Harry Truman didn’t want the Humphrey plank,” Freedman said. “He wanted a plank that was vague and fuzzy and open to interpretation to keep the Southerners within the party.”
So Humphrey agonized: Should he defy the party and take the fight to the convention floor?
A powerful senator from Illinois, Scott Lucas, sarcastically asked, “Who is this pipsqueak who knows more than Franklin Roosevelt knew about Negro rights?” J. Howard McGrath, the chairman of the Democratic Party, warned Humphrey: “This will be the end of you.”
Meanwhile, the Black protesters outside the convention, led by union organizer A. Philip Randolph, heaped pressure on Democratic leaders.
On the third day of the convention, it was Humphrey’s turn to speak.
“Friends, delegates, I do not believe that there can be any compromise on the guarantees of the civil rights which we have mentioned in the minority report,” he said. “In spite of my desire for unanimous agreement on the entire platform, in spite of my desire to see everybody here in honest and unanimous agreement, there are some matters which I think must be stated clearly and without qualification. There can be no hedging — the newspaper headlines are wrong. There will be no hedging, and there will be no watering down.”
Humphrey’s framing of civil rights as human rights on such a stage was transformative, said John Wright, emeritus professor of African American and African Studies and English at the University of Minnesota.
“It was the right echo of what W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter White, Mary McLeod Bethune and other national African American leaders were arguing at the time,” Wright said, “to get a United Nations declaration that the United States was in violation of the human rights of African Americans.”
In the next morning’s convention coverage, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Humphrey’s speech got the “biggest hand of the steamy session.” Nearly three dozen delegates from Mississippi and Alabama left the convention when their efforts to pass a watered-down civil rights plank failed.