As DNC Kicks Off, Palestine Solidarity Activists Look to 1964 for Inspiration

As the Democratic National Convention (DNC) begins, and with Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza fracturing the party’s coalition, the echoes of 1968 are hard to miss. That year, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, protests erupted outside the DNC in Chicago, while tensions flared inside the convention. The nation saw a Democratic party in disarray.

With mass protests occurring over Gaza at this year’s DNC — again, held in Chicago — the 1968 comparisons are apt. But there is another historical example also worth remembering.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the 1964 DNC in Atlantic City where, famously, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), a grassroots party fighting for racial justice, sent a delegation to demand that they, not the all-white “regular” delegation, be seated as Mississippi’s true representatives.

MFDP delegates demanded justice today, not tomorrow. They created a spectacle to force the Democratic Party to confront Jim Crow within its own house and support voting rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

Scorned by Lyndon Johnson and betrayed by liberal leaders, they suffered a short-term defeat. But today, the MFDP effort at the 1964 DNC is considered part of the heroic lore of the civil rights movement, even though it was denounced at the time by the liberal establishment.

“A big lesson from this history is understanding that, in the moment, your protest is not necessarily going to be seen as righteous,” Jeanne Theoharis, a civil rights historian at Brooklyn College, told Truthout. “That was true of the civil rights movement, even though that’s not the way it’s remembered today.”

This week, 30 delegates, representing the nearly one million Democratic primary voters across the U.S. who voted “uncommitted” to protest Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, will be at the 2024 DNC in Chicago, where they will be demanding a permanent ceasefire now and an arms embargo against Israel. They are also asking that Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care physician who volunteered in Gaza, and a Palestinian-American speaker, be allotted speaking time from the main convention stage (they have yet to receive a response).

In demanding their voices be heard and their votes represented, Uncommitted delegates are explicitly drawing inspiration from the 1964 MFDP.

“Those were not folks who were sitting waiting to be given a voice,” June Rose, Rhode Island’s Uncommitted delegate, told Truthout. “They took it, and that’s what we’re prepared to do.”

Organizing Mississippi

By the turn of the 20th century, a totalized Jim Crow regime marked by disfranchisement, racial segregation, debt bondage and convict labor ruled across the South, backed by white violence and a one-party system ruled by Southern Democrats.

Jim Crow may have been most brutal and most entrenched in Mississippi. Between 1877 and 1950, at least 581 Black men, women and children were lynched in Mississippi, the highest number of any state. By 1960, around 93 percent of Black Mississippians weren’t registered to vote.

“Mississippi was considered a closed society and very dangerous,” Françoise Hamlin, a historian of the Mississippi civil rights movement at Brown University, told Truthout. “People died for looking at someone wrong.”

This is what Mississippi civil rights organizers were up against when they escalated their efforts in the early 1960s, and what the MFDP was trying to change when it went to Atlantic City in 1964.

The rise of the MFDP rested on years of tireless grassroots organizing. World War II veterans and Black women built local organizing infrastructures in the 1940s and 1950s that the young organizers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) plugged into during the early 1960s.

The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), backed by major civil rights groups, became a coordinating body to support organizing in Mississippi. In 1963, COFO organized a statewide mock “Freedom Vote” for governor, to highlight their demand for voting rights for Black Mississippians. Then, in 1964, they looked to focus national attention on Mississippi with “Freedom Summer.” Hundreds of northern organizers, many white, flocked to Mississippi to carry out a voter registration drive and run “Freedom Schools” across the state to empower and educate.

The brutal murder of three civil rights activists on June 21 rocked the country, and two weeks later, on July 2, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. While a milestone, the truth remained: The nation was marked by vast racial injustices, and Black people were being beaten and killed for simply trying to register to vote — a right that the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not guarantee. Moreover, Black Mississippians were represented by an all-white state Democratic Party bent on preserving Jim Crow.

As the August 1964 Democratic National Convention approached, things were at an impasse.

“A Genuine Cross-Section of the Community”

The MFDP wasn’t a mere party, it was an organizing vehicle. The forging of the 1964 delegation rested on tireless work across the state.

The MFDP attempted to register thousands of voters and organized dozens of precinct meetings in rural areas and cities alike. “The delegates were teachers, housewives, packinghouse workers, a toy factory worker, in short a genuine cross-section of the community,” noted an observer in Columbus, Mississippi.

Hamlin said the “participatory democracy” of the MFDP was “the closest thing that America had to a democratic process,” with grassroots organizing helping to educate people “so that they’re willing to fight for their own rights.”

The MFDP was organizing a “shadow party,” as Theoharis put it, that would go to the 1964 DNC and demand to be seated. They, not the illegitimate all-white delegation whose power rested on Black disfranchisement, should be acknowledged as Mississippi’s representatives.

This would force the Democratic Party, on its highest national stage, to decide: Is it the party of racial equality or the party of Jim Crow?

The statewide organizing culminated in an August 6 convention, attended by nearly 2,500 people. Ella Baker, the movement’s unsung guiding light, gave the keynote address. “It was probably as close to a grassroots political convention as this country has ever seen,” wrote historian Howard Zinn.

Attorney Joseph Rauh explained the convention strategy. The MFDP would go to the convention’s 108-member credentials committee and make their case to be seated as Mississippi’s only legitimate delegation. Winning at this stage was unlikely, but there was another path to victory. They needed only 11 votes – 10 percent of the committee — to bring the question to the convention floor, and then, if just eight state delegations supported it, there would be a roll call vote on seating the MFDP.

Bringing the question to the floor had a major strategic advantage: it put the whole Democratic Party on the spot, in front of the entire nation, and would force it to take a decisive stance on voting rights.

“I Question America”

The MFDP’s 68-member delegation arrived in Atlantic City on August 21. As historian Barbara Ransby wrote, their strategy could be seen as a “calculated political gamble.”

“It would either win a tactical victory, providing Mississippi activists with another tool with which to push for full freedom,” said Ransby, “or it would expose the limitations of mainstream party politics and strengthen the resolve of those same activists to find creative and truly democratic methods to realize radical social change.”

Numerous speakers gave testimony to the credentials committee, but it was Fannie Lou Hamer who stole the show.

Born in 1917, Hamer had grown up dirt poor working on the cotton plantations of the Mississippi Delta. She joined SNCC in 1962, fortifying the movement with her hymns and undaunted courage in the face of vicious threats and police beatings.

As she sat before the committee, Hamer described the brutal violence faced just trying to “become first-class citizens.”

“If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” she said. “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 hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”

“We Didn’t Come All This Way for No Two Seats”

Lyndon Johnson wanted a smooth coronation, and he was obsessed with thwarting the MFDP challenge. He called an impromptu press conference to interrupt Hamer’s testimony, though millions viewed it on the nightly news.

Johnson deployed 30 FBI agents that infiltrated different groups and posed as reporters during the convention. They wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr.’s hotel room and SNCC’s nearby headquarters. Historian John Dittmer called Johnson’s espionage operation “a Watergate that worked.”

Johnson’s people floated proposals, including that MFDP delegates could be “honored guests” and receive two floor seats, but most of the MFDP opposed this. “They didn’t want to take the two seats as a compromise,” said Hamlin. “They saw it as a sellout.”

Behind the scenes, Johnson’s machine was strong-arming members of the credentials committee who supported the MFDP to back his compromise. Careers were threatened and rewards were offered. “They basically pick off those people one by one,” said Theoharis, with a “carrot and stick.”

Meanwhile, liberal leaders like United Auto Workers (UAW) President Walter Reuther and even Rauh — who was also a UAW attorney — pushed for compromise, as did civil rights leaders like Bayard Rustin. Among the steadfast MFDP members, a sense of betrayal was settling in.

“You could cut through the tension,” remembered one SNCC member.

Soon, the votes the MFDP needed for a roll call on the convention floor dipped below 11. The MFDP rank-and-file remained stalwartly opposed to anything less than being seated as a voting delegation. “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats,” Hamer famously remarked.

In the end, behind closed doors, the credentials committee passed what it viewed as a compromise: The MFDP would have two at-large delegates, with the others welcomed as “honored guests”; Mississippi’s “regular” delegates had to sign a loyalty oath to the party’s nominee; and the party pledged to eliminate racial discrimination at future conventions.

The “compromise” was ignored by all sides. While some in the MFDP advocated accepting it, most delegates opposed it. MFDP delegates staged a sit-in on the convention floor to express their anger. “We are here for the people and the people want to represent themselves,” said SNCC’s Bob Moses, a key architect behind Freedom Summer and the MFDP. “They don’t want symbolic token votes. They want to vote for themselves.”

Meanwhile, most of the “regular” all-white delegation simply left. The Mississippi Democrats went on to vote for Barry Goldwater in 1964, Theoharis pointed out. “This is the beginning of the Deep South migration to the Republican Party.”

Legacies and Lessons

The MFDP remained active after Atlantic City, but the 1964 DNC marked a turning point for the movement.

Young organizers who had gone into the convention with high hopes felt crushed. “It was certainly a lesson in how far their liberal white supporters will go or not go,” said Theoharis.

In response, many organizers turned toward Black Power, popularized by SNCC’s Stokely Carmichael. After Atlantic City, SNCC organizers helped form an independent Black party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, in Alabama.

“There was a great disillusionment with the federal government,” said Hamlin. “People felt they couldn’t rely on the federal government and they needed to instead rely on themselves. That was the crux of Black Power.”

While defeated at the DNC in 1964, the MFDP’s effort bore fruit in the longer run. It put a national spotlight on Black voting rights and racial oppression in Mississippi that no American could look away from. Moreover, there were rules changes at the 1968 DNC, noted Hamlin, and the all-white “regulars” were unseated.

The MFDP was a grassroots party driven by organizers and community members with an uncompromising desire for justice. At the 1964 DNC, they demanded their rights even though it caused discomfort and tension for some.

Though celebrated today, the MFDP’s 1964 DNC campaign, like Malcolm X and Rosa Parks, were roundly vilified in their own day, said Theoharis. While the movement is “now portrayed as a shining star of American democracy,” civil rights activists were “feared and demonized in their time,” and the MFDP was seen as “reckless, as too angry, as overplaying their hand,” she said.

Ultimately, says Hamlin, the story of MFDP shows that movements need to persist in their demands. “Local people need to fight for themselves,” she said.

“This Is a Moment for Change”

Sixty years later, Uncommitted delegates today are drawing inspiration from the sense of justice and determination of the MFDP.

“Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964 were resolute in their approach that, no matter what, their voices were going to be heard,” Rose told Truthout.

Rose, who is the chief of staff for the Providence City Council, notes that 29 percent of voters from Providence, Rhode Island, voted uncommitted in the Democratic primary, as did nearly 15 percent statewide. In Michigan, over 13 percent of voters were uncommitted, as were 19 percent in Minnesota and over 29 percent in Hawaii.

“We want a seat at the table, and would love for that to be formally through DNC programming,” said Rose. “We believe that we represent, just as Fannie Lou Hamer and the freedom fighters did, a core constituency that is both needed to win the election and that also represents moral clarity and social justice.”

Like the MFDP, Uncommitted delegates will be visible at the convention with daily press conferences, a vigil, and t-shirts and buttons, making their demands for a permanent ceasefire and an arms embargo loud and clear. And like the 1964 DNC, there will be actions taking place outside the convention in conjunction with efforts on the inside — a dual front of organizing and pressure.

On August 18, the Uncommitted movement announced that, for the first time ever, the DNC will host a panel on Palestinian human rights. Rose calls this a “good start,” but says their demands for Haj-Hassan and a Palestinian-American to speak from the convention stage, and for policy shifts on a permanent ceasefire now and an arms embargo, remain.

“Whether it’s formally from the main stage or not, we are going to do what it takes to make sure that our voices are heard in this moment,” said Rose. “Disruption is not the aim. The aim is policy change, and we will demand it however we need to.”

Uncommitted delegates will also be working to pull other supporters. “There are countless Harris delegates who believe in a free Palestine and that it’s time to end the war,” said Rose.

While the Uncommitted delegates are hoping for major policy concessions, they will also be bearing witness at the DNC to ongoing genocide in Gaza.

“We’re going to make sure that in every room in that building, the children who have been killed in the massacre are not forgotten,” said Rose. “The Democrats would like for this convention to be a celebration. To me, this is a moment of mourning and grieving.”

“This is a moment for a new direction on Gaza,” Rose said. “This is a moment for change.”