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DNC: BLUE BLOOD WOOS RED STATES WITH PURPLE HEART
by Ian Huntington
September 2004
BOSTON, Mass.—While waiting for the Democratic Party to consummate its selection of John Kerry, the formerly presumptive presidential nominee, I endured an endless stream of warm-up men and introductory speeches. My “Hall Pass”—the lowest possible credential—meant that I was usually banished to the seventh level of the Fleet Center, but for brief periods allowed to walk around the convention floor. There I was jostled by the assembled semi-powerful delegates and fairly important persons, and had the honor of being gently pushed out of the way by one of Russell Simmons's bodyguards.
The modern televised convention is part political infomercial and part NFL playoff game, except the other team never even enters the stadium. The delegates cut loose to the arena classic Millennium Funk Party. On the last night, the Indiana delegation's excitement boiled over into a spontaneous chant of “Kerry, Kerry.” The only things missing was the possibility that anything could happen on any given play. Most of the time, I found it hard to watch the actual speakers and focused instead on the giant projections above them. An event designed for television looks better on a screen.
In case you missed the three hours of prime-time broadcasts, the theme of this year's convention was “strength.” Strength, said Bill Clinton, goes hand in hand with wisdom. Bad leaders, said Teresa Heinz Kerry, sometimes confuse strength with wisdom, leading to unnecessary deaths. Strength is something that U.S. families, homeland security, military forces and alliances could all use an extra helping of, said John Edwards. And it is “more than tough words,” according to John Kerry himself. The Democratic Party platform uses the word “strength” 106 times. On the convention's final night, I stumbled onto an unlocked supply closet filled with boxes of unused signs that said, simply, “STRENGTH.”
For four days, I had listened to speaker after speaker extol John Kerry. As the moment of his arrival approached, I became excited each time I heard, “And now … let me introduce … ,” but it was only ever an introduction for the next introducer. The most frightening part of this one-sided display? It worked. I was more sincerely excited to see John Kerry than I could have previously imagined. When the camera finally showed him coming down through the crowd I heard someone screaming. Moments later, I realized that someone was me. “Reporting for duty,” he answered, with a salute as stiff and regal as Michelangelo's David.
This year, Democratic unity and strength meant that any real debate onstage or conflict in the convention hall was out of the question. But when the Democratic Party met in Atlantic City forty years ago, they weren't able to follow the script quite as closely. That's because the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was there.
In 1964, only five percent of Mississippi's blacks were registered to vote, and while the state population was forty percent black, the Democratic Party's Mississippi delegation was one hundred percent white. Local law enforcement beat, intimidated, and even killed to keep blacks out of politics and away from the voting booth. Blacks had no alternative means to power through the Republican Party, which had been nearly non-existent since Reconstruction. So a coalition of groups that had been active in registering black voters decided to form their own party, and elected sixty-eight delegates, all but four of whom were black, to crash the convention.
On arriving in Atlantic City, the group created a dilemma for Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, who feared that giving in to their demand for full delegate status would drive white Southerners to the Republicans. Johnson tried to distract the media from covering the MFDP's hearing before the convention's credentialing committee by calling an impromptu press conference, but the networks replayed the MFDP's testimony during prime time, anyway. Millions of people heard Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper from Ruleville, Mississippi, describe how a state policeman threw her in jail and forced two black prisoners to beat her with a blackjack for registering blacks to vote. She concluded:
All of this is on account we want to register, to become first-class citizens, and if the [MFDP] 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 the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings, in America? Thank you.
The national party offered a compromise that would grant two members of the MFDP delegate status, seat the rest as honored guests, create a commission to ensure that all future state delegations would be integrated and require that Mississippi's all-white Democratic delegation sign an oath promising to support the Democratic nominee, presumably Johnson, against Goldwater. The White House issued a statement claiming that the MFDP had accepted the compromise, but according to the MFDP, they turned it down. In Hamer's words, “We didn't come all this way for no two seats.” The all-white Mississippi delegation walked out with only a handful their delegates signing the oath to Johnson. Although the party had refused to accept them, the MFDP delegates entered the convention hall. This failed compromise radicalized activists who witnessed the MFDP's thwarted attempt to work within the party, and helped set the stage for the anti-war protests of the 1968 Chicago DNC.
But every powerful institution must co-opt and integrate dissent, erasing any memory that things have ever been another way, even if it takes thirty or forty years. On Tuesday night, the second night of the 2004 convention, the Democrats honored the anniversary of the MFDP and Fannie Lou Hamer. I sat between New Jersey and Delaware as actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dees presented together, taking turns reading off the teleprompter. They could have been awarding the Best Actress in a Supporting Role, except they were speaking about the brutal realities of 1960s Mississippi, and few on the floor were listening. The lack of interest was not usual at that hour; every convention speaker scheduled before 8 p.m. had to compete for attention. “Hey, I wanna hear this,” a young black man scolded his chatty neighbors, as the main screen displayed 1964 footage of Hamer. Interest from the floor increased dramatically when Maya Angelou came out—three mid-20s white girls next to me burst into sustained applause and several Oh-my-God-it's-Maya-Angelou screams.
Angelou offered these words: “In the sequestered most private heart of every American lives a burning desire to belong to a great country, to represent a noble minded country where … the dream of democracy is not in sole possession of the strong.” As she spoke, the video screens ringing the Fleet center above the luxury boxes flashed the phrase they displayed all four days: the DNC logo and the words “A STRONGER AMERICA.” The memorial praised “Fannie Lou Hamer's single decision,” spoke of the fact that “She knew she was only one woman,” remembered “her single voice”, and made hardly any mention of the MFDP, except as something she “co-founded.” Granted, the memorial was officially for Fannie Lou Hamer and not for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. But Hamer's “little light which she shined upon the darkness” (Angelou's words) would have still been in Ruleville, Mississippi, were it nor for the SNCC activists who first approached her, the thousands of blacks who elected her a delegate, the sixty-seven other MFDP delegates who rode with her to the convention and the MFDP's lawyer and other advisors. Hamer was utterly alone when she withstood the beatings in the rural Mississippi jail, but it was only by being part of a movement made up of thousands of people risking their lives that she made it from that cell to Atlantic City. At 2004's well-scripted and ‘unified' convention, even the boldest convention handler would be hesitant to emphasize the exploits of a group of citizens who heroically formed an alternative to the Democratic Party.
Better to focus on a single heroic woman. The official memorial ended with a recreation of the previous night's September 11 memorial: the lights were dimmed and a third of the delegates held aloft tiny lights while a choir sang “This Little Light of Mine,” a gospel song popularized by Hamer. Forty years' time has made Hamer's critique of the party not only safe, but something to celebrate. The Democratic Party is now dependent on black women, ninety-five percent of whom voted for Al Gore in 2000, forming eleven percent of his total. In several Southern states, more blacks than whites voted for Gore. Thirty-nine percent of the 2004 delegates were minorities, more than at any previous DNC. Registration patterns have grown more equal as well—only two percent fewer blacks than whites registered to vote in 2000, and only 2.9 percent fewer voted.
But there is something worth remembering about the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, something that was left out of the DNC program. The MFDP forced a question that the Democrats had to answer—where should these people sit—and that, by answering, would necessarily alienate a large segment of the base. Because this year's delegates checked their dissent at the Fleet Center's doors, Kerry was able to avoid any such question. Like Goldwater driving Johnson to reject the MFDP, and terrorists scaring Americans into rallying behind President Bush following September 11th, so Kerry parlayed fear of a second Bush term into the perfect, unbroken front.
Nowhere to be found was Hamer's real legacy of boldly divisive action and nonviolent confrontation. Howard Dean and his delegates were visible, but only softly and indirectly challenged a candidate who failed to represent so many of their priorities. Dean took his twenty-minute slot, joking wryly about preferring to speak on Thursday night, and his delegates wore shirts with quips like “I see Dean people.” Dennis Kucinich's sixty-eight delegates matched the MFDP delegation in number and he did the most to keep the heat on Kerry, but he released his troops several days before the final nominating vote. Forty-five still voted for him; the remainder backed Kerry. His organization also distributed anti-war stickers and pink scarves that said “Delegate for Peace.” Tim Carpenter, the former deputy campaign director for the Kucinich campaign, was in the convention headquarters when one of the Kerry handlers suggested that armbands should be removed because “they are not fire retardant.”
All the real protest was kept out of the convention hall and behind two fences. I visited the Freedom of Speech Zone on Thursday night, several hours before Kerry was scheduled to speak. The scene was desolate. An old PA system was broadcasting “We Shall Overcome” in a repeating loop. A few signs and papers littered the concrete. Most of the hundred or so protesters had left the ‘Protest Pen' for a parallel street near one of the heavily fenced delegate entrances and were busy confronting a Veterans Against Kerry contingent, engaging in dueling chants of “Bush Lied, People Died” and “Kerry Lied, People Died.” A woman pressed herself up against the fence and in a half-moan, half-chant called for an end to the war in Iraq. Two young suits with delegate credentials swinging from their necks left the security line about thirty meters from the Zone and came toward the woman. “You are being heard. You are being heard. People are listening,” they reassured her through the fences. The woman, oblivious, continued her soft chant.
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