The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), also referred to simply as the Freedom Democratic Party, was an Americanpolitical party that existed in the state of Mississippi from 1964 to 1968 during the Civil Rights Movement. Created as the partisan political branch of the Freedom Democratic organization (a contemporary Civil Rights activist group aligned with the national United States Democratic Party), the party was organized by African Americans and White Americans from Mississippi who were sympathetic to the Civil Rights Movement. The organization aimed to challenge the established power of the state Mississippi Democratic Party, which then opposed the Civil Rights Movement and only allowed participation by White Americans.
In June 1963, African Americans attempted to cast votes in the Mississippi primary election but were prevented from doing so. This contest to determine Democratic candidates was essentially the only competitive race, as the state was a de facto one-party jurisdiction under the control of the Mississippi Democratic Party. Unable to vote in the official election, an alternative "Freedom Ballot" was organized to take place at the same time as the scheduled November voting. With this election seen as a protest action to dramatize the denial of their constitutional voting rights, close to 80,000 people cast freedom ballots for an integrated slate of candidates.[4] In response, James W. Wright, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Bob Moses,[5] founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964. As a result, they encountered violent opposition that included activists being intimidated with church, home, and business burnings and bombings, beatings, and arrests.[6]
Building the party
With partial participation in the regular Mississippi Democratic Party blocked by segregationists, the COFO built on the success of the Freedom Ballot by formally establishing the MFDP in April 1964 as a non-discriminatory, non-exclusionary rival to the regular party organization. The MFDP hoped to become the officially recognized Democratic Party organization in Mississippi by winning the Mississippi seats at the 1964 Democratic National Convention for a slate of delegates elected by some black and white Mississippians.
Building the MFDP was a major thrust of the Freedom Summer project. After it proved to be impossible to register black voters against the opposition of state officials, Freedom Summer volunteers switched to building the MFDP using a simple, alternate process of signing up party supporters. This new process did not require people to take unfair literacy tests or to register for voting at the courthouse in public opposition to existing power structures.
By the end of August 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party had gained so much attention nationally that its delegates had 80,000 members belonging to their racially integrated party.
In time, some activists from the Northeast, including some of the Freedom Riders, would come to dominate the administration of the new party.
State Convention in Jackson, Mississippi
On August 4, before the state convention, the bodies of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were discovered buried in an earthen dam. They had been workers with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), registering people to vote for the MFDP, and had been murdered for their activism. Missing for weeks since disappearing after investigating a church burning in June 1964, they were subjects of a massive manhunt that involved the FBI and United States sailors from a nearby base. The murders drew national attention and generated outrage, emboldening the MFDP to be the party to represent the state of Mississippi.[7]
On August 6, 1964, the MFDP held a statewide convention before attending the DNC; 2,500 people showed up at the Masonic Temple. They decided to take the party to the national credentials committee and attempt to be seated as the delegation from Mississippi. Joseph Rauh, the MFDP legal counsel and a foremost civil liberties attorney, spoke at the convention. He said that the MFDP was the only party in the state loyal to the national Democratic Party and that its chances of success were excellent.
Ella Baker was the keynote speaker at the state convention. She did not deliver the kind of address that the people were expecting on voting and rights but made a statement about society:
I'm not trying to make you feel good. We have to know what we are dealing with and we can't deal with things just because we feel we ought to have our rights. We have to deal with them on the basis of knowledge that we gain ... through sending our children through certain kinds of courses, through sitting down and reading at night instead of spending our time at the television and radio just listening to what's on. But we must spend our time reading some of things that help us to understand this South we live in.[8]
The state convention gave the MFDP confidence in their ability to effect change on the national level. They elected Fannie Lou Hamer, E.W. Steptoe, Winson Hudson, Hazel Palmer, Victoria Gray, Rev. Ed King, Aaron Henry and Annie Devine as electors from the state to the national convention. The day after the state convention, James Chaney was buried in his hometown of Meridian, Mississippi. Dave Dennis gave an impassioned speech about the loss of this young man.
Those are the people who don't care. ... That includes the President on down to the governor of the state of Mississippi ... I blame the people in Washington D.C., and on down in the state of Mississippi for what happened just as much as I blame those who pulled the trigger.... He's got his freedom, and we're still fighting for ours.[9]
Aaron Henry reading from a document while seated before the credentials committee
The MFDP sent its elected delegates by bus to the convention. They challenged the right of the Mississippi Democratic Party's delegation to participate in the convention, claiming that the regulars had been illegally elected in a completely segregated process that violated both party regulations and federal law, and that the regulars had no intention to support President Lyndon B. Johnson, the party's candidate, in the November election. They asked that the MFDP delegates be seated rather than the segregationist regulars.[10]
Martin Luther King told President Johnson that he would "do everything in my power to urge (The MFDP) being seated as the only democratically constituted delegation from Mississippi." King also voiced his support to Congress, "I pledge myself and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to the fullest support of the challenges of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party and call upon all Americans to join with me in this commitment."[12]
The Democratic Party referred the challenge to the convention credentials committee. The MFDP delegates lobbied and argued their case, and large groups of supporters and volunteers established an around-the-clock picket line on the boardwalk just outside the convention. The MFDP prepared a legal brief detailing the reasons why the "regular" Mississippi delegation did not adequately represent their state's residents, including the tactics employed to exclude participation by Black citizens. Jack Minnis wrote, "MFDP, with the help of SNCC, produced brochures, mimeographed biographies of the MFDP delegates, histories of the MFDP, legal arguments, historical arguments, moral arguments" that were distributed to all of the convention's delegates.[13] Their actions attracted considerable publicity.
The credentials committee televised its proceedings, which allowed the nation to see and hear the testimony of the MFDP delegates, particularly the testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer. She gave a moving and evocative portrayal of her hard brutalized life as a sharecropper on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta and the retaliation inflicted on her for trying to register to vote.[14]
After that, most knowledgeable observers[who?] thought the majority of the delegates were ready to unseat the regulars and seat the MFDP delegates in their place. But some[which?] of the all-white[citation needed] delegations from other southern states threatened to leave the convention and bolt the party (as they had done in previous years) if the regular Mississippi delegation was unseated. President Johnson had wanted a convention stressing unity and feared losing Southern support in the coming campaign against Republican Party candidate Barry Goldwater. To ensure his victory in November, Johnson maneuvered to prevent the MFDP from replacing the regulars. After a frantic scramble, he ordered the chairman of the credentials committee to avoid deciding the matter or sending the issue to the convention.
With the help of Senator Hubert Humphrey (a potential candidate for vice president) and Party leader Walter Mondale, Johnson engineered a "compromise" in which the national Democratic Party offered the MFDP two at-large seats, rather than replacing the regular Democratic delegates from their state. This allowed them to watch the floor proceedings but not take part. The MFDP refused this "compromise", which permitted the white-only regulars, who had not been democratically elected, to keep their seats and denied votes to the MFDP.
MFDP leader and Mississippi NAACP President Aaron Henry stated:
Now, Lyndon made the typical white man's mistake: Not only did he say, 'You've got two votes,' which was too little, but he told us to whom the two votes would go. He'd give me one and Ed King one; that would satisfy. But, you see, he didn't realize that sixty-four of us came up from Mississippi on a Greyhound bus, eating cheese and crackers and bologna all the way there; we didn't have no money. Suffering the same way. We got to Atlantic City; we put up in a little hotel, three or four of us in a bed, four or five of us on the floor. You know, we suffered a common kind of experience, the whole thing. But now, what kind of fool am I, or what kind of fool would Ed have been, to accept gratuities for ourselves? You say, Ed and Aaron can get in but the other sixty-two can't. This is typical white man picking black folks' leaders, and that day is just gone.
The MFDP was willing to accept a compromise proposed by Oregon Congresswoman Edith Green, that "loyal" Democrats of both delegations be seated. This compromise was not accepted by the national party, which instead selected the "regular" party to represent the state of Mississippi, those who, on July 28, 1964, had passed the following resolution:[15]
We opposed, condemn and deplore the Civil Rights Act of 1964... We believe in separation of the races in all phases of our society. It is our belief that the separation of the races is necessary for the peace and tranquility of all the people of Mississippi and the continuing good relationship which has existed over the years ...[16]
The MFDP left the Convention rather than be compromised by accepting the two seats. President Johnson had tried to prevent Fannie Lou Hamer from making her speech. After the United States heard her speech, different parts of the population were outraged and began calling into the White House seeking justice for African Americans in the South. The next year President Johnson persuaded Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which authorized the federal government to oversee elections at the state and local level, and enforce practices that would support legitimate voter registration and voting in areas with an historic under-representation of certain parts of the population.[17]
Fannie Lou Hamer said, "We didn't come all this way for no two seats, 'cause all of us is tired."[18] Although denied official recognition, the MFDP kept up their agitation within the convention. When all but three of the regular Mississippi delegates left because they refused to support Johnson against Goldwater, the Republican Party candidate, the MFDP delegates borrowed passes from sympathetic northern delegates and took the vacated seats. The national Party would not allow them to stay. The next day the MFDP delegates returned to discover that convention organizers had removed the empty seats; they stayed to sing freedom songs.
Johnson lost Mississippi in the 1964 presidential election, as whites had still suppressed the black vote. White Democrats were becoming more conservative and voted for Goldwater. With the exception of the 1976 presidential election, when favorite son Jimmy Carter of Georgia was the Democratic candidate, Mississippi has never voted for the Democratic presidential candidate since.
Aftermath
The 1964 Democratic Party convention disillusioned many within the MFDP. For a while, it became more radical after Atlantic City. It invited Malcolm X to speak and opposed the war in Vietnam.
For the better part of a year after hosting the statewide mock election in November 1963, most of the organization's efforts went into challenging the seating of the elected congresspersons of Mississippi to the U.S. House of Representatives. They argued to Congress that, because of the state's disfranchisement, half of the electorate was prevented from participating in the election of those representatives. The FDP had 149 votes in Congress supporting its position; however, the House leadership (dominated by senior Southern Democrats) and Johnson's White House were appalled at this idea and rejected overturning the Democratic representatives from Mississippi.[19][pageneeded]
Many Civil Rights Movement activists felt betrayed by Johnson, Humphrey, and the liberal establishment. The movement had been promised that if it concentrated on voter registration rather than protests, it would be supported by the federal government and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Instead, at the decisive moment, they believed that black civil rights and justice had been sacrificed for the political interests of white politicians. As SNCC Chairman John Lewis later wrote:
As far as I'm concerned, this was the turning point of the civil rights movement. I'm absolutely convinced of that. Until then, despite every setback and disappointment and obstacle we had faced over the years, the belief still prevailed that the system would work, the system would listen, the system would respond. Now, for the first time, we had made our way to the very center of the system. We had played by the rules, done everything we were supposed to do, had played the game exactly as required, had arrived at the doorstep and found the door slammed in our face.[20]
Though the MFDP failed to unseat the regulars at the convention, they did succeed in publicizing the violence and injustice by which the white power structure governed Mississippi and disenfranchised black citizens. The dramatic elements of the MFDP and its convention challenge eventually helped gain congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The MFDP actions resulted in the national party adopting a new policy: its credentials committee banned seating delegations that had been chosen through racial discrimination.[21] The MFDP continued as an alternate for several years as African Americans began to register and vote in the regular political system. Many of the people associated with it continued to press to implement civil rights in Mississippi. After passage of the Voting Rights Act, the number of registered black voters in Mississippi grew dramatically. The regular party stopped discriminating against blacks and agreed to conform to the Democratic Party rules guaranteeing fair participation. Eventually, the MFDP merged into the regular party and many MFDP activists became party leaders. The FDP has only one active chapter, in Holmes County.
After the MFDP was disbanded, many formed a new party, the Loyal Democrats of Mississippi. In 1968, they were successful at the DNC in being seated as the only delegation from Mississippi. Several of these delegates were members of the MFDP.[12]
Militants, including John Buffington (S. N. C. C. (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) field worker in Clay County, chairman of the Clay County Community Development Organization and member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party) and Rudy A. Shields (S. N. C. C. (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) field worker in Copiah County), challenged the white Mississippi power structure, economically and electorally. They were charged with the firebombing of the office of the Clay County Community Development Organization on 24 January 1970. The next day, dynamite exploded the Clay County Courthouse. A grand jury declined to indict them. Several months later, one of the militants, John Thomas, Jr., was assassinated, in broad daylight, and the accused killer was found not guilty, claiming self-defense.[22]
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was the principal channel of student commitment in the United States to the civil rights movement during the 1960s. Emerging in 1960 from the student-led sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, the Committee sought to coordinate and assist direct-action challenges to the civic segregation and political exclusion of African Americans. From 1962, with the support of the Voter Education Project, SNCC committed to the registration and mobilization of black voters in the Deep South. Affiliates such as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama also worked to increase the pressure on federal and state government to enforce constitutional protections.
Freedom Summer, also known as Mississippi Freedom Summer, was a campaign launched by American civil rights activists in June 1964 to register as many African-American voters as possible in the state of Mississippi. Blacks in the state had been largely prevented from voting since the turn of the 20th century due to barriers to voter registration and other Jim Crow laws that had been enacted throughout the American South. The project also set up dozens of Freedom Schools, Freedom Houses, and community centers such as libraries, in small towns throughout Mississippi to aid the local Black population.
Fannie Lou Hamer was an American voting and women's rights activist, community organizer, and a leader in the civil rights movement. She was the vice-chair of the Freedom Democratic Party, which she represented at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Hamer also organized Mississippi's Freedom Summer along with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She was also a co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus, an organization created to recruit, train, and support women of all races who wish to seek election to government office.
The 1964 Democratic National Convention of the Democratic Party, took place at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey, from August 24 to 27, 1964. President Lyndon B. Johnson was nominated for a full term. Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota was nominated for vice president. The convention took place less than a year after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, and Kennedy's legacy was present throughout the convention.
Robert Parris Moses was an American educator and civil rights activist known for his work as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on voter education and registration in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement, and his co-founding of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. As part of his work with the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition of the Mississippi branches of the four major civil rights organizations, he was the main organizer for the Freedom Summer Project.
Annie Bell Robinson Devine (1912–2000) was an American activist in the Civil Rights Movement.
Victoria Jackson Gray Adams was an American civil rights activist from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. She was one of the founding members of the influential Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) was a coalition of the major Civil Rights Movement organizations operating in Mississippi. COFO was formed in 1961 to coordinate and unite voter registration and other civil rights activities in the state and oversee the distribution of funds from the Voter Education Project. It was instrumental in forming the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. COFO member organizations included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
White primaries were primary elections held in the Southern United States in which only white voters were permitted to participate. Statewide white primaries were established by the state Democratic Party units or by state legislatures in South Carolina (1896), Florida (1902), Mississippi and Alabama, Texas (1905), Louisiana and Arkansas (1906), and Georgia (1900). Since winning the Democratic primary in the South at the time almost always meant winning the general election, barring black and other minority voters meant they were in essence disenfranchised. Southern states also passed laws and constitutions with provisions to raise barriers to voter registration, completing disenfranchisement from 1890 to 1908 in all states of the former Confederacy.
The Mississippi Democratic Party is the affiliate of the Democratic Party in the state of Mississippi. The party headquarters is located in Jackson, Mississippi.
Unita Zelma Blackwell was an American civil rights activist who was the first African-American woman to be elected mayor in the U.S. state of Mississippi. Blackwell was a project director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and helped organize voter drives for African Americans across Mississippi. She was also a founder of the US–China Peoples Friendship Association, a group dedicated to promoting cultural exchange between the United States and China. She also served as an advisor to six US presidents: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton.
Eugene Hunter Hurst Jr. was an American murderer from Amite County, Mississippi. Elected as a Democrat to the Mississippi House of Representatives for a single term in 1959, Hurst supported segregation and opposed the civil rights movement, which had expanded into Amite County by the early 1960s.
Frank Smith, Jr., is a civil rights activist and politician in Washington, D.C.
Leslie-Burl McLemore is an American civil rights activist and political leader from Walls, Mississippi. He served as interim mayor of Jackson following the death of Frank Melton on May 7, 2009 until the inauguration of re-elected mayor Harvey Johnson, Jr. on July 3, 2009.
Hollis Watkins was an American activist who was part of the Civil Rights Movement activities in the state of Mississippi during the 1960s. He became a member and organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1961, was a county organizer for 1964's "Freedom Summer", and assisted the efforts of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to unseat the regular Mississippi delegation from their chairs at the 1964 Democratic Party national convention in Atlantic City. He founded Southern Echo, a group that gives support to other grass-roots organizations in Mississippi. He also was a founder of the Mississippi Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement.
Carpenters for Christmas was conceived to counteract a series of church bombings and arson attacks in Mississippi during and following the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. During the summer of 1964, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) organized a nationally supported campaign that challenged the racial segregation of the Mississippi Democratic Party and the state's systematic exclusion of black citizens from voting. Churches played a central role in this campaign, often housing Freedom Schools, serving as freedom election polling places, and serving as the venue for mass meetings. To counter this central role, segregationist forces began a campaign of terror against civil rights workers and the churches that gave them support:
Over the course of Freedom Summer, there were at least three murders, approximately 70 bombings or burnings, over 80 beatings, and over 1,000 arrests of civil rights activists. The COFO incident report, a single-spaced document that offered brief daily summaries, was over ten pages long.
Hartman Turnbow was a Mississippi farmer, orator, and activist during the Civil Rights Movement. On April 9, 1963, Turnbow was one of the first African Americans to attempt to register to vote in Mississippi, along with a group called the "First Fourteen".
Euvester Simpson is an American voting rights activist and contributor to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. A Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) member at the age of 17, she helped black people learn to read, write, and register to vote in Mississippi during the movement. She was an active member in the movement through its entirety. She was involved in the Winona, Mississippi bus incident.
Ralph Edwin King Jr., better known as Ed King, is a United Methodist minister, civil rights activist, and retired educator. He was a key figure in historic civil rights events taking place in Mississippi, including the Jackson Woolworth’s sit-in of 1963 and the Freedom Summer project in 1964. Rev. King held the position of chaplain and dean of students, 1963–1967, at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. At this critical juncture of the civil rights movement, historian John Dittmer described King as “the most visible white activist in the Mississippi movement.”
Sandra Cason Hayden was an American radical student activist and civil rights worker in the 1960s. Recognized for her defense of direct action in the struggle against racial segregation, in 1960 she was an early recruit to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). With Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi, Hayden was a strategist and organizer for the 1964 Freedom Summer. In the internal discussion that followed its uncertain outcome, she clashed with the SNCC national executive.
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