75 years ago, Hubert H. Humphrey called for Dems to 'walk into the bright sunshine of human rights'

CATHY WURZER: Last week marked a significant milestone in US political history, and it probably went unnoticed. It was 75 years ago on July 14, 1948 that a young Minneapolis mayor, Hubert Humphrey, got up before the democratic national convention in Philadelphia and implored the convention to adopt a civil rights plank to its platform, saying, quote, "The time has arrived in America for the democratic party to get out of the shadow of states rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights."

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- To those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them, we are 172 years late.

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CATHY WURZER: Humphrey's call to action swayed enough delegates, paving the way for advancements in the fight for equality and justice and helping to launch Humphrey's national political career. Humphrey would go on to become a Minnesota US senator and vice president in Lyndon Johnson's administration. The speech and what led up to it is the focus of a new book, Into the Bright Sunshine-- Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, written by Samuel Freedman.

The award-winning author and journalist has been a Pulitzer prize and national book award finalist. He's a professor at Columbia University. Professor, welcome to the program.

SAMUEL FREEDMAN: Thanks, Cathy. It's so great to be with you.

CATHY WURZER: What was the political environment surrounding that speech? Why was it so controversial at the time?

SAMUEL FREEDMAN: Heading into the 1948 Democratic Convention, the party's stance on civil rights was not only the defining and divisive issue for the democrats. It was really the issue for the entire country because the Democratic Party had been the majority party at that point for 16 years. And the Democrats had never resolved their own internal contradiction about civil rights.

Franklin Roosevelt, as great a president as he was, had made this I think literally devil's bargain with the southern segregationist wing of the party. And I should just tell your listeners that, back at this time in the '40s, it was the Democratic Party in the south that was the party of white supremacy, kind of the opposite of what we have now.

But FDR had made this devil's bargain that he would let the South continue to practice segregation under their favorite term of states rights and even implement New Deal programs in a bigoted way if they would turn out and vote for him on election day and if their members of Congress would vote for new deal legislation in Congress. And Hubert Humphrey, the liberals of the time, and activists in the civil rights community, like A. Philip Randolph, found that morally untenable. And Humphrey decided, with his allies, to force the issue at the 1948 Convention so that Truman, in spite of his own wishes, could not kick this particular can down the road anymore.

CATHY WURZER: I want to talk about that, obviously, but let's back up just a just a titch, if we could. Hubert Humphrey came from, a as you know, very small town in south Dakota. Who or what incident schooled him about the racial discrimination that was occurring in this country when he was a young man?

SAMUEL FREEDMAN: Well, Cathy. You're right. And all your listeners know, Humphrey grew up as a white Protestant and lived his life in very white Protestant places, two different towns in south Dakota, Minneapolis, where he went to college, Denver during a brief period of going to pharmacy school. The year he went to graduate school at Louisiana state in Baton Rouge, which was the 1939-1940. academic year, transforms his life.

That's the year when he's plunged into a Jim Crow society for the first time. That's the year when, less expectedly, he makes Jewish friends for the first time in his life. That's the year when he studies under an exiled anti-Nazi one-eighth Jewish professor, who teaches him bible scholarly means and, personal example, how democratic societies can in a couple of years become dictatorial societies.

And Humphrey brings that body of knowledge and experience back with him to Minneapolis in September of 1940, and that's the beginning of his public life. And it's with those beliefs that were formed in Baton Rouge that his battles against racism and anti-Semitism become such pillars of his entire public life.

CATHY WURZER: We should say, at the time-- many people don't remember this-- but Minneapolis was a hotbed of anti-Semitism and racism when Humphrey took office. Now, you write that Hubert had a couple of allies. Cecil Newman was the publisher and editor of the Minneapolis Spokesman-Recorder, a newspaper that was the premier Black-focused paper in the city. Interesting man. Samuel Scheiner led the Jewish Anti-Defamation Council of Minnesota. So did Humphrey, in a sense, become their voice?

SAMUEL FREEDMAN: There's an incredible interdependent relationship between Humphrey and Cecil Newman and Humphrey and Sam Scheiner. And by the way, Cecil Newman and Sam Scheiner were friends and allies, who worked together on a lot of human rights issues. What Sam Scheiner and Cecil Newman had done was fight incredibly lonely valiant battles against just racism and anti-Semitism.

By the way, both of them took on both of those issues, not just their own personal issue. And they exposed a lot of abuses. They tried on an individual basis to call people out for illegal or immoral behavior.

But at the end of the day, they didn't have political power. And the Black and Jewish communities, totaling maybe 3% of Minneapolis's population at this time, didn't have the votes to push through change themselves. They needed someone who had a conscience but also political acumen. And Humphrey had a conscience and political acumen, but he needed the firsthand tutoring that he got from Cecil Newman and Sam Scheiner.

They were the ones who really deepened what Humphrey had been exposed to initially in Baton Rouge and really showed him what the situation was in terms of different forms of intolerance in Minneapolis. So it was that connection, that greater compound, like it's a chemical compound, that's formed when you put Cecil Newman, Sam Scheiner, and Hubert Humphrey together. And then things can be accomplished that no one had thought possible.

CATHY WURZER: So Humphrey goes to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, as you say, to force the issue of civil rights. And you had the great opportunity to go through personal letters from Hubert Humphrey, which I'm sure was fascinating. Did he ever indicate-- did he ever have second thoughts about doing this? Did he think it was going to be a mistake?

SAMUEL FREEDMAN: Well, Hubert Humphrey was on a mission. He just wasn't sure whether it was a suicide mission. You have to remember. He's 37 years old at this point. He's only held any elective office for three years. He's the mayor of a mid-sized city. It's less than nine years since he got his bachelor's degree, for that matter.

And he's going to take on his party's incumbent president. And Truman's people at the convention are telling him, if you give this speech, your career is over. And on the other hand, the southern segregationists are threatening to walk out if he gives this speech, which widely is believed would cost Truman the election.

And so yeah, Hubert Humphrey had a number of doubts along the way. He triumphed over them. But being human being, of course, he worried. And you talked about my reading his correspondence.

I want to tell you a part of that that I think helps explain where he got that backbone when he needed it. Muriel Humphrey, his wife, his successor, his senator after he died, during the week of the convention was about to rent a [INAUDIBLE] lake outstate for the Humphrey family to take a little vacation when the convention was over and before the fall campaign began. And she found out that the rumors that [AUDIO OUT] against Jews.

And she went up there and confirmed it. And throughout that week, when Hubert's in Philadelphia and Muriel is in Minneapolis-- and remember, this time, there would be twice-a-day mail delivery. She's writing him and saying, I can't stay there. We can't stay there because this violates our politics. This is not what we believe in.

And Humphrey gets-- Hubert, that is, gets the last of these letters the very day he gives that speech. And I can't help but think that having that kind of reinforcement from the person he loved and trusted most in the world was one more factor in making him stand strong when he really had to stand strong.

CATHY WURZER: So that speech, as I said in my intro, catapulted him into the national spotlight. It led to him serving three terms in the US senate. He authored the Civil Rights act of '64, became vice president to Lyndon B. Johnson, so a pretty quick political rise there. And you focused on his early years, as interesting as they were. Do you think they were overshadowed by some of the later, shall we say, political missteps?

SAMUEL FREEDMAN: There's no question. Look, I'm 67 years old. I was 13 years old when Humphrey ran in '68. I remember watching the police riot at the '68 Convention. I remember the Antiwar Movement.

My parents were Jeanne McCarthy supporters. They thought Humphrey had betrayed liberalism by that time. And I think Humphrey's fatal error, as was Lyndon Johnson's, was to support the escalation in Vietnam.

But what's really tragic is that Lyndon Johnson's reputation has been recentered. It's been rehabilitated in the last 10 or 12 years so that most Americans who care about these things can hold Johnson's catastrophic decision about Vietnam in one hand and his remarkable record of domestic legislation in the other.

And for reasons that had just baffled the heck out of me, that had not happened to Hubert Humphrey. And one of the main reasons I undertook this book, Into the Bright Sunshine, was to try to give a more 360-degree picture of who this man was and also to give a sense of how unspeakably courageous it was for him to take on civil rights at this time, at a time when Lyndon Johnson, great as he later was on civil rights, was going nowhere near this issue.

CATHY WURZER: Professor, I wish we had more time together. I appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Good job on the book.

SAMUEL FREEDMAN: Thank you very much. And as a paying member of NPR, I'm so delighted to be here.

CATHY WURZER: [LAUGHS] Thank you. I appreciate that. I appreciate hearing that. Thank you so much. Best of luck.

Samuel Friedman's been with us. He's the author of Into the Bright Sunshine-- Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights.