FDP had its origins in the fall of 1963, when the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) conducted a “Freedom Vote” to dramatize the exclusion of African Americans from the political process in Mississippi. More than 80,000 Blacks voted Black NAACP state president Aaron Henry for governor and white Tougaloo College chaplain Ed King for lieutenant governor in this mock election. The election's success led to the creation of an independent, Black-led, state Democratic Party that would challenge the legitimacy of the state's white supremacist delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J., in the summer of 1964. The events surrounding the MFDP’s efforts to be seated at the Democratic National Convention of 1964 in Atlantic City provide a strong example of the unprecedented and sophisticated organizing techniques used to challenge the state sponsored terrorism that blocked political participation by African Americans. In this lesson, students step into the shoes of key people at the Democratic Convention in a dramatic role play based on the real challenges and decisions facing the MFDP delegates. It is our hope that after this introduction to the MFDP, students will want to learn more about the people and the strategies used to challenge the political establishment in their fight for voting rights in the United States. This lesson was developed by Teaching for Change as part of the Civil Rights Movement and Labor History Initiative in McComb, Miss. The lesson was written by Deborah Menkart, Sara Evers, Julian Hipkins III, and Jenice View, with research, editing, and/or input from Lisa Anderson Todd, Rachel Reinhard, Emilye Crosby, Sarah Slichter, Elizabeth Boyd, Greg Adler, and Falana McDaniel. Grade Level7th Grade+ Time Required2-3 Class Periods Enduring Understandings
Essential Questions
OverviewThis lesson has four sections: Section I: Student preparation Students are introduced to the lesson with a warm-up and background reading/viewing on the general process for delegate selection and the MFDP in particular. Section II: Stepping Into the Atlantic City Convention Students assume the roles of people who were in Atlantic City or closely connected such as Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson, at the White House, or MFDP chair Lawrence Guyot, who was detained in Mississippi. Following instructions on their role sheet, they ask each other questions and find information. Their main topic of discussion is the initial offer to compromise from Congresswoman Edith Green. The class then regroups to see a video clip of the testimony of Mrs. Hamer in which the MFDP was asking to be seated as the delegation representing all Mississippi Democrats. Section III: “The Compromise” Students learn that the Hamer testimony increased optimism for the successful seating of the MFDP at the Convention. But then they learn how LBJ, fearing he would lose the southern vote for his election, planned to defeat the MFDP. (He received information, provided by undercover FBI agents, that helped him pressure key MFDP supporters.) Students are then faced with a new, token compromise. They have to decide whether or not to accept what’s called a “compromise.” Section IV: What Really Happened? Students compare the actual decision of the MFDP with their own deliberations and decisions. They also discuss the impact of the MFDP on politics in Mississippi and nationally — and the lessons it provides for the ongoing voting rights struggles today. Materials
 Photograph of the MFDP statewide convention, August 6, 1964, crmvet.org It was a stirring scene as nearly 2,500 Black Mississippians streamed into the Masonic Temple in Jackson, Mississippi for the MFDP’s state convention on August 6, 1964. As Stokely Carmichael peered about the hall, he beheld “all of these proud people sitting purposefully underneath their county signs.” The symbolism was not lost on Carmichael, who understood that for the convention’s participants, these signs “were a mark of accomplishment and pride” and were testaments to the “sacrifice, blood, and struggle” that had gone into building the MFDP. During the summer, precinct meetings began paving the way for larger assemblies at the county and district levels, where Black delegates debated resolutions, gave speeches before their peers, and politicked to get their candidates to the Jackson convention. Energy was high as delegates from around the state descended on the city for this final step in building the MFDP. There was an air of celebration. “There was not, could not have been, any state convention in the country that equaled ours in any way,” recalled Carmichael. “Not in spirit, not in fervor, and certainly not in singing.” Fannie Lou Hamer (left) and Ella Baker (right) at MFDP statewide convention, August 6, 1964, crmvet.org Ella Baker gave the convention’s keynote address, stressing the importance of education within the Black Freedom Struggle. “We have to deal with them on the basis of knowledge that we gain … through sending out children through certain kinds of courses, through sitting down and reading at night instead of spending our time at the television or radio just listening to what’s on.” “I think it was that summer,” remembered Carmichael, “night after night, meeting after meeting, that I really came to understand where Ms. Baker’s great faith in ordinary people came from.” The participants gathered in the Masonic Temple elected a 68-person delegation, which largely consisted of homegrown activists noted for their determination and militancy. Most of them had been early supporters of SNCC and CORE in the state and formed the backbone of Mississippi’s increasingly determined civil rights movement. Among them: E.W. Steptoe from Amite County and Hartman Turnbow from Holmes County. The delegation also included Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine, Unita Blackwell, and Victoria Gray–all of whom emerged as local leaders in COFO voter registration projects. The MFDP delegation uniquely raised the profile of rural Mississippians who brought with them a strong commitment to fight on behalf of all ignored and oppressed people in the state at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (New York: Scribner, 2003). John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). Mary King, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1987). Elizabeth Martinez, ed., Letters from Mississippi: Reports from Civil Rights Volunteers and Poetry of the 1964 Freedom Summer (Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press, 2007). Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb, Jr., Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1995). In early 1964, as part of Freedom Summer, Mississippi civil rights activists affiliated with the Council of Federated Organizations in Mississippi launched the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Claiming status as “the only democratically constituted body of Mississippi citizens,” they appealed to the credentials committee of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) of 1964 to recognize their party’s delegation in place of the all-white Democratic Party delegation from Mississippi (Victoria Gray, July 1964). In his statement before the credentials committee, Martin Luther King, Jr., expressed support for the MFDP delegates, calling them “the true heirs of the tradition of Jefferson and Hamilton” (King, 22 August 1964). Because Mississippi blacks were barred from participating in the meetings of the state’s Democratic Party, they decided to form their own party. Mirroring the Democratic Party’s official procedure, MFDP held parallel precinct and district caucuses open to all races. With the support of Freedom Summer students and volunteers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), activists gathered signatures of potential black voters for a “freedom registration.” Delegates to the DNC in Atlantic City, New Jersey, were elected at MFDP’s state convention in Jackson on 6 August 1964. At the DNC later that month, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Congress of Racial Equality, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and SNCC conducted public and private diplomacy on the MFDP’s behalf. In a nationally televised speech before the DNC credentials committee, MFDP delegate Fannie Lou Hamer spoke passionately about the violence and intimidation suffered by Mississippi blacks seeking to register to vote, concluding, “If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America” (Carson, 125). King echoed Hamer’s sentiment, telling the committee, “Any party in the world should be proud to have a delegation such as this seated in their midst. For it is in these saints in ordinary walks of life that the true spirit of democracy finds its most profound and abiding expression” (King, 22 August 1964). President Lyndon Johnson, however, was fearful of losing white southern votes if the MFDP delegates were seated and advocated a compromise. The credentials committee of the DNC offered to award the MFDP two at-large seats, to seat members of the all-white delegation who would formally promise to support the DNC’s candidates in the upcoming elections (rather than campaign for Republican Barry Goldwater), and to bar segregated delegations from the 1968 convention. Although King had told Johnson that he would “do everything in my power to urge [the MFDP] being seated as the only democratically constituted delegation from Mississippi,” he supported the compromise (King, 19 August 1964). MFDP delegates and many civil rights activists, however, were disheartened by the Credentials Committee’s refusal to seat MFDP delegates. Hamer’s response was, “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats” (Carson, 126). When all but three of the regular Mississippi delegation withdrew rather than promise to support the full slate of Democratic candidates, MFDP delegates borrowed passes from sympathetic delegates from other states, symbolically occupied the vacated seats and, when the chairs were removed, stood and sang freedom songs. Although the MFDP did not gain the recognition it sought at the 1964 convention, it continued to pressure the Democratic Party to create a policy that would prevent the seating of a segregationist delegation and later campaigned for Johnson, recognizing that a Goldwater victory would have devastating implications for the civil rights movement. For the next three years, MFDP continued to agitate on behalf of disenfranchised black Mississippians. In 1965, the MFDP led a challenge to unseat Mississippi’s congressmen on the grounds that they had been elected unconstitutionally. In remarks that were later read in the House, King declared, “I, therefore, again pledge myself and the SCLC to the fullest support of the Challenges of the MFDP and call upon all Americans to join with me in this commitment” (King, 17 May 1965). In 1968, a group of former MFDP delegates, calling themselves the Loyal Democrats of Mississippi, succeeded in being seated as the sole Mississippi delegation to the DNC. |
Why did the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party MFDP emerge at the Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City in 1964?
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