Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [149]
After watching her husband brood in a dark room, Lady Bird Johnson wrote him a note. “Beloved,” she began. “You are as brave a man as Harry Truman—or FDR—or Lincoln. . . . To step out now would be wrong for your country, and I see nothing but a lonely wasteland for your future. . . . I love you always, Bird.”
All that Tuesday, the Freedom Democrat vigil continued on the Boardwalk. Beneath a forest of picket signs, hundreds sat in silence outside the convention hall. Backs ached and hours crawled at a Mississippi Delta pace. To rally spirits, Dick Gregory and Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell spoke to the crowd. When protesters got word of the proposed two-seat compromise, they passed it on in whispers. No one could be certain what was afoot, but volunteers manning the phones at the Gem Hotel already suspected the worst.
“Is the Credentials Committee meeting tonight? ”
“They adjourned because we had enough support, and they have to figure out how to screw us.”
Shortly before 2:00 p.m., Joseph Rauh was told to call his boss, UAW president Walter Reuther. At LBJ’s urging, Reuther had taken a red-eye flight to Atlantic City, arriving to convince Humphrey that the two-seat compromise was the only possible solution. On the phone, Reuther now said the same to Rauh. Two seats, at large, given to a party with no legal standing was “a tremendous victory,” Reuther said. Rauh balked. He had been expressly told that Freedom Democrats would never accept the two seats, yet now he said they might. He needed to talk to Aaron Henry. Reuther applied pressure, Detroit style—Rauh would march straight to the Credentials Committee and accept the compromise, or he would no longer work for the United Auto Workers. Feeling decidedly screwed, Rauh headed for the committee room, hoping to filibuster until he could talk to his other bosses. But Freedom Democratic leaders were busy.
By 3:00 p.m., the challenge was unraveling on both sides of North Mississippi Avenue. In an upstairs room at the convention hall, Rauh faced the Credentials Committee, arguing desperately for a recess, struggling to be heard above cries of “Vote! Vote!” Across the street, Hubert Humphrey had called another meeting at the Pageant. This time, there would be no tears, no conciliation, no scenes in black and white. There would be only flaring tempers, pressure politics, and trickery. From the meeting’s first moments, blacks sensed the tightening pincers. When Martin Luther King balked at the compromise, Walter Reuther reminded him that the UAW had bankrolled King’s campaign in Birmingham. “Your funding is on the line,” Reuther said. King came around quickly. When the Reverend Edwin King, recommended with Aaron Henry as a delegate at large, said he would give his seat to Fannie Lou Hamer, Humphrey refused. “The President has said he will not let that illiterate woman speak on the floor of the Democratic convention.” And toward 3:30 p.m., when a TV was wheeled in, announcing that the Mississippi challenge had been resolved, that the Credentials Committee had just approved the compromise, Bob Moses lost the composure that had made him a legend.
Three years ago that week, Moses had been beaten with a knife handle outside the courthouse in Liberty, Mississippi. A friend had taken Moses’ T-shirt and “wrung out the blood.” A week later, Moses took more blacks to the courthouse. As he had labored on in McComb, in Greenwood, in Jackson, the brutality of an entire state had not destroyed Moses’ faith that American