Freedom Summer - Bruce W. Watson [151]
Tuesday night’s program was proceeding with the usual speeches when reporters noted a commotion. NBC’s John Chancellor shouted that the Freedom Democrats were marching into the convention hall. Racing to catch up, Chancellor followed the flow, past New Jersey state troopers and onto the floor. As some Freedom Democrats entered, others left, carrying floor badges borrowed from sympathizers, badges they handed to delegates outside. One volunteer, feeling “like Mata Hari and the French Resistance and the Underground Railroad all rolled into one,” made several trips. Inside, first ten, then twenty or more Freedom Democrats took the seats denied them. All sat proudly, as if their mere presence proved their first-class citizenship. Back in the White House, LBJ ordered the Freedom Democrats removed, but an aide sensed the outcry if cops were seen struggling with blacks on the convention floor. One delegate was taken out, but the rest stayed. “All we want,” Fannie Lou Hamer told a reporter, “is a chance to be a part of America.”
The following morning, Freedom Democrats gathered again to reconsider two seats at large. The previous evening, the Union Temple Baptist Church had overflowed with bitterness. Moderate black leaders had told the delegation that two seats amounted to victory, that more progress would come. But SNCC leaders vehemently disagreed. “We’ve shed too much blood,” John Lewis said. “We’ve come much too far to back down now.” Fannie Lou Hamer “told it” better. “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats,” she said. “All of us is tired.” But on Wednesday morning, with the compromise now formally adopted by the convention, moderates made one last plea for unity. LBJ needed their full support. A Goldwater presidency would be disastrous for civil rights. “You have made your point,” Roy Wilkins told Hamer, “but you don’t know anything and should go home to Mississippi.” Talk spiraled into argument and argument into resentment. Freedom Democrats found themselves split by class. Aaron Henry and the few other white-collar delegates supported the compromise; Fannie Lou Hamer and the rest stood firm. Martin Luther King wavered. “Being a Negro leader, I want you to take this,” he admitted, “but if I were a Mississippi Negro, I would vote against it.” Then Bob Moses rose. For much of the meeting, he had stared at the floor, seeming to be somewhere else, as if beyond politics now. Moving to the podium, reminding one onlooker of “Socrates or Aristotle,” he summed up the exhausting week in a single sentence. “We’re not here to bring politics into our morality,” he said, “but to bring morality into our politics.”
Moses made no recommendation on the compromise. That was for Mississippi’s unofficial delegation to decide. Toward noon, delegates were left alone to vote. At stake was all their name now implied, all Freedom Summer stood for. As Democrats, they should back their party and its compromise. But as Freedom Democrats, they had a certain principle to uphold. When one eighty-year-old sharecropper spoke for the compromise, Hamer and others cried out. “When they got through talking and hoopin’ and hollerin’ and tellin’ me what a shame it was for me to do that,” Henry Sias said, “I changed my mind right there.” Finally, the vote was taken. SNCCs filed back into the room to learn how well they had taught their lessons. The sharecroppers and maids, barbers and cooks, seasoned by their introduction to democracy, had again rejected the compromise.
On Wednesday night, all chairs marked “Mississippi” were removed from the convention floor, but several Freedom Democrats were allowed to stand. And throughout Thursday night’s long tribute to JFK, Bob Moses and others stood in a silent circle, holding hands. No one inside the convention hall seemed to care. The Mississippi challenge now seemed as dated as the huge photos of FDR and Harry Truman looming above the platform. That night, an ebullient Lyndon Johnson came to Atlantic City to accept his party’s nomination. He and Hubert Humphrey linked