It’s become an election year ritual: Every time the Left protests at the Democratic National Convention, we hear the comparisons to 1968, the year that tensions over the Vietnam War caused chaos in the streets. Just as it did back then, the spectacle of unsightly demonstrators, liberals warn, will only help the Republicans and alienate the normies, or persuade antiwar voters to stay home from the polls in November. Then, the thinking goes, just like Hubert Humphrey, the Democrats will go down in defeat. Liberals and moderates deliver this warning every single convention, at least whenever the protests are significant, breathlessly reminding us that the hippies gave us Nixon and, therefore, the Left must shut up.
This year was no exception. The fact that this year’s convention was in Chicago made the comparison an especially irresistible trope for cheap punditry. Political consultant Don Rose was already warning back in April that it looked like “a repeat in the making . . . a perfect parallel.”
But this year, 1968 turned out to be the wrong historical comparison. The relevant one would have been 1964.
That year, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), objecting to the exclusion of black delegates by the racist “Dixiecrats,” white supremacists who ran the local parties and used violence to suppress black votes throughout the South, went to the DNC in Atlantic City to demand representation. Led by Fannie Lou Hamer and other civil rights legends, the MFDP was intended as a parallel party open to all, challenging the undemocratic, all-white Democratic Party.
In the months leading up to the DNC, the MFDP organized Mississippi by precinct, county, and region and held their own state convention to choose sixty-eight delegates. They then came to Chicago and demanded that these delegates be seated as delegates at the DNC. Many of their fellow delegates were persuaded, but President Lyndon B. Johnson, afraid of backlash from the…
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Auteur: Liza Featherstone
