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John Nichols: Wisconsinite pivotal in historic Obama moment

John Nichols  —  8/27/2008 5:20 am

It is no coincidence that Barack Obama will accept the nomination of the Democratic National Convention as the party's candidate for president on the 45th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" address to the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Obama and his supporters hope to make a connection in the minds of the American people.

As Democrats celebrate the nomination of the first African-American ever to seek the presidency as the nominee of a major political party, they want this historic moment to be seen as the latest step in the historic journey of reconciliation and renewal that the civil rights movement began for a nation founded in the original sin of human bondage.

Yet Democrats would be wise to recognize that, while King's speech was a pinnacle moment for America's journey, many of the most dramatic chapters in that story were within their own party. And a Wisconsinite was at the center of the essential one.

One hundred years ago, when the Democratic Party convened in Denver, it was the party of segregation. The Republican "party of Lincoln" attracted the support of African-Americans who had gained the right to vote when they moved north, while the sons of the Confederacy put their mark on the Democratic line. A group of African-Americans appealed in 1908 to Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan and his political strategists to include a condemnation of lynching in their party platform. Fearful of losing Southern votes, Bryan refused to go even that far. And most minority voters remained Republicans.

It would not be until 40 years later that delegations from Wisconsin and Minnesota would lead a battle at the 1948 Democratic National Convention for the approval of a platform plank that clearly committed the Democrats to the advancement of civil rights. The young mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey, electrified the convention with his declaration, "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."

Humphrey pushed the party further than President Harry Truman, its standard-bearer in that election, wanted to go. And he pushed the Southern segregationists, led by South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond, right out of the party.

Truman and his aides had to make a judgment call. Would the president, who had boldly embraced a number of civil rights initiatives after inheriting the Oval Office from Franklin Roosevelt, distance himself from the platform in order to try and keep the once "solid South" in the Democratic coalition or would he seek to forge a new coalition that embraced the hopes of African-American voters in cities such as Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia and New York?

At the urging of his young aide, Wisconsin's Phileo Nash, Truman did the right thing.

Nash, a native of Wisconsin Rapids who would later serve as his home state's lieutenant governor, had since 1946 served as the president's "assistant for minority affairs." In that capacity, he laid the groundwork for Truman's historic decisions to bar racial discrimination in federal employment and in the military. But his greatest challenge came after the 1948 Democratic National Convention, when Nash argued that Truman could and should campaign as a champion of civil rights. The New York Times reported at one point that a close adviser said privately that Truman would not make a major civil rights speech in the campaign. But Nash and his allies did not take no for an answer. They kept pressing Truman to go to Harlem, the nation's best-known African-American community, and speak. Truman finally agreed to do so just days before the November election.

On Oct. 29, 1948, in a move that made international news, Truman stood before 65,000 Harlem residents at the corner of 135th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, and delivered an address written by Phileo Nash. After outlining a 10-point plan to achieve "equal rights and equal opportunity for all mankind" -- which included commitments to establish a Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice and to advance the cause of voting rights nationwide -- Truman declared, "For my part, I intend to keep moving toward this goal with every ounce of strength and determination I have."

Truman had made the commitment Nash sought. And with it he turned the Democratic Party onto a course that would eventually make it the primary tribune for African-American political aspirations -- aspirations that tomorrow night will see Barack Obama accept the nomination not of "the party of Lincoln" but of the party of Truman -- and Phileo Nash.

John Nichols is associate editor of The Capital Times.

John Nichols  —  8/27/2008 5:20 am