23 July 2023
… Humphrey quailed at bringing the civil rights plank to the fall convention. Biemiller and Rauh would write it, true, but it was Humphrey who would have to stand there at the podium, in isolation, and sell racial equality to delegates who considered it snake oil, just as worthless as the Peruna that H.H. had long ago peddled door to door. And who was Humphrey, after all, to defy a president? He was the ‘”boy mayor,” as the newspapers put it. He was a “pipsqueak,” at least compared with the party elders. How could taking on Harry Truman turn out to be anything but a suicide mission? — from “Into the Bright Sunshine”
Seventy-five years ago this month, Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey gave an impassioned speech to delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The 37-year-old Humphrey, well known in Minnesota but without a national reputation, galvanized the delegates with his plea for Democrats to embrace civil rights. He urged them to “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights,” referring to the split in the party between those who were fighting for social justice and Southern “Dixiecrats” who argued for states’ rights that would keep Jim Crow laws in place.
To everyone’s surprise, including Humphrey’s, the convention adopted a civil rights plank, changing the party and the nation. Humphrey’s wing of the party didn’t get everything they wanted, but President Harry S. Truman did offer to desegregate the army, leading to an unprecedented surge of Black voters that led to Truman’s win that November over Republican Thomas Dewey.
Samuel Freedman, a columnist for the New York Times and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, focuses on Humphrey’s early years in his widely praised new book “Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights” (Oxford University Press, $34.95).
“…my intent was not to write a conventional biography of Humphrey but to surround him with his allies, influences, and adversaries, and to place him in the context of Minneapolis’s disgraceful history of racism and anti-Semitism,” writes Freedman, who did the bulk of his research at the Minnesota Historical Society.
Freedman traces Humphrey’s life from his boyhood in South Dakota, where his father, H.H., owned drugstores where Hubert was a pharmacist, through his marriage to Muriel, his late start at the University of Minnesota and his campaign for mayor of Minneapolis. Especially interesting to Minnesotans are the chapters on discrimination against Black citizens in Minneapolis in the 1920s and ’30s, and on anti-Jewish covenants and other restrictions fought by the Anti-Defamation Council in the 1930s. He writes of Humphrey’s varied allies, including Black newspaper publisher Cecil Newman and Sam Scheiner of the Minnesota Jewish Council.
Freedman’s riveting writing about Humphrey at the 1948 Democratic National Convention reads like a novel. He puts the reader in the hot, steamy Philadelphia Convention Center and at all-night strategy meetings of the various factions leading up to Humphrey’s speech. You feel Humphrey’s sweat as he readies himself to walk to the podium.
The night Truman was elected president that November, Humphrey won a U.S. Senate seat. He ran for president himself three times, campaigning as the “happy warrior.”
Freedman’s account of Humphrey’s early years will be eye-opening for those who know Humphrey only as President Lyndon Johnson’s vice president, whose popularity plunged after he reluctantly backed Johnson’s commitment to the war in Vietnam. By the time he died in 1978, Humphrey was beginning to see erosion of some of the social justice laws for which he fought so passionately.
“Into the Bright Sunlight” should go a long way to bringing new respect to this man whose legacy needs to be remembered in this currently divided country.
In advance praise for the book, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar writes: “At the 1948 Democratic Convention, Hubert Humphrey implored the Party and nation to make civil rights the cause of the 20th century. Samuel Freedman’s insightful book provides a critical account of not only Humphrey’s path to that moment but also of the Minneapolis leaders and activists who fought for justice in Minnesota and who shaped the man who would become one of our nation’s greatest champions for equality.”
Freedman will discuss his book at 7 p.m. Monday, July 24, at Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls., in conversation with Laura McCallum, Star Tribune politics and government editor. For information and registration go to magersandquinn.com/event/Samuel-G-Freedman-presents-Into-the-Bright-Sunshine/206.
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