On July 26, 2023 author Samuel G. Freedman presented “Two Roads out of Mississippi: Fielding Wright, Charles Hamilton, and the 1948 Democratic Convention” as part of the History Is Lunch series.
When the Democratic Party gathered for its nominating convention in July 1948, the biggest and most volatile issue was not whether the incumbent president Harry Truman would be nominated. It was whether the party would fully endorse civil rights. Even Truman's massively popular predecessor Franklin Roosevelt had dodged the issue in order to hold on to the southern segregationist wing of the party.
But such a balancing act looked impossible to repeat in 1948, and two Mississippians personified the Democratic divide. Gov. Fielding Wright had laid the groundwork for southern delegates to bolt from the party if a civil rights plank was adopted for the platform. Rev. Charles Hamilton, a minister and politician from Aberdeen, had assembled a set of insurgent, liberal delegates who would challenge the seating of Wright's own delegation on the basis of its racism.
“Sixteen years before Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party electrified the country with their challenge to the state’s official all-white convention delegation, a very similar battle had been fought by Hamilton against Wright,” said Freedman, author of the new book Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights. “Yet this story has largely been forgotten.”
Reviewing Into the Bright Sunshine for Booklist, John Rowen wrote that “Freedman enlarges the reader's understanding of Humphrey while also offering vivid, rich, and unsettling details about politics, society, racism, and antisemitism in mid-twentieth-century America.”
Samuel G. Freedman is professor of journalism at Columbia University. He was a staff reporter for The New York Times from 1981 through 1987. From 2004 through 2008 Freedman wrote the paper’s “On Education” column, then from 2006 through 2016 wrote the “On Religion” column. He is the author of ten books, which include Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School, a finalist for the National Book Award; Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church, winner of the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism; and The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Freedman has contributed to numerous other publications and websites, including The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Salon, Slate, The Undefeated, and The Root. He earned his BA in journalism and history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
History Is Lunch is sponsored by the John and Lucy Shackelford Charitable Fund of the Community Foundation for Mississippi. The weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History explores different aspects of the state's past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building at 222 North Street in Jackson and livestreamed on YouTube and Facebook.
