Methodism, Humphrey & Civil Rights

The American movement for civil rights across 100 years, from the Civil War through the 1960s, is one of the greatest stories of humanity. Certainly, it is defining for America. And it helped universalize American values of human equality. Those values come from Christian anthropology. As the Scriptures note, “the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.”   

Lyndon Johnson, who presided over landmark civil rights legislation, was the most important white advocate for civil rights in the 20^th century. But far less remembered is the second most important white advocate, his eventual vice president: Hubert Humphrey. Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights tells the story.

Or it tells the first half of the story. The book concludes with Humphrey’s speech to the 1948 Democratic Convention in which he urged, representing a committee minority report, that the party adopt its first explicit call for civil rights. Humphrey was then the mayor of Minneapolis, running for U.S. Senate. In the Senate he would across 15 years, often with little support, champion civil rights. In 1964 he was the successful floor leader for the Civil Rights Act, which led to his becoming vice president.

Creditably the book explores Humphrey’s religious faith. Although baptized Lutheran, his family moved to a small South Dakota town without a Lutheran church. So, the Humphreys became Methodist. Hubert enthusiastically embraced the church, whose pastor he admired, and whose son, later a Methodist theologian, became his best friend. Humphrey’s father, who ran a store, was a religious skeptic converted to faith by the pastor, thereafter, becoming an ardent Sunday school teacher, and a moralizing politician.

Although this book does not fully spell it out, 1920s Methodism was the peak of Social Gospel confidence about Christianizing American society. Humphrey, whom the author describes as a “devout Christian,” surely imbibed this reforming zeal. His social conscience is also shaped by Depression deprivation and by his graduate studies in Louisiana, where he witnesses strict segregation and extreme poverty.

Humphrey moved to Minneapolis, an ostensibly progressive city full of Scandinavian “nice.” But as the book elaborates at length, progressive was also relative, and blacks and Jews were not accepted by the overwhelming white Christian majority. In the 1920s, a respectable black family had bought a house in a white neighborhood, only to be surrounded for days by angry crowds of sometimes several thousand white people. Eventually they moved.

Minneapolis neighborhoods, social and professional life were strictly segregated. Blacks had almost no professional opportunities beyond menial jobs. Jews were not accepted in private clubs and other elite sectors of society. Physical violence against blacks and Jews was not uncommon. Police were not always helpful. Churches were largely segregated, and some preachers were outspokenly racist and reactionary. Humphrey joined a racially progressive Congregationalist church, which was the tradition of his wife, Muriel. He also became active in Democratic politics and successfully, as a college professor, ran for mayor. His WWII era efforts in Minneapolis against segregation and racial bias seem tame by later standards but were seen as bold for their time.

Humphrey was an early organizer of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a mobilizing group for anti-Communist progressives that included Arthur Schlesinger, Eleanor Roosevelt, Reinhold Niebuhr, and other notables. They were ambivalent about the very unpopular President Harry Truman and adamantly opposed to former Vice President Henry Wallace, who in 1948 was running as a Soviet-friendly third-party presidential candidate. Wallace strongly favored civil rights and had widespread black support that could hurt Democrats.

Truman, horrified by a black WWII veteran who was brutalized and blinded by South Carolina police, announced a strong civil rights stance. But the President went quiet on civil rights when threatened by a Deep South walkout from the Democratic Party. Humphrey and the ADA resolved to push a strong civil rights stance by the 1948 Democratic Party convention, against party leaders who sought to soothe southern nerves by reaffirming the 1944 party stance.

Humphrey and his cohort plotted late on a steamy summer night in a Philadelphia hotel, their bathtub full of ice and beer, not confident of victory but confident in the righteousness of the civil rights cause. Told by the Democratic national chairman that he was politically ruined if he made trouble at the convention, Humphrey, a candidate for U.S. Senate, was tempted to lay low. But his ADA and other friends implored him. He was young, eloquent, a popular mayor and enthusiastic.

During the convention, Muriel Humphrey explored a Minnesota Summer resort as a vacation spot for their family. When she learned the resort officially banned blacks and Jews, although assured by the owner that this was only by necessity and not by choice, Muriel told her husband they would not stay there. Her husband told her that his civil rights stance at the convention might destroy his career, sending them back to near poverty, when he had taught while also managing a low brow apartment building, which included cleaning bathrooms. Muriel assured him not to worry, that he must follow his principles, in which she shared.

Humphrey’s father, with whom he had sometimes difficult relations, was a convention delegate from South Dakota. He was in the steamy hotel room with the other plotters. And, ever the Methodist, he told his son that his stance may destroy him politically, but he still must cleave to his principles. At least South Dakota delegates would support him. Humphrey agreed to address the convention to tout a minority position for civil rights that had been strongly rejected in committee. President Truman, still in Washington, quietly disapproved, not wanting to divide the party further.

Before speaking, Humphrey nervously shared his speech with former Chicago and political boss Edward Joseph Kelly. The Chicago politico hugged Humphrey, said the speech was necessary, and sent messengers to other urban bosses on the convention floor urging them to organize their delegations, the party’s largest, in favor of the civil rights minority plank. They understood the importance of black voters, whom they did not want to lose to Wallace or to presidential candidate Tom Dewey, whose Republican Party, lacking a Deep South constituency, had a strong civil rights stance.

Humphrey electrified the convention with words that seem mild now but were bracing then:

My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: 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. People — human beings — this is the issue of the 20th century. People of all kinds — all sorts of people — and these people are looking to America for leadership, and they’re looking to America for precept and example.

Hundreds of delegates, of whom only a very few were black, cheered and applauded while some wept. Tens of millions listened by radio and more watched on television.

Shrewdly, Humphrey concluded: “I ask this convention to say in unmistakable terms that we proudly hail, and we courageously support, our President and leader Harry Truman in his great fight for civil rights in America!”

Humphrey’s minority plank was approved 651 to 582. Deep South delegates, after failing to nominate segregationist Senator Richard Russell, bolted the convention to create the Dixiecrat Party with South Carolina Strom Thurmond as their nominee. Thurmond told his supporters: “There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the n-gger race into our theaters, into our homes, and into our churches.”

No longer encumbered by appeasing the Deep South, Truman reiterated his support for civil rights in his convention acceptance speech. He also desegregated the military and the federal work force. Truman concluded the campaign by addressing 65,000 black people outdoors in Harlem at a prayer rally led by clergy. He shocked the nation by his electoral upset against Dewey, thanks to winning 77 percent of the black vote, higher than even FDR had received. Blacks delivered the margin of victory in California, Ohio and Illinois. The 1948 election legitimized civil rights as a national issue.

Humphrey won his U.S. Senate seat and labored for civil rights until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, personally debating then Senator Strom Thurmond. On that issue Humphrey never wavered. In 1965, the Voting Rights Act, for which Humhrey lobbied as vice president, supplemented the legislative victory.

The legislative actualization of human equality in America, which took a century, is epic and without precedent. It redeemed America and inspired the world. It was also the actualization of Christian belief in human dignity. Humphrey in his 1948 speech had shrewdly quoted an earlier speech in the convention by Senator Alban Barkley, who became Truman’s vice president, and  who cited Thomas Jefferson as the Democratic Party’s founder:

He did not proclaim that all the white, or the black, or the red, or the yellow men are equal; that all Christian or Jewish men are equal; that all Protestant and Catholic men are equal; that all rich and poor men are equal; that all good and bad men are equal. What he declared was that all men are equal; and the equality which he proclaimed was the equality in the right to enjoy the blessings of free government in which they may participate and to which they have given their support.

Neither Jefferson nor America ever fully abided this ideal. But the ideal of human equality is the plumb line of American democracy and of freedom across the globe. May the glimmer of its vision never dim.