Book Review:
Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights
by Samuel G. Freedman
Oxford University Press: 2023. 504 pages. $34.95.
This interesting book celebrates the Democratic Party's 1948 adoption of a Civil Rights plank at its presidential nominating convention. Hubert Humphrey was the driving force behind this important landmark in the Civil Rights movement. As Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains (2005) and American Midnight (2022), commented: "...Even people like me who disagreed with Hubert Humphrey over Vietnam will come away from this book with a deepened respect for the man who dragged his reluctant party to take a stand for civil rights."
When they convened in 1948, a pressing issue - besides re-nominating Harry Truman for President - was if Democrats would finally embrace the cause of civil rights and put it in their official platform. Even under Franklin Roosevelt, the party had dodged the issue in order to keep a bloc of Southern segregationists - the so-called Dixiecrats-in the New Deal coalition. On the convention's final day, Hubert Humphrey, then 37 and the not well known mayor of Minneapolis, urged the delegates to "get out of the shadow of state's rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights." To many's surprise including Humphrey, the delegates voted to adopt a strong civil-rights plank. Truman ran on it in his campaign, desegregated the armed forces, and upset the Republican frontrunner Thomas Dewey - a victory due in part to an unprecedented surge of Black voters.
The book includes the history of Humphrey's many contributions to liberal politics, especially regarding civil rights. Humphrey's life journey to the 1948 pivotal speech went from a rural, all-white South Dakota town, to the mayoralty of Minneapolis where he fought its notorious racism and anti-Semitism, to his role as a national champion of multiracial democracy. His allies included a Black newspaper publisher, a Jewish attorney, and a professor who had fled Nazi Germany. The adversaries were the white supremacists, Christian Nationalists, and America Firsters of mid-century America - one of whom tried to assassinate him on February 6, 1947. The March 18, 1948 Minneapolis Star Tribune explained that Humphrey’s championship of civil rights and work for honesty in government "had stoked anger in some quarters."
