It’s become an election year ritual: Every time the Left protests at the Democratic National Convention, we hear the comparisons to 1968, the year that tensions over the Vietnam War caused chaos in the streets. Just as it did back then, the spectacle of unsightly demonstrators, liberals warn, will only help the Republicans and alienate the normies, or persuade antiwar voters to stay home from the polls in November. Then, the thinking goes, just like Hubert Humphrey, the Democrats will go down in defeat. Liberals and moderates deliver this warning every single convention, at least whenever the protests are significant, breathlessly reminding us that the hippies gave us Nixon and, therefore, the Left must shut up.
This year was no exception. The fact that this year’s convention was in Chicago made the comparison an especially irresistible trope for cheap punditry. Political consultant Don Rose was already warning back in April that it looked like “a repeat in the making . . . a perfect parallel.”
But this year, 1968 turned out to be the wrong historical comparison. The relevant one would have been 1964.
That year, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), objecting to the exclusion of black delegates by the racist “Dixiecrats,” white supremacists who ran the local parties and used violence to suppress black votes throughout the South, went to the DNC in Atlantic City to demand representation. Led by Fannie Lou Hamer and other civil rights legends, the MFDP was intended as a parallel party open to all, challenging the undemocratic, all-white Democratic Party.
In the months leading up to the DNC, the MFDP organized Mississippi by precinct, county, and region and held their own state convention to choose sixty-eight delegates. They then came to Chicago and demanded that these delegates be seated as delegates at the DNC. Many of their fellow delegates were persuaded, but President Lyndon B. Johnson, afraid of backlash from the Dixiecrats, refused.
In a compromise, the MFDP was offered two seats, an offer that Hamer famously rebuffed, quipping, “We didn’t come all this way for two seats when all of us is tired.”
The MFDP had done everything right. They did all the things that activists are always accused of not doing. They dressed nicely and made clear they were part of the Democratic Party, not outsiders. They held press conferences and spoke eloquently and politely. They used the language of patriotism and stressed that they just wanted to be treated as human beings.
Hamer, in a speech given before the DNC credentials committee and broadcast on national television, emphasized the plight of blacks in the South:
We want . . . to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America, is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?
Nowadays, the MFDP and its calls for racial equality and democratic rights are acknowledged as righteous even by conservatives. But at the time, the official Democratic Party couldn’t even concede to their most basic demand for representation.
This is the history that is repeating itself so tragically. This year, the Uncommitted National Movement used the same tactics as the MFDP to demand basic humanity toward Palestinians who are being slaughtered by Israel using weaponry paid for by the United States. The movement elected delegates during the state primaries and sent them to Chicago. Unlike the MFDP delegates, there was no controversy over seating them. They spoke politely as full members of the Democratic Party. They held professional press conferences. They persuaded fellow delegates, many of whom then wore keffiyehs and Palestinian flags on the convention floor in solidarity.
Harris’s words were an incoherent collage of triangulation. But without the Uncommitted movement, she would have given a very different speech.
Yet the Democratic Party would not accede to any of their demands, which included an arms embargo and a Palestinian American speaker on the floor of the convention. Representative Ruwa Romman, the Palestinian woman in question — a state representative in the critical swing state of Georgia — was a Harris supporter whose speech, made public, would have been as nonconfrontational as possible.
It goes almost without saying, unfortunately, that Harris was never going to agree to an arms embargo. (As many have been asking, how do you support a cease-fire when you keep fueling the fire?) But the rejection of Romman was deeply insulting to the antiwar movement, to many in the Muslim and Arab community, and to the millions of Americans who long for an end to the genocide in Gaza.
“Uncommitted” delegates hold a press conference at the DNC in Chicago. (Uncommitted National Movement)
The parallel with the MFDP was not lost on the Uncommitted movement, which distributed pins with Hamer’s face and her famous quote “No one’s free until everyone’s free.” Nor was it lost on Romman herself, who referenced Hamer in her rejected speech, which she ended up delivering outside the convention.
The Left of the Democratic Party was robustly united behind the Uncommitted movement’s demand for a Palestinian speaker. Throughout Thursday, the last day of the convention, that demand received vocal support not only from the Squad but from milder progressive Congresspeople like Pramila Jayapal and Lloyd Doggett. It was also backed by UAW president Shawn Fain — a dramatic difference with his predecessor six decades ago, Walter Reuther, who in 1964 threatened to withdraw financial support from Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference if the MFDP didn’t back down on its demands for representation at the DNC.
Harris’s speech showed that she was listening to the Uncommitted movement and did want their vote, but it also showed that she wasn’t willing to alienate any donors, weapons manufacturers, or her current boss. To a nation yearning for peace, she promised the “most lethal military ever.” She full-throatedly and unconditionally pledged support for Israel and Israel’s “right to defend itself.” She repeated unproven details about the October 7 attacks.
Yet Harris also reiterated her commitment to a cease-fire and deplored the suffering in Gaza in sincere tones. What was new and unprecedented for a Democratic presidential nominee was her emphatic language on Palestinian self-determination. Her words were an incoherent collage of triangulation. But without the Uncommitted movement, Harris would have given a very different speech.
After the MFDP was rejected, the next convention year was the infamous 1968. The Left, this time hoping to end the war in Vietnam, had learned from the MFDP’s experience that the party wouldn’t listen to them if they played by the rules. The Democrats found out what happened when they don’t even throw the Left a bone. It begs the question: Without a serious shift on Palestine within the party happening very soon, what will the 2028 DNC look like?
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Contributors
Liza Featherstone is a columnist for Jacobin, a freelance journalist, and the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart.
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