Founded in 1964 to protest racial segregation in mainstream political parties, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was a racially integrated alternative Democratic political group. At the Democratic National Convention that year, it challenged the seating of the regular all-white Mississippi delegation, which officially excluded Blacks.
The noted civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who took part in its founding, spoke at the convention. In her eloquent testimony Hamer described her attempt to register to vote in August 1962 and the harassment that followed, as well as the permanently disabling brutal beating that she, along with two middle-aged Black women and a young Black girl, had suffered while returning from a voter registration workshop in South Carolina in 1963.
These efforts did not unseat the all-white delegation, despite two compromises offered by Democrats Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, which stated that: 1) MFDP delegates could participate in party proceedings without any vote, and 2) Two nonvoting MFDP members selected by Humphrey—African American Aaron Henry, president of Mississippi NAACP chapters, and Anglo-American Ed King, chaplain at the historically Black Tougaloo College—could have at-large seats. Acting on principle, the MFDP completely rejected both offers.
The MFDP's actions, however, resulted in an unprecedented pledge from the national Democratic party not to seat any delegate groups that excluded Blacks at the next convention in 1968. Moreover, the publicity about Black disenfranchisement generated by the MFDP was a factor in President Lyndon Johnson's introduction of voting rights legislation, which was enacted in the summer of 1965. The MFDP helped transform Mississippi politics locally and the Democratic party nationally.
Linda Reed
See also
Civil Rights Movement;
Mississippi Freedom Summer.
