Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
After the September 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham that killed four African American children, Lewis and SNCC ramped up their efforts in Alabama and Mississippi. In Alabama they focused on Selma, helping residents register to vote, hold sit-ins and demonstrations, and protest against the “nighttime shootings, beatings and economic reprisals that awaited any black person who tried to assert his or her rights in any way” (233). In Mississippi, they planned a “full-scale election, with real candidates and real ballot boxes, an exercise to both give black men and women the sense of actually voting and to dramatize to onlookers the exclusion of blacks in the actual political process. The campaign would be staffed by SNCC people, other members of COFO, and-extremely significantly, as it would turn out-a number of white students brought in from Northern and West Coast universities. By September, the stage was set. A slate of Freedom Party candidates was listed on Freedom Vote ballots beside the regular Democratic and Republican candidates running for state office” (232). The end result was over 90,000 African Americans in Mississippi voting on election day. A massive success, the purpose of this campaign was to achieve a similar outcome in the 1964 national election. In early 1964, Lewis and SNCC initiated their Mississippi Summer campaign. Targeting the August Democratic National Convention, their goal “was to organize an insurgent party in Mississippi to challenge the state’s regular Democratic Party-its segregated, whites-only delegates for Mississippi’s seats at the national convention” (241-2). They would do so with “a real party. That April, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was officially created, with plans to participate in that June’s precinct, county and state conventions of Mississippi’s regular Democratic Party. … By going through all the proper procedures, the MFDP would then have legal grounds to challenge the party’s claim to its seats at the national convention” (242). While waiting for August to come, Lewis continued to work in Mississippi. When it was time, he traveled to Atlantic city for the Democratic National Convention. The MFDP brought sixty-eight delegates to the convention, each one ready for action. Unfortunately, President Lyndon Johnson had other ideas. If he let the MFDP succeed, he risked losing the South. He did everything in his power to thwart it, producing a compromise that involved the creation of two at large seats for the MFDP. Lewis was pissed off. He did not like “the idea that Johnson was dictating everything, from the number of delegates to who those delegates would be … too many people had worked too hard for too long to be told that they would now be treated as honorary guests and nothing more” (281). He wanted the MFDP to reject the compromise. He got his wish, as all sixty-eight MFDP delegates unanimously rejected the compromise. Unfortunately, as a result, the MFDP walked away from the convention with nothing and never recovered. The Civil Rights Movement “had made its way to the very center of the system. It had played by the rules, done everything it was supposed to do, had played the game exactly as required, had arrived at the doorstep and found the door slammed in its face” (282).