By Zenitha Prince
Washington Bureau Chief
DENVER (August 27, 2008) -- In 1928, a sprinkling of Black alternates were forced to watch the proceedings of the Democratic National Convention in Houston from behind a chicken wire fence. This week – 80 years later -- African Americans have broken through almost every party barrier, including claiming the party’s nomination for president.
“I never thought I’d see that in my lifetime,” said Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings D_Md.) , the son of South Carolina sharecroppers. “It was not so long ago that someone like [Barack] Obama would be considered three-fifths of a man and now he’s running for the president of the United States.”
In stark contrast to the days when Black delegates could be counted on one hand, there are 1,087 African-American delegates comprising 24.5 percent of the total delegate count. That’s a more than 4 percent jump from 2004 when 886 Black delegates went to Boston.
“There’s been no question in my mind from the very beginning of this campaign and now for this convention that we have attempted in every way possible to open the doors to African Americans in their role at the convention,” said Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, a convention co-chair.
“We are proud that the convention management team is led by an African American, Leah Daughtry.”
The Rev. Leah Daughtry is the CEO of the convention and one of several Blacks holding chief positions at the convention. (Photo by Rachel Feierman)
Only two jurisdictions – Rhode Island and Puerto Rico – have no Black delegates this year, compared to six in 2004. And several states saw significant increases in Black representation, including Virginia (58.1 percent), Ohio (45.7 percent), Georgia (33.3 percent), North Carolina (44.1 percent), Texas (26.9 percent), New York (18.4 percent), Louisiana (33.3 percent), Massachusetts (75 percent), Colorado (71.4 percent), Connecticut (71.4 percent) and Indiana (50 percent).
The trend reflects the importance of the Black vote in this year’s elections. Several of the states President Bush won in 2004, including Indiana, Ohio and Virginia, could be won this year because of their significant Black populations. And in competitive states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, Blacks could also play an important role.
“One of the keys to a Democratic victory in 2008 is a strong Black turnout, and judging by black participation in 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, the Democrats’ prospects look exceptionally good, as black turnout increased by 115 percent,” Bositis writes.
Black participation in the Democratic Party and the political process was not always so robust. Traditionally associated with the “party of Lincoln”—the GOP—Black were represented in Republican conventions as early as 1912 ; the Democrats didn’t include Blacks in their conventions until 1928 and then only in paltry numbers.
With the introduction of Democratic President Roosevelt’s New Deal Policies and President Truman’s push to desegregate the armed forces and for new fair-employment practices, Blacks began to exit the Republican Party and helped decide Truman’s race against Thomas Dewey and John F. Kennedy’s contest with Richard Nixon.
Still, Black representation in DNC conventions continued to be miniscule until the 1964 convention when an upstart Black delegation from Mississippi challenged the status quo. It was a time when the Freedom Rides and registration drives targeted at Southern Blacks resulted in record number of registered Black voters, who elected 68 Black delegates to the convention in Atlantic City, N.J. The group, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, led by Fannie Lou Hamer, however, was barred from joining the state delegation.
Longtime Washington, D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, then a recent law school graduate and member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, wrote the brief and generally led the lobbying efforts to get the MFDD seated. “They were excluded from the process although they had done everything they were supposed to do,” Norton explained. “And then [the DNC] offered us a deal that would seat only two delegates, which we rejected.”
A breakthrough came only after Hamer spoke before the credentials committee and basically shamed the leadership into accepting the Black delegation. “I was just sick and tired of being sick and tired, and if it don’t do me any good, I do know the young people it will do good,” Hamer stated. Norton noted, “Out of that [speech] came the most important development in the history of the Democratic Party—equal representation for people who were traditionally excluded from the process.”
Further strides were made between 1972 and 1988 when Rep. Shirley Chisholm, Rep. Ronald Dellums and Jesse Jackson appeared on the presidential ballot, garnering enough delegates to wield a measure of bargaining power at the conventions.
In 1992, the DNC reached another milestone when it elected Ronald Brown as its first African American chairman. President Clinton would later say of Brown, who was later appointed as the first Black secretary of commerce, that he would never have been elected president in 1992 without Brown’s help.
And now the party has achieved its ultimate diversity goal, Norton said, with the nomination of Sen. Barack Obama. Norton said: “That the party of Sen. [Theodore] Bilboa—the Mississippi arch segregation who used the N-word on the floor of the Senate—would, 45 years later, be nominating an African American speaks for itself in terms of progress.”
More important than representation among the delegates, Franklin said, is African-American involvement in the leadership of the party and the convention. “It’s not news now, but we are proud that the convention management team is led by an African American, Leah Daughtry,” she said. “On the podium every night there will be African Americans as part of those who are representing the party and the nation at this important time; there are African Americans playing vital roles in the standing committees and, in the town hall meetings every night, African Americans leaders from across the country and across other spectra will play a role.” In fact, said David Bositis, senior analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, “African Americans are overrepresented in the Democratic Party, even in the leadership.”