Our Existential Moment

the Fight for Civil Rights. Why this is really interesting, other than the fact that Samuel Friedman is an award winning author, journalist, and educator and was a finalist for the Pulitzer, is that the time that he outlines, the timeline that he outlines in his book very much mirrors the time frame that we are living in right now, where you are seeing a lot of the rights and protections and dissemination of equity that we have been participating in over the last fifty years be rescinded, and in

his book he is looking at how those rights came to be and who was pushing back and who was upholding white supremacy. And again, what is old is new again. History oftentimes repeats itself when we don't disrupt the patterns of behavior and get to the root and the core

of the issues. And so in this conversation we talk about how public schools came to be, how segregation transpired, and what Hubert Humphrey's role was in all of this in creating the progressive movement as we know and understand it today, That's not the name that it went by

at that time. But essentially, the people that were pushing back against Hubert Humphrey, the people that were wanting to institute and did institute Jim Crow and uphold segregation, are the same people that are banning books, and that are intimidating school teachers, and are racing black culture and are overturning affirmative action now right. We love to tell ourselves

the lies that, oh, well, racism will die out. Well, no it doesn't, because the people white Americans who uphold a racist ideology give birth to children for whom they pass down that information too. And so that's how we end up in this cyclical place. What's unfortunate, though, is that I'll ask Samuel, you know, what do you see different this time? Is there any hopefulness that you see in this time that can signal that this may not be the end of days how we discuss it, and

so we get into that conversation. I hope you all enjoy this and that you pick up his book if you were looking for some historical things to read, which I always think is really helpful when we're in such a period of upheaval. And again, his book is entitled Into the Bright Sunshine, Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight

for Civil Rights. Folks, I am very happy to welcome to WOKF Daily Samuel G. Friedman, who is an award winning author, journalist, and educator and had been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and has won a National Jewish Book Award and New York Public Libraries Helen Bernstein Award in his new book, Into the Bright Sunshine and Young Herbert Hubert Humphrey and the

Fight for Civil Rights. In this book, Samuel, you go into it's almost odd that nineteen forty eight, it's almost scary that the timeframe that you're covering and the rise of Humphrey and the rise of I guess liberal politics as we know it, where he was and where we are now is almost as if we're looking in a mirror.

history that takes place during the nineteen forties. But then once we got past November twenty sixteen and we know what happened, I realized that what I was writing about was a parallel set of experiences to what we've been living with in this country for the last seven years now, which is this battle between inclusive, interracial, interfaith democracy and forces of authoritarianism. And that was the same battle Humphrey

was fighting. And the terms that were applied to his foes are the same ones we apply to our foes these days, white supremacist, Christian nationalist America firster. And I don't think that the moral of the story is that

no progress has ever made. But I think the very important moral of the story is that you can't get complacent after you've made progress, that battles continue to need to be fought and that every time there's been a period of progress in this country towards progress on inclusive democracy and greater social equality, is followed by a backlash, and then you have to push back and turn against that backlash.

years ago. What really sets the stage for that and sets the state for that battle over what a multiracial democracy is going to be is very much World War two actually, and the moral claim that black Gis and also Jewish Gis have on the conscients of the United States, because in that war you have people who were othered in this country, who are treated as second class citizens or worse, who go to war to defeat different forms of fascism and racial and religious supremacy in Nazi Germany,

Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and the Black Gis formed this term in this concept that they call double V double victory, and it means we're going to defeat fascism abroad and then we're going to come home and stake our claim

to defeating fascism in the United States. And the Jewish Gis didn't have any phrase as eloquent and succinct as double V. But they had the same idea that we're going to fight on behalf of this country, which, although it doesn't clinch us, treats us definitely second class citizens, and we're going to come back and demand our equality

in this country. And so that really led to a conversation in the United States during the latter years of the war, when it was clear we were going to win the war, and definitely in a couple of years after, of America's unfinished agenda, and how do we make this

more inclusive society? And the reason it really telescoped into the Democratic Party in the Democratic Convention is that at that time we're coming out of four elections of Franklin D. Roosevelt, thirteen years in office until he dies in office and Harry Truman takes over. And of course, in many ways Roosevelt is the great American liberal president of all time because of the New Deal, the social compact that it created.

But in order at least as FDR saw it, to keep getting elected and keep being able to enact New Deal legislation, he made what I think was literally a devil's bargain with the Southern segregationists in the Democratic Party.

And I know now we look at the Republican Party, especially in the South, as being the party of white supremacy, but actually back in the forties and for many decades before, it was completely reversed the Republican Party because it had been the Party of Lincoln and the Union was abhorred by Southern bigots, and the Democratic Party was seen as the protector of white supremacy. And Jim Crow FDR decided, I need the electoral votes from the South to win

in November. I need the support of these Southern legislators in Congress to enact my legislation. And so what I'm going to let them do is implement New Deal legislation on a segregated basis. And in some cases FDR went so far as to have New Deal legislation written and signed by him to really enshrine racial inequality. Just one quick example. A lot of us are familiar with Social Security, right,

social Security was written to omit agricultural workers and domestic workers. Well, guess what ninety percent of the working black citizens in the South did agriculture work and domestic work. So that was clearly a way to carve out black citizens in

the South from the provisions of the New Deal. And so that created this unbearable tension within the Democratic Party of are we going to continue to do that in more but supposedly pragmatic system of letting the South have segregation and the rest of the party being fairly liberal organized labor or been Catholics or been Jews a significant number of blacks in the North, although many still voted

for the Republican Party and the liberal intellectuals. Or are we going to call the question and say you can't have it both ways. You can't say you're the party of liberalism and the social Compact and omit millions upon millions of Black Americans and also tacitly tolerate a great

deal of anti Semitism as well. And all of that comes to boil at the nineteen forty eight Democratic Convention because Harry Truman, who has kind of gone back and forth on civil rights, sometimes being rather bold and sometimes being very timid, is at this moment in his timid phase. He just wants a quiet convention, pass a platform that has very pallid, ambiguous civil rights playing collect ones for FDR always did, and keep the votes of the South.

And it's impossible. The Southerners already are threatening to mutiny, and the liberals, led very much by Hubert Humphrey, are saying, as he actually says in this convention speech, it's one hundred and seventy two years too late to endorse equal rights by race. We're way overdue on this. And that's what comes to play for these four incredible, turbulent, sweltering days in Philadelphia.

black people, people of color and indigenous people in this country. Right, And so we find ourselves in this moment. You know, we can go back to you know, pre Trump to Obama years where many had said, well, we finally arrived, right, we have finally we were actualizing the dream and the vision of what this country should have been, right and

could have been. I often, frankly think about who would America be now had Reconstruction been allowed to continue, had Reconstruction lasted from when it started until this moment, what would America look like? What would our GDP look like?

The second time is after the period of mass immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, when immigration gets cut off in nineteen twenty four. The third time is after this movement. The Freedom movement begins in the nineteen fifties with Montgomery bus boycott and Brown versus Board of bed and you have the policy in the South of what's called massive resistance.

And then the fourth is after the election of Barack Obama and the sense the naive idea of being post racial, which I never bought into, but certainly the idea that we're now seeing a rising multiracial coalition which is the future of this country. And what we get trump Ism as the ultimate.

being challenged at this very moment. Look, we can look at this last session of the Supreme Court and watch how the white lash wasn't just one that is based purely in politics in terms of an election, but now is a judicial backlash based on the fact of who was able to see three Supreme Court justices and turn and weaponize the Supreme Court of the United States to erode the fifty years of progress that were hard to win.

Whether we're looking at abortion or we're looking at affirmative action, we're looking at LGBTQ equality and access, and so when you look at this moment that we're in, which is clearly in the whitelash moment, right, that's clearly where we are. Yes, do you see that they is sam an opportunity for us to learn from this phase? Or is this like are we I guess the question that I'm asking is is this rinse and repeat cycle that we have always

that we continue to go through in America? Is this one worse than what we have ever seen?

a couple of important lessons from Humphrey's example. I should say that what happened in forty HS, so your listeners understand, is over and against Harriet Truman's desire to avoid the civil rights issue, and over and against the Southern segregationist threat to leave the party in the convention, which they do. Humphrey gives this spellbinding speech which convinces the delegates to vote in favor of a firm civil rights plank for

the first time ever. And the famous phrase which I use in my book title is he says, it's time for the Democratic Party to walk out of the shadow of states rights and into the bright sunshine of human rights. A couple of key takeaways from how he accomplished it. This was a case at the forty eight Convention of what I call mister inside and mister outside, and the need for a symbiotic relationship between canny, savvy political maneuvering

and mass mobilization. Humphrey was mister inside. He and his allies were inside the convention mention talking to delegates, getting their votes in line, obviously making great eloquent case from the pulpit, and meanwhile outside, the great labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph was literally outside the convention hall picketing. Because Randolph had been threatening for months a campaign of massive black draft resistance if Harry Truman didn't

desegregate the military. That was one of the key civil rights issues of that moment, you know, desegregating the military, fair Employment Practices Commission, and anti lynching laws were probably the three biggest items on the civil rights agenda. And Humphrey and people from Randolph's Union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping car Porters are writing letters back and forth after the

convention saying, I couldn't have done it without you. So they recognized you needed pressure from the outside in the form of the prospect of massive black draft resistance, and he also needed political acumen and idealism from the inside. And I think that's the lesson now, it's not one

worthy whether you need both. I think another important lesson of Humphrey in this era when some of us have realized there are never trumpers who we never thought would be our allies on certain issues but have become vital allies, is that Humphrey was really adroit at finding people to ally with on his civil rights agenda, especially when he was mayor of Minneapolis, even before becoming a national level politician.

And he could find people who would disagree with on other issues, but a if they had a fundamentally decent soul, and b if they would agree with him on concrete elements of civil rights, like fair employment practices and and restrictive covenants and so forth, he would keep them as his allies. He'd have people labor and management, people who'd be on literally opposite sides of strikes, but would jointly

be working with him for civil rights. And I think that ability to build issue based coalitions when you need them is another good lesson, and I do think it's one that a lot of us have been act really enacting. And you know, you brought up the demolition of abortion rights by the Supreme Court. We've looked at a lot of women and probably some men too, who in elections have voted on the basis of those rights being taken away. And probably a lot of them were moderate Republicans, are independents.

It wasn't all progressive, but when they realized that the constitutional right was being stripped away after fifty years, it changed their thinking. And to some extent, even though I think that the queer vote overall, you know, e skews more progressive on the whold, but it's going to happen with some moderate and conservative queers too. Now that you know you can see where the decision on the three

h three creative cases going. It's going towards further decisions in which businesses get to claim a religious exemption not to do any business for in this point case LGBTQ. But as people pointed out, what if someone says I'm against interracial marriage. What if someone says my religious beliefs

are racial inequality? It opens a gigantic Pandora's box. And I'll just come back to one other thing you said, because you packed so much great insight into your last comment, You're right, somebod the achievements Humphrey was part of our exactly the ones under assault right now. When Humphrey was Lyndon Johnson's vice president. One of their great legislative achievements, and again with righteous pressure from doctor King and the

mass movement as well, was the Voting Rights Act. And we've seen this court whittle it down, even though they threw a bone at it this past term, but overall, really try to defend a strate the Voting Rights Act affirmative action. Lyndon Johnson first really espoused to a firmative action during the Humphrey Johnson administrative term in a famous speech at Howard University. And we see where that's going now.

And so this is what I mean about you make progress, but you can never be complacent about the marker, always staying where it is and never being pushed back, because history tells us there's always going to be a pushback.

we're able to keep democracy in America. My thought, right, we are three years away from the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding the quote unquote founding of America, and where I see us headed is, you know, back to the beginning, right like back to the beginning of time, where it is very clear who has power and who doesn't, that the laws that were fought during the time that you were writing about have all been eroded and erased and yet we have more people of color, more young

people that have access to the ballot than have ever before in our history. So for you, what is that signal to what the future looks like?

school curriculum, all kinds of efforts at voter suppression. So we're not literally going back to enslaved people, but we're going back to a structural inequality that is like a national version of Jim Crow. And just to point out doing which the past does predict the present, kind of Trump's evil genius, and this is something he's more skilled at than DeSantis and other Trump wanta bees is he understands that there's a lot of the white working class

that wants a safety net. They just want it only for certain people. They don't want pure old fashioned republican free market economics and one of the people Humphrey battled against Gerald L. K. Smith, who was a minister and political figure and created the here's the name America first political party and was up there with Father Coughlin, as you know, one of the most dangerous demagogues in America

in the thirties and forties. Gerald L. K. Smith had this idea that he called Christian economics, and Christian economics was We're gonna have a social safety net, but basically only for white Christians. So that is what a lot of demagogues and dictators over history, not just in this country, have figured out, is you buy off the work, the you know, working class of whoever tose the German were the vulk, whoever the true people are, with the social

safety net, and cut it out for everyone else. You know. Adolf Hiller had a great social safety net if you were a non Jewish German or a non Roma or a non career German. He did public works building Mussolini.

If you ever go to Rome, the city is filled with gigantic public works projects that Mussolini authorized so that his supporters would have a social safety net, would have good paying work, and that goes right up to you know, Trump saying, on the one hand, we're going to close the borders, we're gonna do voters suppression, We're going to ban books on and on A, We're going to destroy

all elements of wolfness, a term I'm in woodwoke. I'm not never gonna I'm never going to let that term get taken away because I remember in the Clinton years when Democrats are afraid to say the term liberal and like, don't be afraid of it. Own it. But anyway, and Trump combines all that with saying social Security and Medicare will be saved. But so that again goes right back to the right wing playbook. During Humphrey's zero.

the beacon. Everyone wants to come here. So we have to, you know, limit access to those gates, but that we are the land of aspiration. And I think that what we have recognized over the last several decades, particularly with the advent of you know, social media and internet and access beyond textbooks and you know the five o'clock news,

is that America is not that great. That America has has always had a history that is ripe and dark with racism and discrimination, and whether it is towards women, towards black people, towards indigenous people, towards queer people, or so on and so forth, that it has never lived

up to its creed. Do you think then that given the times that we're in, given the past that we have come from, do you see something different, Samuel, in this upcoming generation, Generation Z, Generation Alpha, That they are more informed, they are more activated, and they're also getting into a work and school system that is worse off

than their parents and grandparents ever were. How do you see this generation taking on the issues and the problems that we have rinstin repeated over the last two and a half centuries.

point will ever be able to retire. So, you know, similarly to the way your generation was so battered by the Great Recession and you know, traumatized by the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the other possibility, which I hope will win out, is that when you know what's at stake, you can't say I don't care who I vote for. Both parties are the same, you know, putting aside specific candidates, No one who's at all sensate now in any generation can possibly look at the two

parties and say there's no difference which one wins. As you were saying, look at the composition of the Supreme Court. Look at the laws that Ron DeSantis is putting through in Florida and Greg Abbott is putting through in Texas. Look at how many states are trying to criminalize women who get abortions, doctors who provide abortions, friends who take people out of state the states, or abortion is still illegal. You can't say that it makes no difference who's elected.

So I really hope that that has sunk in. And the other important thing is the realization that it's these down ballot races that matter that I think a lot of us has progress and Democrats we're very motivated in presidential races, but the right wing got to give them credit. They get their troops out for every little state legislature race and now school board races. I used to cover schools early in my reporting career. Typically ten percent of the registered voters would come out and vote in the

school board election. So it's easy for a mobilized right wing minority to take over a school board. So we've got to also be fully aware as progressives that every race all the way down to ballot has to be you know, topic A for us, not just turning out because we're exhilarated about you know, Barack Obama running, or we're so motivated to make sure Trump doesn't win, it will turn out in high numbers for Joe Biden. It's got to be every race on that ballot.