By the end of July, the Negro movement was stalled. Overwhelming compliance with the Civil Rights Law had seemed to lift a moral burden from the nation's conscience. The Goldwater Convention had stolen from the movement Morality, the American Heritage, the Constitution, and God. And liberals were busily setting aside Baldwin's essays in order to ponder George Gallup's assessment of backlash.

In late August, however, the movement reasserted itself. Emerging from Mississippi, the Freedom Democratic Party (FDP) rocked the Democratic Convention, engaged the attention of a huge television audience, and reelicted from white liberals the phrases and fervor so quickly forgotten a short month earlier.

Many histories of the FDP's convention challenge should be written. The challenge was simultaneously a watershed in the history of Mississippi, a crisis-point in the history of the civil rights movement, and a significant footnote to the history of the Democratic Party. However, as a white Northerner working sporadically for the FDP in Washington and Atlantic City, I could see the unfolding convention challenge only as a case study in political lobbying and public relations.

Formally created on April 26, 1964 the Party began taking shape in June, with the influx of Freedom Summer volunteers. At this stage many of the FDP's Northern friends worried at its sluggishness in building an active organization and constituency. During one June visit to Washington Aaron Henry, NAACP chief in Mississippi and eventual spokesman for the Party, became angry with the impatience of his young Northern supporters: "All you consider is politics and this party thing. We're handling a couple hundred community centers at once down there. We'll cross the political bridge if and when we come to it."

Obviously he viewed the Party as only one, fairly inconsequential, thread in the fabric of the Freedom Summer project. This perspective, shared by most FDP leaders, inevitably inculcated in the Party the crusading zeal and moral absolutism of the Summer Project, qualities well suited to a social revolution, but rather awkward at a national political convention.

By June it was clear that the Party was unable, or unwilling, to establish an orderly lobbying machinery in the North. To Negroes, Frank Smith, an articulate and rather embittered young student, and Ella Baker, a portly veteran of the Southern Negro movement, traveled from state to state for the Party all summer, speaking to Democratic caucuses and committees wherever possible. Between them they secured support pledges of varying intensity from eleven states. But hurried schedules and limited energies permitted the two only to scratch the surface.

For example, the Massachusetts party remained sympathetic, but uncommitted, to the Party right through the convention week. Certainly LBJ's hostility to the FDP contributed to the ambivalence, but simple ignorance among Massachusetts delegates also played a part. At any moment, the FDP could have mobilized Boston's many civil rights groups into a concerted lobbying organization. But word never came from Jackson, and many Massachusetts delegates didn't learn the details of the issue until convention week, when hoopla and gossip precluded careful consideration of the question.

Three Teams

In Washington D.C. the lobbying situation was equally chaotic. Congress remained in session nearly all summer, presenting District civil rights groups with an opportunity to convince, cajole, and inform hundreds of important Democrats. At one point three independent teams of lobbyists were scouring the Hill for the FDP, but lack of coordination led to duplication of effort and endless embarrassment. Without leadership from the Party, the activity was clearly futile, and eventually it disintegrated.

In July the Party ceased ignoring its Northern backers and began counseling them to remain silent and inert. Henceforth information about the Party was to come only from Jackson, and lobbyists were instructed to refer curious newsmen and delegates "to the Mississippi office." In view of the number of Northern delegates still to be won over, the directive seemed ludicrously impractical. There were however several good reasons for it.

Officially, Party leaders justified the directive by claiming concern that the press was beginning to view the FDP as a civil rights project based in New York or Washington rather than as a political movement indigenous to Mississippi. There were also three unofficial, but more substantial, reasons for the directive.

First, many Northern lobbyists had proven rather imaginative in describing the Party to delegates, at times hinting that the FDP group in Atlantic City would be 50% white. Understandably, the Party wished to squelch such rumors at their source. Second, the Goldwater nomination had impressed FDP leaders with the importance of a Democratic victory in November, and there was acute worry that overzealous lobbying might turn the "Mississippi question" into a wedge between quarelling party factions in key states like New York and California.

More important than these two, however, was a third, less noble, reason for the directive; the suspicious, paranoic, militance which propelled the Party. White allies, including Northern lobbyists, were viewed less as assets than as conspirators waiting to exploit the FDP for selfish ends. The Party seemed to prefer testing its friends to using them constructively.

In June Party leaders laid plans to train the Freedom delegation at the Highlander Folk Center in Nashville just prior to the National Convention. When several sympathetic Northern politicians disapproved, citing the Communist connotations of the Center, a Party official snapped coldly, "So you want us to yield to McCarthyism?"

The Party seemed more interested in ideological and moral purity than in political victory, and it was becoming increasingly clear that racial distrust and bureaucratic pettiness within the Party were making impossible an effective political effort on the national level.