No Moderate Control
But the Party had long since slipped from the control of liberal politicians and moderate civil rights leaders. On the boadwalk, the FDP's silent vigil had degenerated into a vitriolic anti-Johnson rally. Jesse Grey, New York rent striker, milled through FDP headquarters at the Gem Hotel, calling for a last-ditch show of defiance.
Indeed, with the last two days, the the Gem had become a general gathering point for discontents and militants of all hues, each long on advice and short on political experience. It was in this atmosphere of ideological chaos, but not necessarily because of it, that the caucus rebuffed Rauh and King and drew up plans to enter the Mississippi seating area illegally.
Commentators have interpreted the Party's decision in various ways. Evans and Novak have intimated that extreme leftists were controlling the Party behind the scenes. Others have blamed the Party's behavior on political naivete. All the interpretations have assumed that the caucus' unwillingness to compromise proved that the Party couldn't fathom the Great American Art of Politics. Perhaps this is a valid indictment, but it ignores the fact that the Party was trying to play not American politics, but Mississippi politics. And, as every FDP pamphlet explains, "Mississippi is like no where else on earth."
The jostling in the aisle, the blind militance of the Mississippi "seat-in," may have dismayed some Vermont politicians and the suburban television audience. But there was another, a back audience crowded around television sets in a thousand grey shacks across rural Mississippi, watching intently as close friends and neighbors stood up to white authority--and got away with it.
The whole credentials challenge was, after all, aimed at this audience, the true constituency of the Freedom Party. Admittedly the challenge degenerated into an overly emotional protest against everything and thus, in a sense, against nothing. But that is because protest is today the only realistic politics open to the Mississippi Negro