In his article on page three, Donald Graham reviews the events of the 1964 Democratic Convention and remarks, "It was an unusual sight, but then it was an unusual year." It has been a while since there has been a Presidential election year quite as unusual as the present one.
Senator Goldwater's candidacy in itself has produced several rather unique situations. Certainly it is the first time in a goodly number of years such an arch conservative has captured a party's presidential nomination and also taken over the party machinery itself. Goldwater is, peculiarly, threatening to break up the Solid South for the first time in a hundred years against the first Southern president in the same period of time.
This year's campaign has gotten underway in earnest far earlier than ones in the recent past have as if to confirm the unusual nature of this year's politics. Graham notes the oddity of the 1964 Democratic convention. Sanford Ungar also finds an air of the unnatural at the Republican convention, though produced by circumstances considerably different from those at Atlantic City. Ungar notes the dilemma that Goldwater's nomination poses for liberal Republican candidates and analyzes the various pressures which must shape a politician's decision to support or repudiate the national ticket.
Civil Rights
Perhaps even more central to this unusual election year is the civil rights movement. The dramatics of the Negro Revolution shifted back and forth from North to South during the summer; but as the conventions were called to order and adjourned and as the national election appraches, civil rights groups have turned their attention from demonstrations to politics.
One of the most significant of these political civil rights groups to emerge over the summer is the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Curtis Hessler worked on the initial political foray of the MFDP out of Mississippi in Washington and Atlantic City and found the party occasionally naive, often disorganized. His careful analysis of the lobbying efforts of the FDP leading up to the convention is a remarkable story, one that could not have occured five years ago.
Leadership Vacuum
Nancy Moran views the MFDP in a distinctly more limited environment. Her day by day account of the intense debate that occurred within the MFDP over the tactics to be employed at the Democratic convention reveals the virtual vacuum of leadership that seems to be developing within the Negro community. By the end of the convention, the MFDP delegates had effectively rejected both the advice of the Northern leaders and the leaders themselves, Miss Moran notes, and she questions whether there is any effective Negro leadership at present.
Patricia Hollander's photo essay and Peter Cummings' narrative present a fair picture of the Mississippi Summer Project. Cummings plays down the heavily political orientation of the COFO voter registration efforts, pointing out that this occupied only a small portion of his day in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Closer to home, the political activism of the Harvard Negro, and his increasing emotional allegiance to a form of black nationalism, is discussed by Harrison Young.
