Hubert Humphrey and the 1948 Civil Rights Speech

Hubert Humphrey was thirty-seven years old and in his first term as mayor of Minneapolis when he walked to the podium at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July fourteenth, nineteen forty-eight. What he said in the next several minutes split the Democratic Party along a fault line that had been building for decades.

The Democratic platform committee had produced a civil rights plank that was deliberately vague, designed to keep the Southern wing of the party inside the tent. Humphrey led a minority faction that wanted specific, enforceable language. He had spent years in Minneapolis fighting antisemitism and advocating for fair employment practices laws, and he had made the calculation that the time had come.

His speech was brief. The core of it was a single argument: that the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights. The delegates adopted the minority plank. The Mississippi delegation and half of Alabama's delegates walked out and formed the States' Rights Democratic Party, the Dixiecrats, nominating Strom Thurmond for president.

Harry Truman, who had privately worried that the plank would cost him the election, won the presidency in November in one of the most surprising upsets in American electoral history. Hubert Humphrey won his Senate seat from Minnesota the same day.

The speech is considered a turning point in Democratic Party history: the moment when the party committed, explicitly and irrevocably, to federal civil rights action. It set in motion the realignment that would transform American politics over the following thirty years. Humphrey would go on to shepherd the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty-four through the Senate as majority whip.