Commonwealth Club Of California Podcast

This July is the 75th anniversary of the critical 1948 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, during which Hubert Humphrey, then the mayor of Minneapolis, gave a stirring and surprisingly successful speech asking the Democratic Party to commit itself to civil rights and to ending segregation. This caused the southern Dixiecrats to walk out and to run Strom Thurman for president—in order to teach the Democrats a lesson. But Truman's upset win over Dewey, caused in no small part by a surge of support from Black voters in northern cities, taught the Democrats a totally different lesson, and set the stage for Truman's desegregation of the military. That led to Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycotts of the 1950s, and to the civil rights legislation that LBJ, with the help of his Vice President Hubert Humphrey, pushed through Congress in the 1960s. Freedman presents a revisionist and riveting look at the American politician whom history has judged a loser because his vice presidency en