This Is What Democracy Looks Like

The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby reminds us that we’re approaching the 70th anniversary of a landmark event in U.S. history: Hubert Humphrey’s speech on civil rights at the 1948 Democratic National Convention and the subsequent vote on a civil rights platform.

Humphrey’s 1948 triumph wasn’t the first important step the Democrats took in the shift from their Jim Crow past and toward their civil rights future — that would probably be the end of the two-thirds rule in 1936, which ended the Southern veto over Democratic presidential nominations. And it was hardly sufficient: The Democratic presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956, Adlai Stevenson, ran as a moderate at best on the issue. Yet it was certainly important. Some Dixiecrats who walked out on the party in 1948 never returned, and as they and their successors moved to the Republican Party, the bigotry faction of the Democrats became smaller and smaller.