Mayor Humphrey of Minneapolis

[ Soft music plays ] Every citizen in this country has a stake in the emergence of the United States as a leader in a free world.

That world is being challenged by the world of slavery.

In these times of economic, political, and spiritual crisis, we cannot, and we must not, turn from the path so plainly before us.

And now is the time to recall those who were left on that path of American freedom.

What Hubert Humphrey embodied was exactly what Frederick Douglass embodied and Abraham Lincoln embodied, and the great abolitionists, the great editors, the great orators -- all those people who, at key moments, spoke for the people over privilege, for opportunity over exploitation.

He did that in 1948.

He became a hinge of history, that history took a different turn because of the stand he took.

[ Cheers and applause ] That was courageous.

You have to remember, this is before Rosa Parks sat in the front of a bus or before Martin Luther King Jr. was known.

That was a turning point.

[ Up-tempo marching-band music plays ] As the convention came to a close, millions of Americans were asking, "Who is this man, and where did he come from?"

[ Soft music plays ] In the early summer of 1940, a 29-year-old student by the name of Hubert Horatio Humphrey arrived on the University of Minnesota campus after receiving a master's degree in political science from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

He had hoped to complete a PhD and teach, but he had a wife and child, and no job and no money.

What I shall always remember about the return to the university was the inspiration that I received from my teachers.

They were remarkable.

Hubert certainly had pretty well-formulated political ideas.

He came by them naturally, out of the -- out of the family and out of his father's influence and out of the reading that he had done.

He was a confirmed Democrat -- a Democrat with a big "D" and democrat with a little "D." But what I really wanted to do was just to go back to school to study.

I had an insatiable appetite for learning.

Well, at that time, I was very much in need of money.

We had no income.

Then, the war was on, and I wasn't sure just what was going to happen to me.

The Works Progress Administration was launched late in 1935 as the key agency in the federal work program... In the meantime, I got a job teaching with the adult education program of the WPA, developing and conducting education programs, recreation programs, social-action programs.

I became intimately acquainted with the work of the trade unions.

Most immediate concern is in carrying out the purposes of the... My national hero during the '30s, of course, was Franklin Roosevelt.

But I cast my first vote and I was a Roosevelt Democrat, no doubt about it.

He made the presidency an intimate institution.

Fueled by a rapidly developing political philosophy, Humphrey began to share it wherever he could find an audience.

We frequently spoke from street corners and asking people to gather around, to shake hands, to visit with people, and I would speak to them.

I can recall where we wouldn't have a half a dozen people that would attend our little gatherings on the street corners.

If he got to the corner and there were just a handful of people out there, Hubert was talking just above a whisper.

But then, if you got over five people there, then Hubert started yelling to high heaven.

You could hear him all over the community.

What we've got to do, in a very real sense, is almost like the Gospel.

You've got to go on out and save the sinners.

You've got to go out and get the votes He loved to talk to the sinners.

It just kept rolling and rolling, and he never missed an opportunity to proclaim the Word of America.

People said he talked too much, but Humphrey didn't learn only by reading and listening.

He learned by talking, and be taken with the idea and would then develop it.

He would talk minutes on this thing until he had drained every little bit of cognition out of it.

There are not many audiences who felt that they had wasted their last 30 minutes listening to Hubert Humphrey.

He would speak to all kinds of organizations every day, to business groups, to labor groups, to church groups, to fraternal societies.

And he would -- He would do this in tandem.

That is, he'd run from one meeting to another.

He understood who he was talking to and what concerned them.

And somehow he was able to so communicate with them that they in turn communicated with others.

So it wasn't very long before Humphrey was a known factor in the community.

[ Wind blowing ] On a Sunday morning in the spring of 1943, Humphrey started on an aimless walk across the river, into the city.

On the bridge, he was approached by two labor leaders.

They had, uh, come to know me through my work in the field of workers' education, and I was asked if I would run for mayor of Minneapolis.

I had decided to file.

I was a newcomer in the field of a dozen or more candidates.

I filed at the last minute and campaigned furiously, particularly with Arthur Naftalin, another political-science student at the University of Minnesota.

Humphrey filed 19 days before the primary.

That's just fantastic when you think of it.

Hubert's energy was just so strong.

We were young, active, working day and night, getting literature out to the homes, door-to-door, going through the apartment buildings, nailing up signs.

I was making speeches all over the city, to the labor movement down in the union halls and to the senior citizens.

We conducted a sufficiently aggressive campaign to come in second in the primary.

Therefore, I was on the ballot for the general election.

The fact that I had succeeded in the runoff was nothing short of a political miracle.

He lost the '43 election, but he was established by the time the primary was over, and came within about 5,000 votes of actually winning.

But really an unheard-of entry into politics.

By the late summer of 1943, following my defeat, I sat down and evaluated just where we were.

We had no money.

I was broke.

I had debts in the sum of around $1,300.

Uh, we were barely making it.

However, I was resolved to pay those bills.

I went out and made speeches.

I would get $5, $10, $25, whatever they were willing to pay for a luncheon speech or breakfast or some kind of lecture or meeting.

And the money was applied to paying off our campaign bill.

[ Traffic passing ] It was in the spring of 1945 that I decided that I would run again for mayor, and I set in motion our campaign.

I would speak a good deal, getting around to the people.

I can recall a meeting of my supporters, an emergency campaign meeting.

Even though we were broke, I got Western Union to accept telegrams from me and on credit.

I don't believe they'd do it again.

And sent out 200 or 300 or more telegrams asking key people to join me on a Saturday morning for an emergency campaign meeting.

I asked them to make a substantial contribution.

"We need money.

We are broke.

We've got to have help, and we have to have it now.

And I want each and every one of you to pass by me, up in front of this hall.

I want to shake your hand, and I want you to put some money on the table, and I want plenty of it.

I don't want a lot of quarters, dimes, and nickels.

I need money.

I'll take checks."

It was more like a revival meeting than a political gathering.

Now, listen here.

We're going to have just -- We're going to end this little revival meeting.

I'm not going to ask you to come down here and hit the altar.

I'm not going to do that.

[ Laughter ] But I want to know whether you're going to go out in those neighborhoods.

I want to know whether you're going to get out those votes.

I want to know whether you're going to ring that phone right off the line.

I want you to get out and use some shoe leather.

I want you to talk in church on Sunday, even if you talk out loud, I want you to speak at the union meetings.

I want you to talk on the street corner.

I want you to visit on the bus.

And by the time we left there, I had several thousands of dollars in campaign contributions.

[ Telephone rings ] We went on to win a very major victory, winning that election by over 30,000-vote majority.

And I found myself as mayor of the city of Minneapolis at age 34, the chief executive officer of the 15th largest city in the United States.

Politics was just a part of the -- of my life.

It was like the air I was breathing and the water that I was drinking.

Minneapolis had just elected its youngest mayor by the largest landslide in its history, voting for change in a city broken by Depression and now controlled by an unholy alliance between organized crime and city government.

Bars, gambling houses, and brothels operated openly and unrestricted in a system of payoffs that ran from the cops on the beat all the way to the mayor's office.

Humphrey was elected on a promise to clean up City Hall, but it would be an impossible task.

He would have no voice in the budget, major appointments, or policy, because the city charter granted nearly total administrative control to a city council, and the council could obstruct him or even ignore him if they wished.

Believing Humphrey to be young, inexperienced, and powerless, local mobsters placed bets on what it would take to bribe him, and bags of cash soon appeared in his office.

But the new mayor refused and turned to the only appointment that the city charter allowed him -- the police chief.

Humphrey quickly named the tough, FBI-trained cop Ed Ryan.

And we on the Police Department had just about given up hope of ever having a mayor who would have the guts and the honesty to clean up that situation.

Behind his rough exterior, Ryan was more than a one-dimensional character.

He was an educated man who spoke fluent French and brought his love of music to a local radio show.

[ Soft jazz plays ] Ryan's appointment was met with bitter opposition from business, labor, and the powerful City Council, so Humphrey enlisted newspaper and radio to mobilize public opinion, putting pressure on the council, and after a month Ryan was confirmed.

And together they would begin the largest crackdown on crime that the city had ever seen.

So, when young Humphrey came along, we went to work, and we closed Minneapolis tight.

Now, anyone who thinks that it doesn't take guts and it doesn't take honesty to smash a multimillion-dollar racket in a large city had better guess again.

Humphrey had the guts and he had the honesty.

[ Soft, dramatic music plays ] When local gangsters were confronted, they were frightened and then angry, and the new mayor began to get threatening letters and phone calls.

He says, "Do you think I'll get shot?"

And it was a serious question, really, because there had been a number of killings, gangland-style, in Minneapolis.

And he said he was afraid of being shot.

Humphrey responded to the threats by requesting a grand-jury investigation into underworld activities, and he began to seek out sources that would provide him with information from the streets.

Then, in order to publicize police activity, he would strap on a gun and accompany officers in squad cars, closing down illegal establishments well into the night.

To change the police department from the inside, Humphrey initiated a series of innovative reforms.

To combat the abuse of minorities, he worked with the University of Minnesota and the American Council on Race Relations to organize the first-in-the-nation human-relations training for officers.

Humphrey ordered that cops be hired from the neighborhoods.

Then, after a six-month probation, the neighbors could decide if the officer should become a permanent member of the force.

He increased the number of officers and made the Minneapolis Police Department the first in the country to have a 40-hour workweek.

[ Police radio chatter ] He threatened to fire anyone accepting bribes, and then increased police salaries to replace the money they received from the payoffs.

Aware of the city's history of police involvement in labor disputes, Humphrey ordered officers to stop protecting replacement workers and not cross picket lines.

While he began to reform police behavior on the inside, Humphrey also knew that he would have to change it on the outside.

It was an unbelievably tricky balance that Humphrey had to achieve, in terms of crackdowns on the mobsters, many of whom were Jewish, and separate that from harassment and brutality and profiling of blacks and Jews, which was also routinely done.

There was a moment in the mid-'40s, with Humphrey and Ryan, when I think police reform could have been achieved in a meaningful and long-lasting way here.

But they were both gone from the scene before that took hold.

And you have that reversion back to norm.

Humphrey understood that to break the chain of corruption, he would have to help local businesses survive, so he reduced the city fees and licenses to help with the loss of income that they received from payoffs, and opened a direct line of communication with business owners.

I remember, he called a meeting in City Hall of the owners of saloons, bars, and their wives.

He said, "Look, I know how business has been run here.

We have hours bars have to be open.

They can't serve certain ages.

And I know what you've done.

Policeman comes in, you slip him $10 or $50, and you -- and you can do it.

"That's stopping," he says.

"That's stopping.

No more."

He turned to the wives, and he says, "Your husbands have been violating the law.

You don't want husbands that are criminals.

You want that business that they're in to be responsible, community-service businesses.

You see to it that your husband lives up to the law."

I mean, that's the kind of thing that he used to do.

Humphrey came to town on the promise of change, but change beyond the police department was restricted by the ruling City Council, so he did what he did best.

He went directly to the people.

Humphrey electrified the city, simply using the bully pulpit.

And everybody's got to listen for a little while, at least, when the mayor speaks.

And Humphrey was so good at that that everybody did listen.

He had a very quick and retentive mind.

It just leaped like sparks.

Incredible memory.

His mind just sopped up information.

He'd go through the newspaper each day, and he would then understand what these problems were all about, and he could remember all the detail.

To this day, it's hard for me to believe that he was able to retain the information that he did.

[ Cheers and applause ] In his first year as mayor, Humphrey delivered more than 1,000 speeches and used every available resource to reach the people.

The Minneapolis Star-Journal and the Morning and Sunday Tribune -- a city... In the 1940s, before television and all that followed, newspapers were king.

And in Minneapolis, the keys to the kingdom belonged to the Cowles family, led by John Cowles Sr. Father was, of course, publisher of the Star and the Tribune in Minneapolis, and supported Humphrey as mayor and was certainly well-impressed by Humphrey's performance.

[ Printing equipment vibrating ] The media soon came to discover that, you know, what he was doing and what he had to say was really just newsworthy.

Just you couldn't avoid it.

I think, by and large, he felt quite comfortable with newspaper people of all kinds -- reporters, editors, publishers, and so on.

He felt, I think, that what they were interested in and what he was interested in overlapped a good deal.

So why not talk with them freely, openly.

And that kind of speech was Humphrey's cup of tea.

He could -- He knew exactly how to -- how to say it, how to do it.

He wasn't afraid of self-deprecating humor, and he just had a good time.

It was a natural for him.

But at the time, newspapers were being challenged by the popularity and accessibility of radio.

And for Humphrey, it was one more tool to reach the public.

Good evening, fellow Americans.

We are waging today, in the United States and out here in Minnesota, a campaign... There was no TV.

Radio was still the prime electronic media.

I wanted radio time whenever I could get it, because we were hard-pressed for funds to carry on our message.

We got the cheapest time we could -- $26 for 15 minutes -- because we lived hand-to-mouth.

In 1940, as Minneapolis was struggling with the nationwide polio epidemic, Sister Elizabeth Kenny came to town to help.

Her revolutionary ideas were met with bitter opposition from some in the medical community, but Humphrey championed her work and used the radio to help.

[ Up-tempo music plays ] Well, it's 9:05, and time for all you kids to gather 'round your radios and listen to the funnies.

This morning, we have an extra-special guest in our studios -- none other than the Honorable Hubert H. Humphrey, mayor of Minneapolis.

The mayor is doing his part in entertaining you boys and girls during this stay-at-home polio campaign.

Mayor Humphrey and the funnies.

Thank you very much.

Good morning, boys and girls.

We start right off with "Blondie."

And you know what?

It looks like Blondie and Dagwood are going to go out in a fishing party.

Here's a really good one today, though, this "Bugs Bunny."

Alright, now, you know what's been happening with "Dick Tracy."

The next funny we're going to read is called the "Sad Sack."

And is this fella... You've been listening to the mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert H. Humphrey, doing his part in entertaining you boys and girls during the present polio epidemic.

[ Indistinct conversations ] While Humphrey began to take command of local media, for him, it was not enough.

He needed to be physically connected to the people as a warm and visible caretaker of the city he loved.

He just spread himself over whatever came to his attention, and that meant most everything.

Everything and everybody interested him.

He learned from exchange with people.

It was a much more natural, unforced kind of response.

He was almost unguarded.

His emotions would be right there on his sleeve.

He saw a hungry kid, he never forgot that kid.

He identified with that person as much as if it were him.

And it's that ability to make that leap between passively observing and noting a human problem, articulate and move and excite people towards its solution, that was at the heart of his leadership.

He just had such a universal spirit, such a -- such an open soul.

Humphrey believed in really bringing people together, that politics was our way, together, to achieve a fairer society, one that brought out the best possibilities of democracy and not the worst.

[ Marching band music plays ] Although Humphrey's role as mayor was restricted, he found legal ways to go beyond the ceremonial, to improve people's lives.

[ Soft music plays ] He found jobs for minorities and personally negotiated over 35 labor strikes, often in his own office.

As World War II was winding down and vets were returning to a housing shortage, Mayor Humphrey asked citizens to share a room.

He then set up a nonprofit corporation and panhandled $56,000 to purchase surplus house trailers, prefab homes, and temporary Quonset huts.

And when Northwest Airlines threatened to leave town, he convinced them to stay by asking the federal government to donate land to expand the airport.

Despite his efforts, Humphrey was often unable to convince a reluctant City council to make changes, so he created a government within a government by organizing ordinary citizens into committees and commissions, which could do the work that the city charter gave him no authority to do.

So Hubert Humphrey figured out, "I can raise money outside the council's appropriation, to fund these citizens committees.

I can populate them mostly with volunteers, and then I can use them to help change public opinion.

And by changing public opinion, I can bring force on the council to come around to taking some of the positions I want the council to adopt."

He utilized committees so effectively, had them in so many areas.

He had them in housing, he had them in law enforcement, had them in taxation and finance.

He had them in the field of community development.

And he made great use of them.

It was his own energy, his own enthusiasm, his own conviction that really moved this along for people.

They were excited about it.

I organized the civic leaders into committees and task forces and commissions to alert the public to what was going on, what was wrong, and what might be done, and to bring pressure to bear upon the City Council, to mobilize public opinion for change.

That's really what it added up to.

As the mayor of a city, I tried to be the leader of the overall community.

My administration was not particularly partisan.

I worked closely with -- with the business community, the labor movement, and with groups such as the League of Women Voters and others that were essentially interested in improving the quality of our life.

[ Soft music plays ] [ Marching-band music plays ] By the time Humphrey became mayor, fascist fires had already been burning across the U.S., and support for a pro-Nazi organization known as the Bund was openly displayed by a gathering of over 20,000 in Madison Square Garden, and a popular group known as the America First Committee was led by anti-Semite preachers like Father Charles Coughlin.

We are Christian insofar as we believe in Christ's principle of "Love your neighbor as yourself."

And with that principle, I challenge every Jew in this nation to tell me that he does not believe in it.

[ Cheers and applause ] For the anti-Semite, for the Jew-hater, the Jew is both the revolutionary and the capitalist.

He's both the coward and the secret hand controlling everything.

And you hear all of those stereotypes being flung around in Minneapolis.

Anti-Semitism is quite acceptable.

There's an establishment credibility.

Minneapolis was a real petri dish for someone like William Bell Riley, who's the most prominent fundamentalist minister in the entire country.

He is educated.

He can quote Plato and George Bernard Shaw and Shakespeare in the course of a sermon.

Riley believed in an infamous forgery called "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which purported to expose the Jewish plan to control the world, and it would frame everything that he did in regard to Jews in Minneapolis and beyond.

And "The protocols of the Elders of Zion," for Riley, is the decoding ring for the whole world.

Builds a Bible school.

He starts a printing operation.

He ultimately sets up a university.

He trains missionaries.

He's doing all the things that are the sign of a major religious figure.

He was able to, in effect, get the tacit approval of many of the elite families in town.

But at the same time, he is absolutely committed to intractable anti-Semitism.

Minneapolis was regarded as an anti-Semitic center.

And it was reflected in the business life, it was reflected in the professional life, it was reflected right across the board.

You see it in the success of the Silver Shirts, the pro-Nazi organization, being able to hold meetings in Minneapolis.

You couldn't live in elite neighborhoods, you couldn't join certain country clubs.

You couldn't be a member of the Minneapolis Club.

For example, when I got to Minneapolis, if you were a Jew, you could not belong to the American Automobile Association chapter in Minneapolis.

Jews were not permitted to belong to it.

And this is the sort of thing that Hubert would react to, in a flash.

You know, "We got to change that."

We used the pressure of prominent citizens to threaten withdrawal from the Automobile Club unless they changed their bylaws.

They did, indeed, change the bylaws.

It was not easy to change the attitude of a community.

I learned that it could not be done by just one group, that it required a coalition, and frequently you had to depend on people who were not necessarily with you on all matters of public policy or politics.

[ Soft music plays ] While still in college at LSU, Humphrey met a young Jewish student who had family in the death camps, and he had a German professor by the name of Rudolf Heberle, who lectured extensively about the rise of the Nazis.

And Rudolf Heberle's big academic project was to study how totalitarian societies evolved out of democratic ones.

Democratic societies can change.

Demagogues can pick off vulnerable groups, one by one, until they've assembled power that can't be easily overturned.

And Humphrey had those ideas in his head when he gets to Minneapolis.

And when he gets here, Polish Jews are giving him the smuggled-out reports of the ongoing extermination in the death camps and concentration camps.

Hubert Humphrey is in possession of that written material in 1943 and is telling Polish Jews here in the Twin Cities, "I'm going to keep talking about this.

This is going to be part of every speech I give."

He was a hero of the Jewish community of Minnesota.

There's no question about it.

He went to synagogues and spoke at synagogues.

As a matter of fact, he was so close to the Jewish community that I remember once introducing him to an audience as Rabbi Humphrey.

[ Soft, dramatic music plays ] Hubert Humphrey was taking on white supremacists, like Gerald L.K.

Smith, probably the leading right-wing extremist of America in the 1940s.

Smith came regularly to Minneapolis.

He had a big following here.

It was very receptive territory for him.

There is a highly organized campaign to substitute Jewish tradition for Christian tradition.

Repudiate them in the marketplace, on the platform, from the pulpit.

Once we commit ourselves to this great spiritual, patriotic implication, we naturally must be fighting every gesture that appears in opposition to our Christian constitutional tradition.

Issued to the corrupt.

And they tangled with each other a lot.

And it was a battle between political liberalism and political extremism in a way that feels very present-day.

[ Soft, dramatic music plays ] One early morning in the spring of 1947, Humphrey returned home from work.

As he unlocked his front door, gunshots rang out.

The next day, an officer was assigned to his home to protect him.

There had been hate mail coming into City Hall for weeks preceding the shooting.

There had been threats against Humphrey and denunciations against him, and it derives directly from some of Humphrey's confrontations with Gerald L.K.

Smith.

A follower of Smith's, Maynard Nelsen, I'm convinced, is the person who tries to assassinate Humphrey.

Nelsen, it was discovered, had been putting up anti-Semitic placards.

And when he was arrested, the police found propaganda materials, firearms in his home.

So he had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to be the person who tried to kill Humphrey.

[ Fire crackling] Humphrey became mayor at a time when America was on fire with racial tension.

What were then commonly called race riots had erupted across the country, from Detroit and Harlem to Beaumont, Texas, and lynching continued unabated in the Deep South.

After fighting for freedom in a segregated army, returning black soldiers faced the apartheid of Jim Crow.

In Minneapolis, the tiny, segregated African-American minority was largely invisible to the white majority, and they faced discrimination in housing, employment, and public places, and threats from an ever-present Ku Klux Klan chapter.

Humphrey's time in the Jim Crow South gave him an unusual sensitivity to the effects of segregation, and he began to forge relationships with an isolated but vibrant black community.

And one of the most meaningful was with Cecil Newman, founder and publisher of the Minneapolis Spokesman newspaper.

For years, Newman was often a lone voice speaking out against attacks on the African-American community in Minneapolis.

But despite Newman's efforts, the small community that he represented had no political power.

They couldn't assemble enough power by themselves to really have political clout.

You needed to have allies, figure out how you could wield power in order to make social change.

Hubert Humphrey, with this great body of political skills, as well as this tremendous reservoir of conscience, he's the white person who Cecil Newman meets who has both great values and political acumen.

Newman is kind of Humphrey's conscience and his tutor on civil rights and the single most important African-American in Hubert Humphrey's life.

Civil rights, human rights was, very deeply and early, part of Humphrey's whole approach to the matter of government and public policy.

He was just wholly wedded to the idea of decency and equality.

In his first week as mayor, Humphrey traveled to Chicago to observe the city's efforts to create a fair-employment law.

When he returned with his own proposal, the City Council quickly voted it down.

Undeterred, Humphrey immediately established the Mayor's Council on Human Relations with the intended purpose of reducing social tensions caused by racial and religious discrimination.

Humphrey could not get the City Council to give him any money for a Mayor's Council or Mayor's Commission on Human Relations.

He set one up anyway and just went out -- We went out and panhandled money from individuals and from businesses and from others, and he made it go.

While Humphrey made the organization appear to be a city-government project, it was instead privately funded and staffed by unpaid volunteers, preventing any political opposition.

It was the mission of the Mayor's Council on Human Relations to collect data to inform the largely white Christian public of the problems faced by blacks, Jews, and other minorities.

Then, to gain deeper understanding of the problem, Humphrey ordered a citywide self-survey to study discrimination, under guidelines developed by Dr. Charles S. Johnson of Fisk University.

He put bankers on it, policeman on it, merchants on it, students on it, professors on it.

And he asked each segment of the community to explore itself.

Let's take banks.

He would have the banking community study the extent to which the banking industry of Minneapolis was employing Jews, not employing Jews.

"Any Jews on the board?

Any blacks on the board?"

Did the same thing with teachers, did the same thing with merchants.

He sent 600 volunteers out, all over Minneapolis, to knock on doors and to talk to people, trying to find out how discrimination was working, who was being discriminated against.

The whole community was covered.

Everybody was asked to look inwardly.

The survey revealed widespread discrimination against nonwhite, non-Christian minorities across the city.

Humphrey then used the findings to put pressure on the City Council to pass a fair-employment ordinance.

And by the time he comes back to the council a second time, he has tons of speakers lined up, he has sample fair-employment ordinances from other cities that he can point to.

He has public opinion lined up behind him, you know, petitions to mobilize information and mobilize opinion.

Then, the City Council has to go along with him, enact fair-employment practices, fund the commission, pass laws for enforcement.

They didn't do that because they wanted to.

They did it because Humphrey had made it politically unpalatable for them to refuse to do it.

That practical approach to going out and asking people what was going on, and then bringing it back and turning it into policy, into the official policy of the city of Minneapolis was a marvelous marriage of principle into policy.

That's the way he worked.

And it was that experience of sending those people out through the neighborhoods of Minneapolis and gathering the information and bringing it back and organizing it, looking at it, and then acting on it that made him a very unique politician.

In June of 1947, Humphrey was elected to a second term as mayor, with a resounding victory.

But even as the returns came in, his interests were changing and his reputation as a champion of civil rights was beginning to spread beyond the city limits.

And by the spring of 1948, he was traveling to cities across the country to speak about civil and human rights, beginning a crusade that would last a lifetime.

The virus and disease of racism warps and destroys flesh and blood and spirit and soul.

There is no freedom for those who are looked upon as second-class citizens, or denied the equal protection of the laws.

People of color, whether it was Roy Wilkins or Whitney Young or Thurgood Marshall or A. Philip Randolph, they were all parts of his circle or his friends.

He was a part of the civil rights family.

My uncle, Roy Wilkins, had grown up in Saint Paul and had gone to the University of Minnesota, and he and Humphrey were friends.

Not just friend-ly, they were actually friends.

And he was effusive about what a wonderful human being he was, and his speech was from the heart, and that this was a man you could trust.

[ Indistinct conversations ] It was not just a political matter with him.

It was a sense of conscience, a sense of commitment, something that put his own political career on the line.

You know, he never backed down, in terms of civil rights.

[ Indistinct conversations ] [ Train horn blowing ] As the 1948 Democratic National Convention approached, President Harry Truman struggled under the shadow of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Meanwhile, Humphrey had helped to form a liberal anti-communist group called the Americans for Democratic Action, which included members of the Roosevelt cabinet, labor and religious leaders, and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

The ADA was concerned with the continued control of the Democratic Party by a group of Southern segregationists known as the Dixiecrats, and the battle lines were clearly drawn over the issue of civil rights.

[ Indistinct conversations ] Humphrey and the ADA were pushing Truman to endorse a strong civil rights platform, and the Dixiecrats were threatening to leave the Democratic Party if he did.

In late 1946, Truman established the President's Committee on Civil Rights to document discrimination in education, housing, public accommodations, and voting.

But as the convention neared, with the Dixiecrats in control, Truman feared losing their support, and any talk of civil rights would now be buried in the majority party plank.

Humphrey and other members of the ADA arrived to Philadelphia early and holed up at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel to develop a last-minute minority plank on civil rights that would be presented directly to the delegates for a vote.

Humphrey was then chosen to be the keynote speaker.

Wednesday, July 14, 1948, the final day of the convention.

Vice presidential candidate Alben Barkley recalled that the very air smelled of defeat.

As an accidental president, Harry Truman was the expected candidate, although he trailed in every available poll.

Got to remember that Truman was written off by that point.

This convention, these delegates were there, none of them had any hope that anything was going to come out of the convention, other than some good parties and maybe some rousing speeches.

They'd all go home, dutifully cast their votes for Truman, and watch him go down to defeat.

Truman knew that any chance for victory lie in the solid support of the traditional Democratic South.

But the Southerners had condemned his strong stand on civil rights.

And facing political realities, he now supported a watered-down plank to prevent a Southern revolt.

But by sunrise, Humphrey had decided to take his fight for a stronger civil rights platform to the convention floor, proposing a minority plank that demanded Congressional action against lynching and discrimination in voting, employment, and the armed services.

The proposal challenged the president and was an outrage to the powerful Southern Democrats.

He had to weigh the fact that if he took this issue to the floor, and the South walked out, it could cost Harry Truman the presidency, and it could cost him his election to the Senate later that year.

He had spent all night and morning refining his speech, and by afternoon, Humphrey and his supporters had arrived in the hall.

He had lost 15 pounds in two weeks.

He was exhausted and defeated, but determined to take his struggle directly to the delegates for a vote.

While his growing commitment to human rights was crystallizing in this moment, he was distraught.

He knew that he had little chance of succeeding, and if he pushed the Southerners too far, they would deliver on their threats to leave the convention and split the party in two.

He knew how adamant the Southern politicians were.

He knew what they had at stake.

They'd been fighting for this way of life for a hundred years, and they had, resting on their shoulders, the legacy of the Confederacy and the Southern way of life, and they were fiercely dug in.

Convention Chairman Sam Rayburn, himself a Southerner, reluctantly granted Humphrey permission to speak.

He also granted equal time for amendments by the powerful group of Southern segregationists known as the Dixiecrats.

After all, I had been the black knight, so to speak, of the party, the wild-eyed radical, the destroyer of the Democratic Party, the enemy of the South.

Illinois Senator Paul Douglas later called it the greatest speech he ever heard.

"No braver David ever faced a more powerful Goliath."

The Dixiecrats and the conservative Republicans had had a stranglehold on the legislative process.

I mean, even, if in their souls, there may have been one or two of them who weren't really rabid racists, they knew that there were times when you had to deliver for your constituency on that issue, or you're gone.

The final day had dragged on.

Security sealed the building, anticipating the visit of the president.

With no air-conditioning, the inside temperature soared into the 90s.

[ Applause ] Thousands of restless and inattentive delegates listened as the proposals were read.

But before they could vote, they would have to wait through nearly an hour of speeches condemning the civil rights plank.

You shall not crucify the South on this cross of civil rights!

[ Crowd cheers ] Sitting behind the massive podium, Humphrey began to perspire as he waited his turn.

The temperature rose, tempers flared, and the Philadelphia police began to patrol the aisles.

...government of the United States, under the provisions of the... Humphrey had relied on the support of his family.

He also remembered a conversation that he had with his friend Orv Freeman.

Orv, as his campaign manager, said, "I should be advising you not to do it, because it will hurt your campaign in Minnesota because it will cut off any money from the national party."

But Orv said, "As an idealist and a true believer, I think you should do it."

But in the end, the choice was his alone.

Humphrey was only 37 years old and virtually unknown, yet he waited to speak to the largest crowd of his life, with his future and that of the Democratic Party hanging in the balance.

On the other hand, on principle, he couldn't have -- He was the man who could turn the issue.

He had the moment, he had the ear of the convention, he had the opportunity.

And if he -- if he didn't live up to it, he couldn't live with himself.

At the moment of the decision, Humphrey, even as he went to the platform, he wasn't really too sure of himself.

Ed Flynn, one of the big bosses of the party, was on the platform with him.

This old Irishman put his arm around me and he said, "Young man, you go right ahead.

You're doing what is right.

And frankly, even if some of these Southerners bolt, it's time that the Democratic Party took this stand."

And then Flynn sent out word to these power centers, "Let's support this thing."

The moment had finally arrived as the heat near the podium became unbearable.

And the lights were terribly hot.

I recall, standing under those lights, how the sweat poured out of me.

[ Applause ] Then, as David McCullough later described it, Humphrey stepped to the podium, his face shining.

The audience suddenly hushed.

Mr. Chairman, fellow Democrats, fellow Americans, I realize that in speaking in behalf of the minority report on civil rights, that I'm dealing with a charged issue, with an issue which has been confused by emotionalism on all sides of the fence.

I feel I must rise at this time to support the minority report, a report that spells out our democracy, a report that the people of this country can and will understand, and a report that they will enthusiastically acclaim on the great issue of civil rights.

[ Cheers and applause ] You know, let's face it, there are a lot of things going on there.

Let me say this... Unless it's really a hot issue, or somebody that is a pretty good speaker -- a great speaker, in Humphrey's case -- not many people listen.

But they listened to Hubert.

...morally sound position.

We can't use a double standard.

There's no room for double standards in American politics.

For measuring our own and other people's policies, our demands for democratic practices in other lands will be no more effective than the guarantee of those practices in our own country.

[ Cheers and applause ] But it wasn't very long before the importance of what he was saying just permeated the crowd.

There will be no hedging and there'll be no watering down, if you please, of the instruments and the principles of the civil rights program.

[ Cheers and applause ] To those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them, we are 172 years late!

[ Cheers and applause ] 60 million people listened at home and work.

I say this -- the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadows of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights!

[ Cheers and applause ] As the significance of his words resonated through the country, Muriel sat near the radio and cried.

...of American freedom for all of us here, for the millions who have sent us, for the whole 2 billion members of the human family.

Our land is now, more than ever before, the last, best hope on Earth.

And the reaction was just explosive.

People just marched in the aisle and carried on.

I ask this convention.

I asked this convention to say, in unmistakable terms, that we proudly hail, and we courageously support our president and leader, Harry Truman, in his great fight for civil rights in America.

[ Cheers and applause ] As Humphrey stepped down, the crowd began to move toward the podium.

There was Paul Douglas seizing the banner of Illinois and Dick Daley.

The next thing I knew, there was a delegation from Pennsylvania and New York, the Eastern Seaboard, all parading down and around Convention Hall.

Fearing a Southern walkout, Rayburn ordered the band to remain silent.

The applause lasted over 10 minutes, until finally Rayburn dimmed the house lights, forcing the delegates back to their seats.

Shortly after the vote on the civil rights plank began, Flynn's influence became apparent as New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan voted yes.

When Wisconsin delivered the deciding votes, Humphrey's gamble had paid off and he had won a stunning victory.

The NAACP proclaimed that, "The victory marks the greatest turning point for the South and for America which has occurred since the Civil War."

The speech would begin a fundamental change in the Democratic Party and signal the opening round of a historic civil rights movement.

And as Humphrey stepped down from the platform, his friend A. Philip Randolph, was leading a demonstration outside.

Hubert Humphrey was in the forefront of the civil rights fight when that fight was still a lonely, unpopular, isolated struggle.

He is a man whom I have known and admired for many years, and with whom I have worked in many facets of the fight for human dignity.

Of his dedication to this fight, I have a profound respect.

He is not going to play politics with the question of racial and social justice.

Humphrey was out front.

He was the warrior for civil rights and enjoyed speaking before Negro organizations.

And his commitment was for real.

And it was intense and it was consistent.

African-Americans during that period had great respect and appreciation for Hubert Humphrey.

He was their man, and he was carrying the banner for their cause.

[ Applause ] Hubert understood that we were increasingly and rapidly becoming the world in microcosm, where people of every race and every creed and every color have to make a social contract to care for, protect, and defend one another with equity and fairness.

That type of spirit, that type of courage was contagious.

[ Soft music plays ] There have to be white people you can trust, and to know that you can reach across the racial divide and shake hands, or touch a heart that is decent and honorable, despite the thick and awful racism that deforms the society.

And Hubert Humphrey made you feel that you did have allies, and it was worth getting up in the morning and struggling some more.

Because with allies like that, you can shape the future.

[ Women vocalizing ] When tyrants tremble as they hear the bells of freedom ringing When friends rejoice both far and near, how can I keep from singing?

To prison cell and dungeon vile, our thoughts to them are winging When friends by shame are undefiled, how can I keep from singing?