Black Democrats Gain Convention Influence but not Numbers

[struggle4progress]

by George E. Curry
NNPA Editor-in-Chief
Originally posted 7/27/2004

WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Twenty years ago, Mississippi, a state where law enforcement officials routinely did nothing as African-Americans seeking access to the ballot were murdered in public, sent an all-White delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J.

Fannie Lou Hamer, a former Mississippi sharecropper, challenged the seating of the lily-white delegation in 1964, saying that her Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was more representative of Mississippi voters. National Democratic Party officials hastily arranged a compromise that gave voting rights to two MFDP delegates and arranged for the others to sit as honored guests.

Now, two decades later, more than three-fifths of the Mississippi delegation is made up of African-Americans. With 61 percent of its delegates to the Democratic National Convention being African-Americans, Mississippi is second only to the Alabama delegation, with 62.9 percent of its delegates African-Americans. South Carolina is third, with 45.5 percent.
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Pennsylvania showed the largest increase in Black delegates (27.6 percent), followed by Georgia with 18.4 percent and New York, 10.1 percent. The greatest declines were in Virginia (58.1 percent), Louisiana (18.9 percent) and Ohio (14.6 percent).
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http://wilmingtonjournal.blackpressusa.com/news/Article/Article.asp?NewsID=3389&sID=3