![]() ![]() And his father ran the local drugstore in town. Tell us a bit about his background.įREEDMAN: Hubert Humphrey was a product of the grasslands of eastern South Dakota, a tiny little town, 600 people, called Doland. Hubert Humphrey was from the heartland, and his family suffered some real hardship. SAMUEL FREEDMAN: It's such an honor to be on the show with you, Dave.ĭAVIES: You know, so many politicians in the United States have come from families of wealth - you know, the Tafts, the Kennedys, the Roosevelts, the Bushes. His new book is "Into The Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey And The Fight For Civil Rights." Well, Samuel Freedman, welcome back to FRESH AIR. ![]() Sam Freedman is a veteran journalist, author of nine previous books and a longtime professor of journalism at Columbia University. ![]() Freedman says Humphrey's powerful speech at the 1948 party convention, when a group of southern states threatened to bolt and formed their own party, helped lead to a critical realignment that allowed Democrats to win national elections in part by appealing to Black voters rather than segregationists in the South. Freedman, says Humphrey's better-known political failures have overshadowed some important achievements in his early years in politics, when he fought bigotry in Minneapolis and played a critical role in getting the Democratic Party to embrace civil rights in the 1948 presidential election. His name was Hubert Humphrey, and he's best known to history as Lyndon Johnson's vice president in the 1960s, who supported an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, then lost the 1968 presidential election to Richard Nixon. That practice was challenged in 1947 by the 36-year-old mayor of Minneapolis, who was gaining a national reputation for fighting racial, ethnic and religious discrimination in his city and beyond. And the American Bowling Congress, which ran local tournaments, limited teams to white men only. In the years after World War II, bowling was the fastest-growing recreational sport in America. ![]()
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