Editorials

This week my sister and brother-in-law celebrated their sixtieth anniversary. Remembering their wedding was especially meaningful for me because it coincided with another meaningful anniversary I remember from 1964, a Democratic convention quite different from the one we just watched which was a brilliantly produced television spectacle.

The 1964 convention was held in Atlantic City New Jersey. Lyndon Johnson was the incumbent president and his candidacy was locked up. Hubert Humphrey, a textbook exponent of what we called the SLP (standard liberal position), was slated to become the Democratic candidate for vice-president.

The wedding was in New Jersey too, at my parents’ home about an hour away from Atlantic City. My husband and I were allies of the civil rights struggle, and had been active in the fight for a fair housing law in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where we lived at the time. We took advantage of the opportunity to leave our not-quite-two-year-old daughter with her grandparents for the day so that we could make a trip to the convention, where the principal controversy was going to be the attempt of members of the multi-racial Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to be seated as delegates in place of the traditional southern Democrats, the segregationists who officially represented Mississippi for close to a century.

As I watched the 2024 convention from home 60 years later, I was struck by the similarities and contrasts between the two events.

In 1964 we had no credentials whatsoever, but walked right in a side entrance and wandered at will through the spectator seats of the hall. Security did not seem to be a concern, despite the fact that John Kennedy had been assassinated just the year before. The Freedom Democrats were offered a couple of seats among the delegates in the Atlantic City auditorium, though without convention voting rights. (They weren’t satisfied.)

In Chicago last week the protestors, opponents of the war on Gaza, were among the elected and voting delegates seated on the floor, some sporting keffiyehs, but no one was allowed to express this opinion as a speech from the podium. Pre-convention credentialling and on-site security were very tight. No unauthorized person was allowed in.  

Outside the hall, rowdy Chicago 2024 demonstrators got into the now-customary scuffles with the enormous number of enforcement officials in the surrounding streets, with some arrested. The Freedom Democrats and their supporters in 1964, on the other hand, were models of polite behavior, with a long, well-disciplined picket line on the boardwalk which we joined with nobody’s authorization. Aside from the occasional freedom song, protestors didn’t make much noise. 

Participants were neatly dressed in what looked like their church clothes. ( I was familiar with such protocols, having demonstrated against the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Francisco with picketers wearing hats, gloves and high heels four years earlier. A lot of good it did…) 

In 2024 it was different. Many of the official delegates and some of the protestors were wearing funny hats, tee-shirts with slogans and other costumes, just like they were at a party, but also buttons and signs opposing the Gaza war. 

And the 2024 convention was kind of like a party, wasn’t it? Celebrity guests, including entertainers of all sorts, were numerous. 

In Atlantic City pop stars were not evident. The preponderance of delegates were stereotypical Old White Guys. 

In 2024 the Black (formerly known, in 1964, as Negro) delegates from Mississippi, were clearly visible seated on the floor among their state comrades, only some of whom were white.. 

Did I mention that I was 24 years old and seriously pregnant? 1964 was a notable year for other reasons besides the convention: the birth of my second daughter and the birth of Kamala Harris, the superstar of the 2024 show. 

The highlight for us in Atlantic City in August 60 years ago was not in the convention hall or in the picket line on the boardwalk. It was in the modest café where we stopped for lunch. We were thrilled to discover at the next table, also having a sandwich, Dr. Martin Luther King, in town to support the Freedom Democrats. I mustered my courage and asked him to shake hands. I’ve told my middle child that she has a special obligation to work for social justice because of her pre-natal encounter with the great man. 

A friend of mine, only slightly younger than I am, recently suggested that in the 1960s our proximate goals were taking back the Democratic Party and demolishing the Republicans. For my cohort, pre-boomers now beginning to leave the scene, two of our ultimate goals have been racial and gender equity and ending U.S. participation in pointless international wars. He thought that we’re finally almost there, and maybe we are. 

If so, it’s taken the major part of my generously long life, and close to a half century of Kamala Harris’s time on earth so far to figure out, approximately, some answers to the classic question: What is to be done? (Что дѣлать? in the words of Lenin and Nikolay Chernyshevsky) 

But the struggles are not over, given situations in Ukraine and in Palestine and the Sudan and…. 

Some of my friends are ready to shift current protests over the Gaza war to petitioning the Harris campaign to take action, but I think that’s premature. I’ve reluctantly concluded that there’s no point in pressing candidates for pre-election promises, because campaign concessions are unenforceable. 

But Joe Biden, no longer a candidate, is still president, and even as a lame duck there are many things he can and should do before he exits. Now as a non-candidate he is free to do the right thing, though his instincts may be wrong as far as Palestine is concerned. I first started thinking it’s time for him to retire when I realized that his relationship with Israel had not evolved since about 1957. 

Kamala Harris will be vice-president for another couple of months, and she can’t do much now except campaign with big smiles and vague generalizations, nor should she. We need to shelve our protest signs and even our keffiyehs until November 6. What I’ve learned, in the 70-some years I’ve been trying to influence government to do the right thing, is that what we need is conscientious electeds who we can guilt-trip.  

Kamala might be one of them—she was raised in Berkeley. IIn her convention speech Harris indicated that she knows there’s a lot wrong in Gaza now. We can remind her of that when she’s in a position to act. 

We owe it to our old friends in Israel, many of them originally from the United States, to help them figure out how to get rid of their country’s current appalling rulers. It’s not antisemitism to say that those guys now running things in Israel are proto-fascist and genocidal. They’re squandering the emotional capital history has accorded Jews since the Holocaust. It’s antisemitism to deny the obvious, to claim the current government as the new normal. 

Israelis can do better. We need a U.S. government which will support those in their country who want to do the right thing, which includes achieving equity between Palestinians and Israelis. I’ve learned that it’s going to take a while for them to get there.  

In the political era bookended by these two conventions, those of us in the USA who’ve lived through it have made some progress, it’s true, but it’s taken a while and there’s still a lot to be done. Those like Kamala Harris (and my daughters and granddaughters) who volunteer to take up the torch shouldn’t be reluctant to continue to preach joyfulness. In the words of the immortal Molly Ivins: 

“We have to have fun while trying to stave off the forces of darkness because we hardly ever win, so it’s the only fun we get to have.” 

Let’s try to win in November. That would really be fun.