A looming racial challenge for Republicans

Democrats had their moment of racial crisis 50 years ago this month at the party’s 1964 national convention in Atlantic City, N.J. What happened there changed America and American politics by forcing the Democrats to become more racially inclusive in selecting delegates, leading to more women delegates and a record number of female and minority candidates. Republicans need a similar response to their looming racial crisis.

The turmoil at the 1964 Democratic convention started with what came to be known as “Freedom Summer.” College students went into Mississippi to register black voters. Their organizing led to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a mostly black group of Mississippi Democrats who challenged the convention to deny seating to the all-white delegates from their state.

The Freedom Democrats lost the short-term fight in a dramatic fashion. On Aug. 22, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson held an impromptu White House news conference to pull television cameras and the nation’s attention away from a black woman sharecropper’s testimony before the convention’s credentials committee of being jailed and beaten for registering to vote.