Charter Fight

The Young Democrats are holding their National Convention in New York next week. For five days the junior-grade politicians will rush around the lobbies and suites of the Statler Hilton vying for executive positions and confirming their obvious and implicit support of the National Democratic Party.

The main function of the Young Democrats is to provide a free, enthusiastic force to man mimeo machines, to distribute leaflets, to babysit for voting mothers, and to secure the young lovelies in straw hats and striped blazers who decorate every campaign bandwagon. The rhetoric of their gatherings is usually cliched and the issues only token.

But this year the convention will consider a matter that, if silly on the level of YD politics, reflects a real and vital issue for the Democratic Party: the future of the Party in Mississippi.

Two opposing groups from Mississippi will ask the YDs for a charter.

One set of applicants is made up of members and supporters of the virtually all-Negro Freedom Democratic Party (FDP). The other consists mainly of representatives from college Young Democratic clubs in the state who are supported by the Mississippi Democratic Conference (MDC)--a bi-racial coalition of NAACP, organized labor (AFL-CIO), and white moderates who fear the FDP.

In August 1964, at the Democratic convention in Atlantic City, the FDP group made its first try for a charter. Many members of the YD National Committee felt the Mississippians should be recognized; but the Committee rejected the FDP-backed petition on the grounds that it did not have validating signatures from any of the state's three Senior Party officials. The applicants protested that the Senior Party State Chairman had not supported the Democratic presidential nominee in the preceeding national election; they said, therefore, that they were not required to get the signatures.

At this point, J. Albert House of North Carolina, National President of the YD's, pledged full support to future efforts by any group to organize the Mississippi YDs.

Not much happened until February 1965, when the National YDs re-established contact with the Mississippi group and set up a Membership Practices Committee.

Also in February, a group of Young Democrats was organized at the University of Mississippi. It is around this contigent that the present MDC-backed faction is built. Cleveland Donald, a Negro from the integrated YDs at Ole Miss, and Hodding Carter III, on leave from the Greenville, Miss., Delta Democrat Times and presently a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, are the cochairmen of the moderate delegation to the New York convention.

At an earlier convention August 17 in Jackson, Miss., the two groups of YDs attempted to form a united front. The convention rules and agenda drawn up the night before were adopted. But this was the last of preplanned politics.

Johnny Frazier, chairman of the Greenville NAACP, was elected convention chairman. The MDC group then moved to elect co-chairmen, although the proposed constitution called for the election of a state president. A confused debate followed, during which the FDP group charged that previous understandings were being broken, that electing officers before the hearing of committee reports or the adoption of the constitution was out of order, and that many delegates driving to the convention would not arrive till the afternoon session.

Frazier ignored the charges, ruled all objections out of order, and allowed the elections to continue, with the MDC voting its candidates to a majority of the offices.

More FDP supporters had arrived by lunchtime. When the convention reconvened, a motion was made to censure Frazier for his conduct during the morning and to remove him as chairman of the convention. Hodding Carter then stood up and asked all "true" YDs to follow him downstairs to a "true Young Democratic state convention." He, Cleveland Donald, and the MDC faction, in all about a third of the group, walked out.

What then will happen in New York?

The moderate MDC coalition will insist that to charter the FDP group would be to commit political suicide in Mississippi, where the bulk of the political power is white. The coalition will point out that voters think of the FDP as radical (if not communist), and there would be little hope of organizing an effective YD club around an FDP core.

The FDP will insist, on the other hand, that whites who would not join the virtually all-Negro FDP group will not join the integrated MDC group either. And right now it is probably true that even the more moderate faction would fail to attract the kind of white support that provides eager campaign help.

However, given the political direction of the FDP, it doesnt seem likely that whites will ever agree to join it. Young Democrats organized around the bi-racial MDC coalition would provide at least the working beginnings of a new Democratic Party in Mississippi.