Obituaries : Channing Phillips; Nominated for President at ’68 Convention

The minister and civil rights activist who became the first black ever nominated for President by a major political party is dead of cancer.

The Rev. Channing Phillips’ death Wednesday at age 59 was announced Thursday by the Riverside Church in Manhattan, where he had been minister of planning since 1982.

Phillips gained national attention in 1968 when he was nominated as a favorite-son candidate from the District of Columbia at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

He had been elected to the convention as a delegate for Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, but allowed his name to be placed in nomination because Kennedy had been slain in Los Angeles in June of that year.

He was nominated as a symbol “of that black minority in America that for so many decades has been voiceless and powerless,” said Philip M. Stern, a writer and District of Columbia delegate who nominated him.

Phillips became the first ballot choice of nearly all black delegates. He received 67 1/2 votes from 18 states, 17 from California alone, which was more than that given the eventual nominee, Hubert H. Humphrey.

Phillips said his admittedly token candidacy was meant to show that “the Negro vote must not be taken for granted.”

Born in Brooklyn, Phillips participated in Martin Luther King Jr.’s first march on Selma, Ala. He was director of congressional relations for the National Endowment for the Humanities during the Jimmy Carter Administration and was vice president of Virginia Union University, a professor at Howard University and a minister at Lincoln Temple in Washington before moving to New York.