1988 Democratic National Convention : Jackson Delegates: New Pride, Old Anger : Mississippi Group Reflects Concerns of His Constituency

It took Hollis Watkins a quarter of a century--more than half his life--to get from Atlantic City to Atlanta.

In 1964, as a young activist for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi, Watkins sat on the boardwalk in Atlantic City with Fannie Lou Hamer and other pioneers of the civil rights movement who had been rejected as delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Party officials had shut them out in favor of an all-white delegation.

On Tuesday, Watkins finally got to register his feelings inside the hall--in a first-row seat, right in front of the podium when delegates began to vote on the party platform. He is one of 21 blacks in the 47-member Mississippi delegation, one of fully two dozen Mississippi delegates--including six whites--who are pledged to support a black candidate for President, the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Jackson mentioned the delegation early in his speech Tuesday, noting their struggle as a triumph of the civil rights effort.

And perhaps more than any other delegates at the 1988 Democratic convention, Watkins and his Mississippi cohorts embody both the new pride and the old anger of a constituency Jackson once described as “the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised.”

They are mindful of what their presence here means as delegates from the poorest state in the nation, and the state with the highest proportion of blacks in its population. Yet for many, patience wears thin.

“To a certain extent I feel good because a lot has been accomplished . . . When we look back at 1964 and where we are now, we can say that we’ve come a long way,” Watkins said Tuesday night.

“But we still have a long way to go,” he was quick to add.

For many of Mississippi’s black delegates, the strength of their numbers is a victory in itself.

Part of the Process

“We’re involved, very much involved in what’s happening,” said Mississippi Democratic Chairman Ed L. Cole, the only black in the nation to hold that state post. “We don’t protest any more. We’re part of the process.”

But others among Jackson’s Mississippi delegates are far less satisfied, despite Monday’s show of unity by Jackson and Dukakis. For now, the edge is off the anger they carried here with them, but they are not yet convinced that their party is ready to offer them the kind of partnership they had demanded.

“I think Dukakis was very vague. He was actually kind of condescending,” said Jackson delegate Cindy Ayers-Elliott, a disillusioned veteran of the 1984 convention. “Dukakis said he wants us to be a part of the process. We’re already a part of the process. It could be just like in 1984, a bunch of promises and nothing concrete.”

Although they are heavily outnumbered by Dukakis forces, Jackson’s supporters are keenly aware that they are crucial to making the Democratic convention a celebration of party unity. More importantly, they argue, the Democrats cannot win in November if Jackson’s voters are not enthusiastic enough to go to the polls, and those voters should get something from the party in return.

Believe Party Has Failed

By declaring his interest in the vice presidential nomination, Jackson put the party to what many of his supporters saw as an unambiguous test of its willingness to accept them. By their reckoning, the party has failed, just as it did a quarter century ago in Atlantic City.

Michael L. Alexander, a congressional aide who managed Jackson’s Mississippi campaign, felt particularly insulted by the nostalgic links that Dukakis drew to 1960, the last election where candidates from Massachusetts and Texas shared the ticket.

“We need to be looking ahead,” the 31-year-old delegate said. “In 1960, black people couldn’t even vote in the South.”

At 44, Fannie Lou Hamer had lived almost three-quarters of her life before learning during a 1962 civil rights rally at a Baptist church in Ruleville, Miss., that blacks actually had a right to vote.

In her remaining years, she would never stop paying the cost of defending that right. Hamer was kicked off the Sunflower County plantation where she lived and worked for refusing to take her name off voter registration rolls. For trying to register others, she was beaten in a Winona, Miss., jail and left with permanent injuries.

Although Hamer has been dead for more than a decade, her experiences still shadow the generation of Mississippi activists that followed her. They have picked up her battle cry: “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

An Idol to Some

At 31, Ayers-Elliott is too young to have participated in the civil rights movement. But Fannie Lou Hamer is something of an idol to the second-time Jackson delegate, who recently became the first black ever appointed administrative assistant to Mississippi’s state treasurer.

“Fannie Lou Hamer in 1964 was outside pushing for her voice to be heard,” said Ayers-Elliott. “Now, in 1988, we’re on the inside, but we’re still struggling for our voice to be heard. So we can’t get comfortable.”

“I’m determined to have some changes,” she said.

“Unity? At what cost?”

Alvin O. Chambliss Jr., a 43-year-old black lawyer from Oxford, has little enthusiasm for Democratic leadership’s dreams of a convention that will launch Dukakis into the fall campaign on a tide of good feeling. A coronation is not what he is planning.

“This is the only time we can vent our frustrations,” he had argued before the convention. Chambliss wanted nothing short of a guarantee from Dukakis that he will appoint blacks to a certain percentage of postmasterships, judgeships and other crucial offices.

He also was willing to fight for Jackson’s minority planks that would rearrange the government’s budget priorities. Although Jackson forces declared a platform victory Tuesday, the actual document that emerged from a series of floor votes was a far cry from the specific promises that Jackson had sought.

“Those are the issues Rev. Jesse Jackson raised. These were the issues that precipitated my involvement in the Democratic Party,” Chambliss said. “I’m unwilling to let those issues die.”

‘Democratic Party Owes Us’

Chambliss argued that “the Democratic Party owes us,” particularly in the South, where blacks have remained the party’s most loyal voters, amid huge defections by whites.

“We’ve won all the elections and yet we haven’t been rewarded,” he said Tuesday. “Atlanta is where we have to start. . . . No matter what we say, we can’t leave Atlanta empty-handed.”

But although the language of the platform is not the detailed blueprint that Jackson forces had wanted, others argue that such immediate victories are not the point.

“In years to come, and not too far in the future, (Jackson’s) positions will be majority positions. . . . It’s important that the American people hear them and see them articulated,” said Leslie McLemore, a Jackson State University dean who represented the candidate on the Democratic platform committee.

While McLemore sees the Jackson and Dukakis forces joining after the convention, Chambliss has gone so far as to threaten publicly that he will not vote for Dukakis unless he is satisfied that Jackson has been treated fairly.

He is not the only one.

‘Let Them Have George Bush’

“For the first time in my life, since 1936, I feel like not going to the polls at all. If these white people want George Bush, let them have George Bush,” said Margaret Walker Alexander, the 73-year-old writer attending her second convention as a Jackson delegate.

She contended that it was racism that made the party “squeamish about even nominating (Jackson) for vice president,” and warned that it could cost the party the election.

But later she conceded that it would be difficult to waive a right for which blacks had struggled so hard, saying: “I’m probably going to vote.”

Many Jackson delegates are similarly torn between their anger at and their loyalty to the party.

“I’m almost schizophrenic,” said Cole, the state chairman. “Nobody else running for President makes me feel the way I feel when Jesse Jackson is speaking. The only one who came close was Bobby Kennedy in ’68. But I also have a political realism. . . . We need to change the occupancy in the White House.”

Jackson’s first race for the White House in 1984 marked a watershed for black participation in Mississippi politics.

The estimated 60,000 new voters that he had helped register showed up in stunning force at party caucuses. Where Mississippi’s 82 county Democratic parties had had no more than a half-dozen black chairmen before, almost 30 were elected in 1984, McLemore said.

It was then that Watkins, the veteran of the 1964 convention protest, said he first considered running for delegate. After Atlantic City, “I had just never had the interest,” he said. “For the most part, I didn’t see myself being caught up in a process that really wasn’t about me and my people.”

Just as Jackson drew new voters into the party then, many of his present delegates believe he can reinvigorate those who have grown disillusioned in 1988. Thus, these supporters say, the role that Jackson decides to assume--and that Dukakis allows him to assume--can be critical in the fall campaign.

‘People Will Follow Him’

“If he feels comfortable with his role in the Democratic campaign, Jesse Jackson is going to articulate that. And if Jesse says A-OK, then people will follow him,” McLemore said.

Others disagree.

Johnnie E. Walls Jr., one of those who won his county chairmanship on Jackson’s 1984 wave and who is now Mississippi delegation vice chairman, said: “If you interview the leadership of the black community, they will say you have to go with the Democratic Party as opposed to the Republican Party, but the grass-roots may not see it that way. . . . There will be no real compulsion to vote for the Democrats unless Jackson supporters are given something concrete.”

“It certainly will affect my feelings about the party,” he added. “I don’t feel like being used again.”

Almost unanimously, those who were part of Jackson’s Mississippi delegation to the 1984 convention remember it as a bitter experience.

In the words of one, Jackson was treated as nothing more than “a side show.” The only major concession to his candidacy was the chance to make a major address on prime-time television.

The speech was a stirring appeal for reconciliation, in which Jackson expressed regret for anti-Semitic remarks that he had made in private. “Please forgive me,” he said. “Charge it to my head, and not my heart.”

“He was speaking from deep down in his soul. It was electrifying,” Ayers-Elliott said. “You could look around and there were people on the edge of their seats. They were in tears.”

‘Too Mad to Cry’

But Margaret Walker Alexander recalled it differently: “I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t shedding a tear. I was too mad to cry,” she said. “Here was a man giving a speech in total defeat. . . . I didn’t think he needed to apologize for anything.”

But she feels a little better this time: “As I remember, we left the convention with nothing. It looks like it won’t be that bad this time.”

Added another member of the delegation: “We won’t get everything we want this time. You never do. But if you look at where we started--slavery, locked out and couldn’t vote--we came really close this time. . . . People should be inspired by how far we’ve come.”