WHEN MINNEAPOLIS erupted in protest after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the scale of unrest may have surprised some. Though it’s a liberal city, Minneapolis is not widely known as a hub of social justice organizing when compared to Selma, Birmingham, and other flashpoints of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. But in his gripping new biography, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, journalist Samuel G. Freedman reminds us that the city has long been a hotspot for struggles against racism.
Northern cities had their own brand of Jim Crow, often misleadingly described as “de facto,” which was imposed not by statute but through housing covenants and blatant discrimination by businesses and public officials. Mob violence was another factor. The hostility in Minneapolis extended to both African Americans and Jews, who, despite their miniscule numbers, launched vigorous movements for equality. A young city politician named Hubert Humphrey was listening.
Freedman seeks to salvage Humphrey’s legacy from his resounding loss in the 1968 presidential election, when his loyalty to Lyndon Johnson’s unpopular war in Vietnam divided the Democratic Party and allowed Richard Nixon to end nearly a decade of liberal dominance in Washington, DC. A professor at Columbia University, former columnist at The New York Times, and author of eight well-received books focused on Jewish and African American history, Freedman contends that this memory has masked the critical leadership that Humphrey provided on civil rights, most prominently by convincing delegates to the Democratic National Convention in 1948 to adopt a platform endorsing federal action against lynching, school segregation, and employment discrimination—all of them issues that Northern Democrats had previously equivocated on to avoid a confrontation with their Southern wing.
The civil rights plank, in fact, alienated many conservative white voters, and not just in the South. But it also galvanized Black voters and sparked a partisan realignment that continues to inform electoral politics in the United States. Critical to understanding that transformation, as Freedman demonstrates in this deeply researched and eloquently narrated account, is Humphrey’s experience as mayor of Minneapolis.
Raised in an entirely white South Dakota town, Humphrey had only fleeting encounters with Black or Jewish Americans before his father drove him 300 miles to enroll at the University of Minnesota a few months before the 1929 stock market crash. He became active in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democratic Party and completed a master’s degree at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he encountered full-blown Jim Crow.
Freedman contends that Humphrey remained largely aloof to racial politics during his studies but experienced an awakening while working for Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, charged with giving speeches about the “danger of a militant and brutal Fascism.” That threat was particularly pressing in Minnesota.
“HITLER MUST BE LAUGHING!” read a 1941 front-page headline of the city’s Black newspaper, the Minneapolis Spokesman. The story detailed how the Minneapolis office of a West Coast airplane manufacturer was carrying out “strict orders from the main office … not to consider any Negroes for any technical work under any circumstances.” The paper’s publisher, Cecil Newman, charged that such policies echoed Hitler’s “theory that certain races are inferior,” and he inferred that “[t]hose who practice these things in America must believe as he does.”
Newman was not simply comparing Jim Crow to fascism; he and others documented close links between them. A week after the employment discrimination story appeared in the Spokesman, Minnesota-born aviator Charles Lindbergh told supporters of the America First Committee, which was still pushing to keep the United States out of the war, that the “greatest danger to this country” came not from Germany or Japan but from Jewish “ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.”
Lindbergh’s message tapped a deep vein of antisemitism in Minnesota, which included not just an active Ku Klux Klan chapter in the 1920s and the fascist Silver Shirts in the 1930s but also business owners who excluded Jews from housing, restaurants, and resorts. Sam Scheiner of the Minnesota Jewish Council described “a wide-spread secret movement in this country allied with, and supported and subsidized by the Nazi government of Germany and other Fascist powers and parties.”
Humphrey could have dodged the whole issue. His political hero, President Roosevelt, had tailored the New Deal to win support from Southern Democrats, ordered the internment of Japanese Americans, provided only reluctant support for Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust, and adopted civil rights policies only under pressure. Humphrey’s earliest support came from labor unions that were often hostile toward Black and Jewish workers.
So why did Humphrey risk his future by coming out hard for civil rights? Freedman offers a few psycho-experiential clues: a childhood encounter with African American road workers in South Dakota; his father’s opposition to the Ku Klux Klan; his sister Frances’s opposition to Jim Crow in Washington, DC; his upbringing in social gospel Protestantism. But old-fashioned political contact on the streets may have been the decisive factor. Freedman argues that it was the coalition of Black and Jewish activists headed by Newman and Scheiner that pushed him into action.
In his unsuccessful bid for mayor in 1943, Humphrey won praise for “unusually fair treatment of Negroes” but no formal endorsement from Newman’s Spokesman. But a wave of race riots and his pointed opposition to the America First Party, led by Christian nationalist Gerald L. K. Smith, turned him into Newman’s ally and then a nationally recognized champion of racial and religious equality.
The end of World War II brought revelations of the Holocaust and a resurgence of antisemitic violence in Minneapolis. While local politicians and the press ignored the violence, or blamed it on Jews, Humphrey instead went up several levels and framed it as a threat to American democracy. “Let us not fail to remember that wherever dictatorship has gained control, its first attack was on a racial or religious minority.” He doubled down on that message after winning a landslide election. “Against electoral logic,” Freedman writes, “Humphrey had elevated the battle against discrimination, and the interests of racial and religious minorities, to a prominent role in his campaign. He was formulating his own answer to the question of what kind of country postwar America should be.”
Only partially successful at home, Humphrey’s civil rights agenda won him a national platform in the Democratic Party, and he increasingly sought to play on bigger stages. Facing resistance from the city council and local business leaders, he established a Human Rights Council and a municipal Fair Employment Practices Committee that made Minneapolis, according to Freedman, “virtually the only city in America where a wronged job applicant could count on the government as an ally.” When President Harry Truman backed away from civil rights to retain support from Southern whites, Humphrey reasserted the position that the United States could not lead the free world unless it was fully democratic at home. “For us to play our part effectively,” he declared at the 1948 convention, “we must be in a morally sound position.”
Freedman’s powerful and well-documented account makes a strong case for Humphrey’s rehabilitation. Yet he ends too abruptly to explain the Minnesotan’s legacy. The epilogue jumps quickly from 1948 to “the pinnacle” of Humphrey’s career after shepherding the 1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress and then to 1977 when the tolls of cancer, his “misjudgment of Vietnam,” and a growing backlash against the Civil Rights Movement were already eroding his legacy. But Freedman gives us little by which to understand the shift.
The civil rights plank may have helped Truman win in 1948, but Republicans would dominate the White House for two terms after that. How did Humphrey’s insistence on linking United States leadership at home and abroad evolve into a willingness to place victory in Vietnam above the war on poverty and other domestic problems? And, perhaps most urgently, what lessons does Humphrey’s life hold for confronting the persistence of racial inequality and resurgent white supremacy and Christian nationalism today? That may have to wait for another book. But Freedman’s reassessment of Humphrey’s beginnings is a valuable starting point to more effectively assess his contributions to American life.
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William Jones is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota and the author of The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (Norton, 2013).