Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

About This Book

From one of the country's most distinguished journalists, a revisionist and riveting look at the American politician whom history has judged a loser, yet who played a key part in the greatest social movement of the 20th century. As Samuel G. Freedman points out, Hubert Humphrey's public life began and ended in disgrace. Humphrey started out as an outlier in the post-war Democratic Party and ended the same--as the man who lost his bearings during the Vietnam War and then lost the presidency to Richard Nixon. Freedman therefore has not written a hagiography of Humphrey. Instead, he uses the stock characterization of Humphrey to illuminate his most triumphant early career, when his early efforts to promote racial justice not only transformed the Democratic Party (with its hardcore Dixiecrat, anti-integrationist element) but the nation as well. Humphrey was "woke" before anyone else in his party and he dragged them into the light. As Freedman shows, Humphrey's 1948 speech to the Democratic Convention electrified the nation. At the age of 37--younger than Beto O'Rourke, Andrew Gillum, and Stacey Abrams are today--he picked up the mantle of civil rights and carried it forward. Here is the Humphrey few know, and, after reading Freedman's book, no one will forget.

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