Many Challenges On Attendance

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31762, 20 August 1968, Page 13

Many Challenges On Attendance

DEMOCRATS’ CONVENTION

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

CHICAGO, August 19.

The Democratic credentials committee will meet in Chicago today, bringing into the open the party’s internal power struggle between civil righters and Southern diehards for delegate support, N.Z.P.A.Reuter reported.

The committee, which decides on the right of delegates to attend the national convention to choose the party’s Presidential candidate, faces the biggest list of challenges in the party’s history.

Seventeen State groups, representing nearly one-third of the convention’s 3099 delegates, are being challenged. Heading the list is a claim that Mississippi’s 44 delegates —only two of whom are Negroes—do not represent the true wishes of the State’s registered Democrats. The outcome of the hearings is virtually certain to cause bitter fights on the convention floor between supporters of Vice-President Hubert Humphrey and Senator Eugene McCarthy. In the Mississippi case the Vice-President, who hopes to win the nomination on the first ballot, and Senator McCarthy will be united for the cause of Southern Negroes in attempting to unseat the State’s regular delegation.

But in some of the other challenges, McCarthy supporters are expected to claim that pro-Humphrey factions are too heavily represented. Mr Humphrey’s campaign organisation yesterday accused Senator McCarthy of attempting to paralyse the convention by shutting out almost a third of the delegates by challenging their credentials.

The State's party has ignored all demands for it to admit more Negroes—thus denying a ruling by the national party four years ago that no-one should be denied the right to participate because of colour, creed or national origin. The Governor of New

Jersey, Mr Richard Hughes, chairman of the credentials committee, announced last night the convention’s special equal-rights committee had found there was “a prima facie lack of evidence” that Mississippi had complied with the rule to include sufficient Negroes in its delegation to represent the black population of the State. Importance of the seating battle for the candidates can be gauged by the fact that in 1952 a bitter squabble over contested delegates helped General Eisenhower defeat the late Senator Robert Taft at the Republican convention, which was also held in Chicago;