Atlanta, 1988

 Few things are uglier than the press corps covering a presidential campaign. I know because I was part of a mob at the Democratic National Convention in 1988 in Atlanta.

At newspapers, the traffic cop is the news editor, who rules the copy desk and thus rules on all disputes involving good English. He or she reads everything. I found the news editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and asked what story he’d like to read that the mob was not likely to cover.

He told me about Big Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, just down Auburn Avenue from Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had preached. Ebenezer is a smaller church. Big Bethel is enormous. All the political stars and the press corps would be at Ebenezer. For better or worse, Dr. King’s church had become a prestigious place, and, in a way, an exclusive place. Big Bethel would be where people who drove buses and cleaned hotel rooms for a living would be. If I went to church on the Sunday before the convention began, I might learn something.

It was a long service, and I was among those standing so that others could sit. Minister after minister spoke about why people who claim to be religious can’t turn away from questions of justice. They were not concerned with arcane policy. They asked whether it’s OK to have two people doing the same job for different wages. Whether it’s OK, when you are hiring workers or admitting students to college, to exclude people because of race. The ministers asked whether someone who claims to believe in a just God could see all that and not do anything at all.

The ministers did not speak of Democrats and Republicans. In 1988, David Duke, a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, was seeking the Republican nomination. Instead, the ministers at Big Bethel were looking to the Democratic Party for some kind of sign. How important was it to the party that people be treated unjustly?

Jesse Jackson was seeking the nomination, but it was clear from what the ministers and church members said that people were watching the party, not the candidate. How would the party treat the issues Jackson raised? Would the party give the agenda of equal treatment lip service or would it offer voters a sign that it was serious, perhaps by nominating Jackson for vice president?

I left the church with the impression that one segment of one community had clearly stated its hopes and expectations.

I spent the week looking for evidence that the party’s delegates understood those hopes and expectations and took them seriously.

By the end of the week, I thought the Democratic Party was in trouble.