Attending Democratic Conventions
Passman became politically active as a delegate to the Democratic National Conventions in 1948, 1952, and 1956. In 1948, delegates from Mississippi and Alabama walked out of the convention in Philadelphia and supported then Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who opposed President Harry S. Truman and instead ran for president as the nominee of the new States' Rights Party. The Thurmond forces opposed the civil rights plank inserted in the Democratic national platform. In Louisiana, Thurmond and his running-mate, Mississippi Governor Fielding Wright, were the official Democratic nominees and hence won the state's ten electoral votes.
In 1952, at the Chicago convention, Passman supported U.S. Senator Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia, who was an unsuccessful conservative contender for the nomination. Passman was a delegate to the 1956 convention, also held in Chicago, where delegates renominated former Governor Adlai Stevenson, of Illinois, once again to challenge Republican nominee Dwight David Eisenhower. That fall Stevenson became the first Democratic presidential nominee since Reconstruction to lose in Louisiana.
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