Jennifer Delton
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Jennifer A. Delton is a writer and a chair of the history department at Skidmore University in the United States.
In 2002, she wrote Making Minnesota Liberal: Civil Rights and the Transformation of the Democratic Party. In the book, she argues that the unusual concentration of civil rights leaders like Hubert Humphrey, Orville Freeman, and Eugene McCarthy — from mostly white Minnesota — was a reaction to the racial divisiveness between the German and Scandinavian populations that had festered in this state. She argues that the insertion of civil rights as a political issue had the effect of minimizing the distinctions between those of German and Scandanavian descent. This degree of unity that came from dealing with the issue of white on black racism helped figures like Humphrey construct a dominant anti-communist liberal position within the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.
