Fred Harris, former US senator from Oklahoma and presidential candidate, dies at the age of 94

Fred Harris, former U.S. senator from Oklahomapresidential candidate and populist who advocated reforms of the Democratic Party during the turbulent 1960s, died on Saturday. He was 94 years old.

Harris’ wife, Margaret Elliston, confirmed his death to the Associated Press. It was not immediately clear where he died, but he lived New Mexico since 1976 and was living in Corrales at the time of his death.

“Fred Harris passed away peacefully this morning from natural causes. He was 94 years old. He was a wonderful and loved man. His memory is a blessing,” Elliston wrote in a text message.

Harris served in the Senate for eight years, first winning in 1964 to fill a vacancy, and in 1976 he ran unsuccessfully for president.

Harris’s role as chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1969 and 1970 was to heal the party’s wounds after the tumultuous 1968 national convention, when protesters clashed with police in Chicago.

Initiated policy changes that led to an increase in the number of women and minorities as convention delegates and in leadership positions.

“I thought it worked wonderfully,” Harris recalled in 2004, when he was a congressional delegate Democratic National Convention in Boston. “This makes the choice much more legitimate and democratic.”

“The Democratic Party was not democratic, and many delegations were largely controlled or dominated by bosses. And there was terrible discrimination against African Americans in the South,” he said.

Harris ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, dropping out after poor results in early contests, including a fourth-place finish in New Hampshire. Even more moderate Jimmy Carter he managed to win the presidency.

That same year, Harris moved to New Mexico and became a professor of political science at the University of New Mexico. He wrote and edited several books, mainly about politics and Congress. In 1999, he expanded his writings to include a mystery set in Depression-era Oklahoma.

Throughout his political career, Harris was a leading liberal voice for civil rights and anti-poverty programs aimed at helping minorities and disadvantaged people.

“Democrats everywhere will remember Fred for his unparalleled integrity and as a pioneer in establishing core progressive values ​​of fairness and opportunity for prosperity as the founding tenets of our party,” the New Mexico Democratic Party said in a statement.

He was also active in Native American affairs with his first wife, LaDonna, a Comancan.

“I have always called myself a populist or a progressive,” Harris said in a 1998 interview. “I am against concentrated power. I don’t like the power of money in politics. I think we should have programs for the middle class and the working class.

New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham praised his work for our common state and nation.

“In addition to being an extremely talented politician and professor, he was a decent, honorable man who treated everyone with warmth, generosity and good humor,” she said in a statement. “dream. Harris was a leadership lesson that public officials should emulate now and always.”

Harris was a member of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, the so-called Kerner Commission, appointed by then-President Lyndon Johnson to investigate urban riots in the late 1960s.

The commission’s landmark 1968 report concluded that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

Thirty years later, Harris co-authored a report that concluded that the commission’s prophecy had been “fulfilled.”

“The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and minorities are suffering disproportionately,” said the report by Harris and Lynn A. Curtis, president of the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, which continued the commission’s work.

Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute said Harris gained notoriety in Congress as a “fiery populist.”

“It appeals to people… the concept of the average person versus the elite,” Ornstein said. “Fred Harris had a real ability to express these concerns, especially for the oppressed.”

In 1968, Harris served as co-chairman of then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign. He and others pressured Humphrey to use the convention to break with Johnson over the Vietnam War. However, Humphrey waited until the end of the campaign and narrowly lost to Republican Richard Nixon.

“It was the worst year of my life, ’68. We killed Dr. Martin Luther King. “We assassinated my Senate colleague Robert Kennedy and then we called this terrible convention,” Harris said in 1996.