JACKSON, Miss. – Vice President Kamala Harris is accepting the Democrats’ presidential nomination Thursday,
exactly 60 years after another Black woman mesmerized the nation with a televised speech that challenged
the seating of Mississippi’s all-white delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
The testimony of
Fannie Lou Hamer to the credentials committee in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was vivid and blunt.
She described how she was fired from her plantation job in retaliation for trying to register to vote and
brutalized in jail for encouraging other Black people to assert their rights. She told of arbitrary tests
that white authorities imposed to prevent Black people from voting and other unconstitutional methods that
kept white elites in power across the segregated South.
“All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens,” Hamer told the
committee.
Whether every eligible citizen can vote and have their vote be counted is still an open question in this
election, said U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, who is
speaking Wednesday at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He got his first practical experience
in democracy at Hamer’s urging in 1966, when he was a college student in Mississippi and she recruited him
to register other Black voters.
Hamer has already been the subject of appreciation this week, as the Democrats’ convention began Monday.
“Our challenge as Americans is to make sure that this experiment called democracy is not just for the
landed gentry or the wealthy, but it is for everybody,” said Thompson, who led the House committee that investigated
the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
‘Is this America?’
Hamer
was raised in cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta and became a sharecropper. She joined the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and helped organize Freedom Summer, a campaign to educate and register
Black voters. With Mississippi conducting whites-only primaries, activists formed the racially integrated
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to confront leading Democrats on a national stage.
“If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” Hamer told the credentials
committee. “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to asleep with
our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent
human beings, in America?”
President Lyndon B. Johnson hastily called a news conference during Hamer’s testimony to try to divert
attention from divisions that could alienate white voters in the South. TV cameras cut away, but networks
showed her speech later.
Top Democrats said Hamer’s group could seat two delegates, but that was too little for the Freedom Democrats.
And it was too much for the regular Mississippi delegation, which fled the convention without declaring
loyalty to LBJ, and eventually left for good as conservative Democrats across the South, including
segregationists, switched to the Republican party.
Leslie-Burl
McLemore was one of the Freedom delegates and recalls how determined they were.
“I knew in my mind, because I’m 23 years old and I’m vice chair of the Freedom Democratic Party, I’m not
going to accept that damn compromise,” the retired political science professor at Jackson State University
said recently at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
