JACKSON, Mississippi (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris will accept the Democratic presidential nomination on Thursday, exactly 60 years after another black woman captivated the nation with a televised speech in which she questioned the seating of Mississippi’s all-white delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention.
Fannie Lou Hamer’s testimony before the Credentials Committee in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was lively and blunt.
She described being fired from her job on the plantation in revenge for trying to register to vote, and being brutally mistreated in prison for encouraging other blacks to assert their rights. She recounted arbitrary tests ordered by white authorities to prevent blacks from voting and other unconstitutional practices that kept the white elite in power in the segregated South.
“The reason for this is that we want to register to become first-class citizens,” Hamer told the committee.
Whether every eligible voter can vote and have their vote counted is still an open question in this election, said U.S. Representative Bennie Thompson, who is speaking at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago on Wednesday. He had his first practical experience with democracy in 1966 at Hamer’s urging, when he was a college student in Mississippi and she recruited him to register other black voters.
Hamer was already the subject of praise this week as the Democratic National Convention began on Monday.
“Our challenge as Americans is to make sure that this experiment called democracy benefits not just the landed gentry or the wealthy, but everyone,” said Thompson, who chaired the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
“Is this America?”
Hamer grew up on cotton fields in the Mississippi Delta and became a sharecropper. She joined the (*60*) Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and helped organize Freedom Summer, a campaign to educate and register black voters. Because Mississippi had white-only primaries, activists formed the racially integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge leading Democrats on the national stage.
“If the Freedom Democratic Party doesn’t have a seat 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 sleep with our phones off the hook because our lives are threatened every day because we want to live as decent people, in America?”
President Lyndon B. Johnson hastily called a press conference during Hamer’s testimony to divert attention from the disagreements that might alienate white voters in the South. Television cameras went blank, but networks later aired her speech.
Leading Democrats said Hamer’s group could provide two delegates, but that was not enough for the Freedom Democrats. And it was too much for the regular Mississippi delegation, which left the convention without declaring its loyalty to LBJ and eventually left for good as conservative Democrats throughout the South, including segregationists, defected to the Republican Party.
Leslie-Burl McLemore was one of the Freedom delegates and remembers her determination.
“I knew I wasn’t going to accept that damn compromise because I’m 23 years old and vice chairman of the Freedom Democratic Party,” the Jackson State University political scientist emeritus said recently at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson.
“We had four white people in our delegation and the white people had no black people in their delegation,” McLemore said. “So, hey, we had God on our side.”
The risk of blows and death
Other organizers included Ella Baker, Bob Moses, and David J. Dennis Sr. Just days before the 1964 convention, Dennis delivered an impassioned eulogy at the funeral of James Chaney, the Freedom Summer volunteer who was killed along with Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman by Ku Klux Klan men in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
That violence was still fresh when Hamer testified that she was evicted from her home in 1962 when she tried to register to vote. She said the plantation owner told her, “We’re not ready for this in Mississippi.”
Hamer also reported that in 1963, she was detained and beaten on the orders of white police officers in Winona, Mississippi, after she and several other blacks returned from a voter education seminar. The beatings left eternal damage to her eyes, legs and kidneys.
On Tuesday, the first out-of-state Mississippi Freedom Trail sign was unveiled in Atlantic City to commemorate the Freedom Democrats. Another sign, dedicated in Winona in June, commemorates the prison beatings. Euvester Simpson was 17 in 1963 and shared a cell with Hamer. She said she heard Hamer being whipped in another room.
“Mrs. Hamer told me she was in a lot of pain,” Simpson said, recalling how she calmed Hamer with saturated rags and the gospel song “Walk With Me.”
“Her back hurt. Her hands were bleeding. She was swollen from using her hands to protect her back,” Simpson said.
“State-sanctioned violence” is one of many themes from Hamer’s 1964 testimony that still resonates, said Keisha N. Blain, a Brown University historian, referring to the July 6 death of Black woman Sonya Massey at the hands of a police officer who responded to her 911 call.
“This issue remains, even if the specific circumstances are different,” Blain said.
Advocating for physical autonomy
Although Hamer did not include it in her testimony at the convention, she was also an advocate for bodily autonomy. A white doctor had performed a hysterectomy without her consent in 1961 when she had a uterine tumor removed. Such treatment of black women was so common in the South that Hamer called it a “Mississippi appendectomy.”
Blain noted in her 2021 book, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America, that Hamer feared that both abortion and birth control were “tools used by white supremacists to regulate the lives of impoverished blacks and even prevent the growth of the black population.”
Hamer continued to speak after the convention, saying she was “sick and tired” of how long it takes America to ensure fair treatment. Another year passed before Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and then nearly another year before the Supreme Court upheld the law.
A 2013 Supreme Court ruling struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act – the requirement for states with a history of racial voting discrimination, especially in the South, to seek federal approval before changing their elections. “Many communities across the country are struggling with attempts at voter suppression,” Blain said.
Hamer also advocated for fair treatment of black farmers. The Biden administration announced in delayed July more than $2 billion in direct payments to black and minority farmers who faced discrimination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance called it “disgraceful” and suggested it was racism against whites. Thompson, however, said black landowners had been denied loans and assistance from the USDA for many years. “The people who ran the federal agencies were part and parcel of this system of disenfranchisement,” Thompson said.
Still an inspiration
Wil Colom, a Mississippi lawyer who is now a member of the Democratic National Committee and is in Chicago for the convention, was a teenager when he heard Hamer speak at a church in Ripley, Mississippi, in October 1964. The church was burned down after her appearance. Colom said the speech was “electrifying” and motivated him to challenge racial segregation in theaters and swimming pools.
Colom said he visited Hamer at her modest home in Ruleville before she died of cancer in 1977 at age 59.
“She had no idea what an important figure she had become, which surprised me,” Colom said.
The Freedom Democrats paved the way for the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 and now for the nomination of Harris, Dennis said.
“For me, everything is connected,” said Dennis. “It’s like a relay race. One baton is passed on to the next.”
