Vice President Kamala Harris is accepting the Democrats’ presidential nomination Thursday, exactly 60 years after another Black woman mesmerized the nation with a speech that still resonates in American politics
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 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.
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.
