Fannie Lou Hamer rattled the Democratic convention with her ‘Is this America?’ speech 60 years ago
JACKSON, Madam. — Vice President Kamala Harris accepts the Democratic presidential nomination Thursday marks 60 years since another black woman captivated the nation with a televised address challenging the seat 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 lively and direct.
She described being fired from her plantation job in retaliation for trying to register to vote, being beaten in prison for encouraging other black people to assert their rights, and telling of arbitrary testing imposed by white authorities to keep black people from voting and other unconstitutional methods that kept white elites in power in the segregated South.
“All this is because we want to register and become full citizens,” Hamer told the committee.
Whether every eligible citizen will be allowed to vote and whether his or her vote will be counted is still an open question in this election, the US Congressman said. Bennie Thompsonwho speaks Wednesday at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He got his first hands-on 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 received a lot of praise this week, as the Democratic convention began on 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 for everyone,” said Thompson, who led the House committee that investigated the uprising of January 6, 2021 in the US Capitol.
Hammer Raised in cotton fields in the Mississippi Delta, she became a sharecropper. She joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and helped organize Freedom Summer, a campaign to inform and register black voters. While Mississippi held white-only primaries, activists formed the racially integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge leading Democrats nationally.
“If the Freedom Democratic Party is not in place by now, then I doubt 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 human beings, in America?”
President Lyndon B. Johnson quickly called a news conference during Hamer’s testimony to distract from divisions that might alienate white voters in the South. The television cameras went dark, but networks continued to air her speech.
Top Democrats said Hamer’s group could field 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 when conservative Democrats in the South, including segregationists, switched to the Republican Party.
Leslie-Burl McLemore was one of the Freedom delegates and remembers how determined they were.
“I knew in my head, being 23 years old and the vice chairman of the Freedom Democratic Party, that I was not going to accept that damn compromise,” the retired Jackson State University political science professor 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.”
Other organizers included: Ella Baker, Bob Moses, and David J. Dennis Sr. Just days before the 1964 convention, Dennis delivered an impassioned eulogy to the funeral of James Chaneythe volunteer of Freedom Summer who together with Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman by members of the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
That violence was still fresh when Hamer testified about her deportation after trying to register to vote in 1962. She said the plantation owner told her, “We’re not ready for that in Mississippi.”
Hamer also said that in 1963, she was detained and beaten on the orders of white police officers in Winona, Mississippi, after she and several other black people returned from a voter education workshop. The beating permanently damaged her eyes, legs and kidneys.
On Tuesday, the first Mississippi Freedom Trail marker outside the state was unveiled in Atlantic City, honoring the Freedom Democrats. Another marker, unveiled in June in Winona, commemorates prison abuse. 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 wet wipes and the gospel song “Walk With Me.”
“Her back was hurting. Her hands were bleeding. She was swollen, because she had used her hands to protect her back,” Simpson said.
“State-sanctioned violence” is one of many issues from Hamer’s 1964 testimony that still resonates, he said. Keisha N. Blaina historian from Brown University. She cited the July 6 shooting death of Sonya Masseya black woman, by an officer who responded to her 911 call.
“This theme remains, even though the specific circumstances are different,” Blain said.
Although Hamer did not make it part of her testimony at the convention, she was also an advocate of bodily autonomy. A white doctor had performed a hysterectomy without her consent when she had a uterine tumor removed in 1961. 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 “white supremacist tools to regulate the lives of impoverished black people and even prevent the growth of the black population.”
Hamer continued to speak after the convention, famously saying that she “sick and tired of being sick and tired” about how long America took to ensure fair treatment. Another year passed before Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and nearly another year after that before the Supreme Court upheld the law.
A 2013 Supreme Court ruling dismantled a key portion of the Voting Rights Act—the requirement for states with a history of racial discrimination in votingprimarily in the South, to get federal approval before changing the way they conduct elections. “Many communities across the country are struggling with voter suppression efforts,” Blain said.
Hamer also advocated for fair treatment of Black farmers. The Biden administration announced more than $2 billion in direct payments in late July Black and minority farmers who faced discrimination by the United States Department of Agriculture.
GOP candidate for vice president JD Vance called this “disgraceful” suggesting it is racist against white people. But Thompson said black landowners refused credit and denied USDA support for years. “The people who ran the federal agencies were inextricably linked to the system of disenfranchisement,” Thompson said.
Wil Colom, a Mississippi lawyer now a member of the Democratic National Committee and in Chicago for the party convention, was a teenager when he heard Hamer speak at a church in Ripley, Mississippi, in October 1964. The church burned down after her appearance. Colom said the speech was “electric” and motivated him to challenge segregation in theaters and swimming pools.
Colom said he visited Hamer at her modest Ruleville home before she died of cancer in 1977 at age 59.
“She had no idea, which surprised me, what an important figure she had become,” Colom said.
The Freedom Democrats helped elect President Barack Obama in 2008 and now also help nominate Harris, Dennis said.
“For me, it’s all connected,” Dennis said. “It’s like a relay race. One baton goes to the next.”