The 2024 Democratic National Convention is seeing the country unite to nominate someone who could become the first Black woman president. The historical event comes 60 years after Fannie Lou Hamer’s famed “Is this America” speech, where she called out the seating of Mississippi’s all-white delegation.
It was during the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, that Fannie Lou Hamer sat before the credentials committee to give testimony about her experience as a sharecropper in Mississippi who was fired from her plantation job in retaliation for trying to register to vote.
Hamer described the abuse she sustained
while in jail for encouraging other Black people to exercise their right to vote, AP News reports.“It wasn’t too long before three white men came to my cell. One of these men was a state highway patrolman,” Hamer told the crowd. “He said, ‘We going to make you wish you was dead.”
She recounted the arbitrary tests imposed by white authorities to block Black people from voting, along with other unconstitutional tactics used to keep white elites in power throughout the segregated South.
“All of this is on account of we want to register to become first-class citizens,” Hamer told the committee.
Hamer went to the DNC as part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which helped organize Freedom Summer, a campaign to educate and register Black voters. In response to Mississippi holding whites-only primaries, activists like Hamer formed the racially integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to confront leading Democrats on a national stage.
President Lyndon B. Johnson attempted to distract the public from Hamer’s speech by calling a news conference during her testimony. However, networks later showed her speech on television, giving the masses a chance to hear her impassioned plea.
“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 sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in America?”Her work and voice continue to resonate within the modern Democratic Party with figures like U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, who will speak Wednesday at the 2024 Democratic National Convention who first registered to vote after Hamer urged him to while he was a college student in Mississippi.
“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,” Thompson said.
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