For those who don’t remember, and for those who choose to forget:
In 1964, a group calling itself the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party attempted to get seated at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. The MFDP delegation sought to be seated in place of the regular delegation, which consisted of racist whites who had benefitted from keeping 93 percent of African Americans disenfranchised. Five southern delegations threatened to quit the convention if the MFDP delegation was seated.
The Johnson Administration responded by sending then-Senator Hubert H. Humphrey to negotiate a “compromise,” which would have seated the “regulars” and allowed two members of the MFDP to attend as at-large delegates. The MFDP refused.
The issue went before the credentials committee, where Fannie Lou Hamer, the MFDP vice-chair spoke.
The twentieth of twenty children, Fannie Lou’s grandparents were slaves. Her parents were sharecroppers, and she started to pick cotton at age six. When she was twelve, she dropped out of school. After she married Perry “Pap” Hamer in the early 1940s, she worked as a sharecropper (and later as a timekeeper) on the Marlowe Plantation near Ruleville, Mississippi.
Here is some of what she had to say to the credentials committee:
Mr. Chairman, and to the Credentials Committee, my name is Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, and I live at 626 East Lafayette Street, Ruleville, Mississippi, Sunflower County, the home of Senator James O. Eastland, and Senator Stennis.
It was the 31st of August in 1962 that eighteen of us traveled twenty-six miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to become first-class citizens. We was met in Indianola by policemen, Highway Patrolmen, and they only allowed two of us in to take the literacy test at the time. . . .
[I]n the rural area where I had worked as a timekeeper and sharecropper for eighteen years, I was met there by my children, who told me that the plantation owner was angry because I had gone down to try to register. After they told me, my husband came, and said the plantation owner was raising Cain because I had tried to register. Before he quit talking the plantation owner came and said, “Fannie Lou, do you know - did Pap tell you what I said?”
And I said, “Yes, sir.”
He said, “Well I mean that.” He said, “If you don’t go down and withdraw your registration, you will have to leave.” Said, “Then if you go down and withdraw,” said, “you still might have to go because we are not ready for that in Mississippi.” And I addressed him and told him and said, “I didn’t try to register for you. I tried to register for myself.”
I had to leave that same night. . . .
And June the 9th, 1963, I had attended a voter registration workshop; was returning back to Mississippi. Ten of us was traveling by the Continental Trailway bus. When we got to Winona, Mississippi, [I was pulled off the bus and arrested, along with five others]. . . . [I]t wasn’t too long before three white men came to my cell. One of these men was a State Highway Patrolman and he asked me where I was from. I told him Ruleville and he said, “We are going to check this.”
They left my cell and it wasn’t too long before they came back. He said, “You are from Ruleville all right,” and he used a curse word. And he said, “We are going to make you wish you was dead.” I was carried out of that cell into another cell where they had two Negro prisoners. The State Highway Patrolmen ordered the first Negro to take the blackjack. The first Negro prisoner ordered me, by orders from the State Highway Patrolman, for me to lay down on a bunk bed on my face.
I laid on my face and the first Negro began to beat. I was beat by the first Negro until he was exhausted. I was holding my hands behind me at that time on my left side, because I suffered from polio when I was six years old. After the first Negro had beat until he was exhausted, the State Highway Patrolman ordered the second Negro to take the blackjack.
The second Negro began to beat and I began to work my feet, and the State Highway Patrolman ordered the first Negro who had beat me to sit on my feet - to keep me from working my feet. I began to scream and one white man got up and began to beat me in my head and tell me to hush. . . .
All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens. And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?
Thank you.
Fearful that southern democrats would defect en masse to the Republicans if he did not seat the white delegation (something that they would do anyway), Johnson got the credentials committee to reject the MFDP’s application and seat the “regulars.”
The events of Atlantic City were not that long ago. They took place in my lifetime. In Barack Obama’s lifetime. And in Michelle Obama’s lifetime. And now, forty-four years later, a woman not much younger than Fannie Lou Hamer’s own adopted children has headlined the national convention of the very party that once denied Fannie Lou Hamer entry.
Here’s what Fannie Lou said on another occasion:
I do remember, one time, a man came to me after the students began to work in Mississippi, and he said the white people were getting tired and they were getting tense and anything might happen. Well, I asked him, “how long he thinks we had been getting tired?” … All my life I’ve been sick and tired. Now I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.
I hope you had a good view last night, Fannie Lou. You don’t have to be sick and tired anymore.
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