Fannie Lou Hamer rattled the Democratic convention with her 'Is this America?' speech 60 years ago

JACKSON, Miss. -- 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.

'Is this America?'

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. TV cameras cut away, but networks showed her speech later.

Top Democrats said Hamer's group could seat 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 as conservative Democrats across the South, including segregationists, switched to the Republican party.

Leslie-Burl McLemore was one of the Freedom delegates and recalls how determined they were.

“I knew in my mind, because I’m 23 years old and I’m vice chair of the Freedom Democratic Party, I’m not going to accept that damn compromise,” the retired political science professor at Jackson State University said recently at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson.

“We had four white folk in our delegation and the white folks didn’t have no Black folk in their delegation,” McLemore said. “So, hey, we had God on our side.”

Risking beatings and death

Other organizers included Ella Baker, Bob Moses, and David J. Dennis Sr. Only days before the 1964 convention, Dennis gave 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 Klansmen in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

That violence was fresh when Hamer testified about being evicted 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 recounted being jailed and beaten in 1963 in Winona, Mississippi, at the command of white law enforcement officers, 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 to commemorate the Freedom Democrats. Another marker, dedicated in June in Winona, recognizes the jail 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 soothed Hamer with damp rags 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 kind of guard her back," Simpson said.

“State-sanctioned violence” is among the many issues from Hamer’s 1964 testimony that still resonate, said Keisha N. Blain, a Brown University historian. She cited the July 6 shooting death of Sonya Massey, a Black woman, by a deputy who responded to her 911 call.

“This theme is still lingering, even if the specific circumstances are different,” Blain said.

Advocating for bodily autonomy

While Hamer didn't make it part of her testimony at the convention, she also was an advocate for 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 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 kept speaking after the convention, famously saying she was "sick and tired of being sick and tired” over how long America was taking to ensure fair treatment. Another year went by 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 dismantled a significant part of the Voting Rights Act — the requirement for states with a history of racial discrimination in voting, mainly in the South, to get federal approval before changing the way they hold elections. "Many communities across the nation are grappling with attempts at voter suppression,” Blain said.

Hamer also advocated for fair treatment of Black farmers. The Biden administration in late July announced more than $2 billion in direct payments to Black and minority farmers who faced discrimination from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance called this “disgraceful,” suggesting it is racist against white people. But Thompson said Black landowners had been refused credit and denied support from the USDA for many years. "The people who ran the federal agencies were part and parcel to the system of disenfranchisement,” Thompson said.

Still an inspiration

Wil Colom, a Mississippi lawyer who now serves on 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 after her appearance. Colom said the speech was “electrifying" and motivated him to challenge segregation at theaters and swimming pools.

Colom said he visited Hamer at her modest home in Ruleville before she died of cancer at 59 in 1977.

“She had no perception, which surprised me, of what an important figure she had become,” Colom said.

The Freedom Democrats helped lead the way to President Barack Obama's election in 2008 and now to Harris' nomination, Dennis said.

“To me, it's all connected,” Dennis said. “It’s like a relay race. One baton moving to the next.”