WHEN VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS takes the stage in Chicago on Thursday night at the Democratic National Convention to accept her party’s nomination for president of the United States, I will raise a glass to my grandmother from Newton, Mississippi and remember again the year she stood up to powerful, undemocratic white men.
Thelma McMullan arrived as an alternate delegate at the 1964 Democratic convention in Atlantic City. She was a 57-year-old white woman from Mississippi. Her husband, Milton, 60 and white, was an official delegate of the Mississippi Democratic Party.
President Lyndon B. Johnson was the nominee. Thelma supported Johnson. Milton did not. He and other white Mississippi delegates passed the following resolution before the convention: “We oppose, condemn and deplore [President Johnson’s] Civil Rights Act of 1964. . . . We believe in separation of the races in all phases of our society.”
That summer arrived following a bleak season of political violence in our country. John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed the previous November. Medgar Evers had been shot and killed months before Kennedy. And then, in the immediate runup to the convention, there were the 1964 Freedom Summer murders. Civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were killed in Neshoba County for helping black citizens register to vote. Members of the KKK and local police had murdered them.
The new Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was at the convention, too. Cofounded by Fannie Lou Hamer, who that summer famously said, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” the upstart party was made up of elected white and black delegates. They were there to challenge and protest the Mississippi Democratic Party’s all-white delegation, which had ignored federal election law by excluding black Mississippians in their selection process. Most of these regular delegates had no intention of supporting Johnson in the November election. They planned to switch to the Republican presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, because he opposed the Civil Rights Act.
At the opening of the convention, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party made its case to the credentials committee that their alternate slate of 68 delegates should be seated.
The proceedings were televised.
“The seating of the delegation from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party has political and moral significance far beyond the borders of Mississippi, or the halls of this convention,” Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said in support of the MFDP delegates.
Then Fannie Lou Hamer gave her own hair-raising account in exacting detail of how she and other black Mississippians seeking the right to vote were extorted, threatened, harassed, shot at, beaten, jailed, then beaten and tortured again in jail.