Hamer could not be thrown off her mission. She recounted her experience in Winona on numerous occasions—most notably at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. At the time, the Democratic Party dominated Southern politics. Hamer showed up at the convention as a representative of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), an organization she had helped establish to challenge the segregated, all-white Mississippi delegation at the DNC. As Hamer and her colleagues pointed out, a “whites-only” Democratic Party representing a state in which one out of five residents were black undermined the very notion of representative democracy. In their eyes, those who supported a “whites-only” party were no different than white mobs who employed extralegal methods to block African Americans from voting.
In her televised DNC speech, Hamer called out American hypocrisy. “Is this America,” she asked, as tears welled up in her eyes, “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?”
Hamer had pulled back the curtain. The United States could not claim to be a democracy while withholding voting rights from millions of its citizens. Although the MFDP delegation did not secure its intended seats at the convention, Hamer’s passionate speech set in motion a series of events that led to the 1965 passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act (VRA). Her address, combined with the nationwide protests led by black activists, compelled President Lyndon B. Johnson—who had interrupted Hamer’s speech with a press conference of his own—to introduce federal legislation that banned local laws, like literacy tests, that blocked African Americans from the ballot box. The act also put in place (recently curtailed) restrictions on how certain states could implement new election laws new election laws.
The VRA significantly bolstered black political participation in the South. In Mississippi alone, the number of African Americans registered to vote dramatically increased from 28,000 to approximately 280,000 following its passage. In the aftermath of the VRA, the number of black elected officials in the South more than doubled—from 72 to 159—following the 1966 elections.
Hamer not only helped to register voters but empowered others by entering the realm of electoral politics herself. In 1964, one year after she succeeded in registering herself to vote for the first time, Hamer ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives to challenge white Mississippi Democrat Jamie Whitten, who was seeking a 13th term. Although her chances of winning were slim, she explained to a reporter, “I’m showing people that a Negro can run for office.” Despite a limited budget, Hamer ran a spirited campaign backed by a coalition of civil rights organizations, promising to tackle the issues of poverty and hunger. The Democratic Party refused to allow Hamer’s name on the official ballot, but the MFDP organized mock election events and brought black Mississippi voters out in record numbers. An estimated 60,000 African Americans participated and cast a symbolic vote for Hamer in what the MFDP termed a “Freedom Ballot.”