Sixty years ago, on August 22, 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer, a Black former sharecropper from Sunflower County, Mississippi, who had become a civil-rights activist, delivered one of the most eloquent addresses on race relations ever heard. Testifying before the credentials committee at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, where President Lyndon B. Johnson was days away from being nominated, Hamer joined a group of other Mississippians to demand that the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party be seated at the convention instead of an all-white delegation sent by the state’s Democratic Party. These white Democrats, the group from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party argued, had long discriminated and committed violence against Black citizens like them, and had worked to keep them disenfranchised.
Hamer was one of the many women who had been at the center of a voter-registration drive in the Deep South since the early 1960s. Those efforts culminated in 1964 with the campaign known as Freedom Summer, organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other civil-rights groups. Just weeks before the convention, the nation was horrified to learn that three participants, one Black Mississippian and two white Jewish volunteers from New York—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner—had been murdered by Klansmen with whom local police officers collaborated.
Sitting at a table before the committee members, with television cameras capturing her every word, Hamer recounted how she had been attacked and beaten in the Winona, Mississippi, jail for her voting-rights activities. She concluded her address with these words:
All of this is on account 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?
That question has haunted the nation ever since. In this November’s election, all American voters will get the chance to answer Hamer’s question. We can hope they will provide a better answer than Democrats did in 1964.