(Host) The upcoming Democratic and Republican National Conventions cause
commentator and Vermont Humanities Council executive director Peter
Gilbert to think of the 1964 Democratic National Convention – and an
inspired civil rights activist.
(Gilbert) In the summer of 1964 at the
Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Fannie
Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist who’d picked cotton most of her
life, testified before the Credentials Committee that delegates from the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which she had helped start,
should be seated. She argued that the official, all-white Mississippi
delegation had been elected under racially discriminatory practices so
egregious as to deprive it of its legitimacy.
She told the
Committee her story, that when she and others had traveled to their
county seat to register to vote, they were arrested, taken to jail, and then beaten nearly to death by
state troopers and people under their direction. When she got home and
she refused to have her name removed from the voting list, the owner of
the plantation where she had worked and lived for eighteen years sent
her packing. That night sixteen shots were fired into the
house where she had taken shelter for the night. All this happened, she
told the Credentials Committee, simply because they had tried to
register to vote. Her testimony was powerful stuff, and it infuriated
President Lyndon Johnson, who would be the party’s nominee.
Democratic
Party leaders tried to find a compromise that would satisfy Hamer’s
party but not cause millions of southern whites to abandon President
Johnson and vote instead for the Republican, Barry Goldwater. Party
leaders proposed seating two non-voting delegates from Hamer’s Freedom
Democratic Party. Hamer famously replied, "We didn’t come all this way
for no two seats, ‘cause all of us is tired."
"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."
Compromise
couldn’t be reached that summer, Hamer’s delegates were not seated, but
she had made her point. By the next Democratic National Convention four
years later, the party’s credentialing rules had changed for the
better. However, that year Richard Nixon would win the White House using
the so-called Southern Strategy, which exploited anti-black racism,
fear of social unrest, and distrust of the federal government.
Hamer
died of breast cancer in 1977 at the age of fifty-nine. On her grave
stone is one of her most famous comments: "I am sick and tired of being
sick and tired."
Perhaps nothing is more fundamental to the
nobility of American democracy than the right to vote. This year the
United States Attorney General has opened a record number of
investigations (more than a hundred) into possible voting rights
discrimination. And so, while there’s been progress in the last fifty
years, it seems that the work that Fannie Lou Hamer and others dedicated
their lives to, many risked their lives for, and some died for isn’t
finished.
Fanny Lou Hamer thought that she’d be forgotten; but she isn’t, and she shouldn’t be.