I’m writing this from Jackson, Mississippi, where I’m finishing up a summer studying civil rights and desegregation. This has been an extremely historic time to be here, studying this topic: it’s 60 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and 50 years after Freedom Summer and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We also started in Boston in June, looking at busing and commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Morgan v. Hennigan decision.
Part of Freedom Summer involved the organization of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. This party challenged the Mississippi Democratic Party’s all-white primary and delegation at the 1964 Convention. (Most of the white delegates opposed Johnson anyways.)
Fannie Lou Hamer was born in Ruleville, Mississippi, up in the Delta, in 1917. Hamer was a sharecropper, at least until one day in 1962, when she took the brave step of registering to vote. This was no small feat here in Mississippi in 1962. She was later quoted as saying:
I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared – but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.
In 1964, Hamer led the MFDP’s challenge at the Democratic National Convention, which was being held in Atlantic City. There, on live TV, she gave one of the most inspiring speeches that I have ever heard. President Johnson was so scared of her that he cut in with a diversion press conference (the media thought that he might announce his running mate). But that just made her more powerful: her testimony before the credentials committee was replayed that night in prime time on all the networks. You can listen to her testimony here.
It’s worth noting that the MFDP was generally unsuccessful. The party offered them a compromise, in which 2 MFDP delegates would be seated in place of 2 members of the all-white delegation. At first, the MFDP’s lawyer, who was under pressure from the administration, wanted to take the deal, but the delegates rejected it, and none were seated. Yet they made a difference: their work and Hamer’s testimony was critical in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
It’s important to remember heros like Mrs. Hamer, who so many of us have forgotten. As we remember and teach the Civil Rights Movement, we shouldn’t just teach that Rosa sat down and Martin stood up. We need to remember the people on the ground, the activists who were beaten or killed for their work. The students who risked their lives going door-to-door registering voters. The brave local people who housed them, and who worked alongside them. The religious leaders who allowed them to use their churches as operating bases and Freedom Schools, to teach literacy and African-American culture and history, despite the very real risk of a Klan bombing.