By Marian Wright Edelman,
Washington Informer
As our nation experiences a political convention where a woman of color makes history, it’s another chance to look back at the convention that happened 60 years ago this week in Atlantic City, N.J., during the civil rights movement’s landmark Freedom Summer. The extraordinary woman who made history then as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party unsuccessfully sought to unseat the segregated slate of Mississippi Party regulars was one of our nation’s civil rights sheroes and one of my own great lanterns and role models from the dog days of struggle in Mississippi: Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer. As Children’s Defense Fund continues to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer, we honor that moment and its legacy today.
Mrs. Hamer, the 20th child born of poor Mississippi sharecroppers, once asked her mother why they weren’t white. She internalized and lived her mother’s answer: “You must respect yourself as a little child, a little Black child. And as you grow older, respect yourself as a Black woman. Then one day, other people will respect you.” And we did respect Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer as a Black woman. And we loved her. I loved her. Mrs. Hamer was 44 and working on a Sunflower County, Mississippi, plantation when civil rights workers arrived in the county. She went to hear them when they spoke about voter registration, and when they asked if anyone was willing to try to register to vote, she raised her hand. Her indomitable spirit and self-respect led her to cofound the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and travel to Atlantic City as vice chair of the MFDP’s integrated delegation.
There, Mrs. Hamer testified before the convention’s Credentials Committee on the intimidation, arrest and brutal jailhouse beating she had experienced trying to register to vote in Mississippi. In one exchange, she described the conversation she had with the white man who owned the land where she and her family lived and worked as sharecroppers when he angrily told her he would evict them because she had tried to register to vote: “My husband came, and said the plantation owner was raising Cain because I had tried to register. And before he quit talking the plantation owner came and said, ‘Fannie Lou, do you know—did Pap [her husband] tell you what I said?’ And I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He said, ‘Well, I mean that.’ Said, ‘If you don’t go down and withdraw your registration, you will have to leave.’ Said, ‘Then if you go down and withdraw … you still might have to go because we’re not ready for that in Mississippi.’ And I addressed him and told him and said, ‘I didn’t try to register for you. I tried to register for myself.’”
She continued her testimony with the brutal, painful details of what happened after she was brought to the county jail. Her speech was nationally televised, despite President Lyndon Johnson’s last-minute attempts to push her off the air to avoid alienating white Southern voters. She powerfully concluded: “All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens. And if the [Mississippi] 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 of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”
The MFDP was only given two at-large seats at that convention, but it was made clear that change was on the way. Eight years later Mrs. Hamer was officially elected as a national party delegate. She never let anything turn her back, although, as she once said, “I’m never sure anymore when I leave home whether I’ll get back or not. Sometimes it seems like to tell the truth is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I’ll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom. I’m not backing off.” Her spirit of grit, love and courage made history then and is still an inspiration for the history being made right now. As Vice President Kamala Harris makes another historic leap forward, it extends the legacy of barrier-breakers determined to be “the first, but not the last.”
Edelman is founder and president emerita of the Children’s Defense Fund.
