TThis year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago marks a historic moment as Vice President Kamala Harris is named the Democratic presidential nominee. Harris’ ascension to this position – as the first Black and Asian woman to lead a major political party – would not have been possible without decades of efforts by Black activists to assert their political agency even in the most difficult situations.
A typical example of this is the political efforts of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer. Sixty years ago on August 22, Hamer delivered a stirring speech at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. She paved the way for Harris’ rise while drawing attention to the challenges many Americans still face today – particularly voter suppression and state-sanctioned violence.
Fannie Lou Hamer’s path to the 1964 Democratic National Convention began in rural poverty. Born on October 6, 1917, the granddaughter of enslaved blacks, Hamer worked most of her life as a sharecropper. At the tender age of 12, she completed her education at a local school to help her family cope with growing financial pressures. Yet Hamer’s family remained trapped in poverty – the result of the exploitative nature of the sharecropping system and the violence used to maintain it.
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The difficulties of her childhood continued into adulthood, as she struggled to make ends meet. Despite her limited material resources and the various challenges she faced as a black woman living in poverty in Mississippi, Hamer was committed to improving the lives of others.
On August 27, 1962, at the age of 44, Hamer attended a meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at the William Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in Ruleville, Mississippi. At the time, only 5% of Mississippi’s 450,000 black residents were registered to vote. To ensure that black Americans did not circumvent decades of restrictive and unconstitutional laws and practices, white Southerners had worked diligently to deny African Americans the right to vote, threatening to shoot anyone who dared to defy them.
The violence that white Americans used to block black votes only underscored their immense power. Realizing the potentially transformative power of her voice, Hamer quickly volunteered to travel with the group of SNCC activists to Indianola, Mississippi, to register to vote at the county courthouse. Hamer realized in that moment that she had the power to influence local, state, and national politics to build an inclusive democracy that lived up to the ideals Americans supposedly held in high esteem. “The only thing they could do to me was kill me,” she later remarked, “and it seemed like they had been trying to do that, little by little, for as long as I can remember.”
Hamer’s newfound sense of empowerment changed her life. Over the next few months, she became SNCC’s senior field secretary and traveled throughout the South to mobilize residents for the right to vote.
Her political work exposed her to constant harassment and violence. In June 1963, Hamer and several other activists were arrested in Winona, Mississippi, while returning from a voter workshop in South Carolina. The group was taken to the Montgomery County Jail, where they were tortured for four days. Hamer was beaten by police officers – who enlisted prisoners to assist her – which resulted in kidney damage, a blood clot in her eye, and an even worse limp.
But Hamer refused to back down after these setbacks. She then set her sights on the 1964 convention in Atlantic City, where she used the power of public testimony to denounce state-sanctioned violence, the deep inequality facing black Americans, and America’s failure to live up to its democratic ideals. The timing of the convention was particularly significant. Just weeks earlier, President Lyndon Johnson had signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination in public places and discrimination in the workplace.
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The primary purpose of Hamer’s trip to Atlantic City was to address the shortcomings of the Democratic Party and demand equal representation. She came with a delegation from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), an organization she founded in April 1964 with Bob Moses, Annie Devine, Ella Baker, Victoria Gray, and others to challenge the Mississippi Democratic Party’s practice of excluding black Americans from attending the party’s conventions.
Several civil rights organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), advocated that the MFDP be given an opportunity at the convention to challenge the validity of Mississippi’s other all-white delegation at the convention, hoping that the national party would intervene and give the MFDP seats rather than suffer the embarrassment of exposing the Democratic Party’s lack of equality.
Hamer joined other members of the MFDP in making her case before the DNC’s Credentials Committee. In her memorable speech, she drew on her personal experiences to shed light on the racist violence and intimidation that black people endured daily in the Jim Crow South.
She began by talking about voter suppression. She recounted how in 1962, when she went to the courthouse in Indianola, Mississippi, to register to vote, she encountered one roadblock after another. When she finally made it, she returned home, where the owner of the plantation where she worked as a sharecropper gave her an ultimatum: “If you don’t go and withdraw your registration, you’ll have to leave.” She left that same evening.
She then recounted how white racists fired 16 bullets into a house where Hamer had lived after being expelled from the plantation. She also described the brutal attack she suffered in Winona in 1963.
Hamer concluded her speech by asking, “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our phones unanswered because our lives are threatened daily because we want to live as decent people in America?”
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Those who heard the speech were transformed by its power. She used the opportunity to demand more than recognition from the DNC; she sent the message that silence in the face of humiliation and violence was simply not an option. This message was so powerful that President Lyndon B. Johnson deliberately interrupted Hamer’s testimony by calling an impromptu press conference. His efforts were in vain, however, and the entire speech was later broadcast on the evening news. Through televised broadcast, Hamer’s message had an even greater impact, reaching millions of people from diverse communities across the country. Hamer had lifted the curtain: The United States could not claim to be a democracy while denying millions of its citizens the right to vote.
This year’s DNC in Chicago will once again feature a black woman at the center of attention – but this time as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate. Hamer’s groundbreaking speech and her tireless fight for civil and human rights paved the way for this historic moment.
And despite this progress, the problems Hamer addresses persist in American society. State-sanctioned violence continues to impact the lives of Black and brown people. And as the recent shooting of Sonya Massey shows, Black women and girls are particularly vulnerable.
State governments also continue to try to restrict access to the ballot and use underhanded means to manipulate election results. Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic presidential candidate, has a unique opportunity to make Hamer’s vision of an inclusive democracy for all a reality by, among other things, advocating an aggressive response to voter suppression and state-sanctioned violence.
Keisha N. Blain is a professor of African Studies and History at Brown University. She is the author of several books, including Wake up America: Black women on the future of democracy (W.W. Norton, 2024).
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME hereThe opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors..
