NARRATOR
In the summer of 1964, the black men and women of Mississippi, joined by a thousand young volunteers from the north, formed the Freedom Democratic Party in defiance of the all-white Democratic Party of Mississippi. When the Democratic National Convention met in Atlantic City, black activists in the Freedom Democratic Party traveled by bus from Mississippi to demand that the all-white delegates from Mississippi (whose population was 40 percent black) be replaced by a black and white delegation that would be representative of the state. Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper who had become a leader of the movement in Mississippi, spoke to the Credentials Committee, citing her own experience, about what happened to black people in Mississippi who tried to vote. Her eloquence on this occasion, which was nationally televised, so worried President Lyndon Johnson that he issued a White House announcement to interrupt her testimony. The Democratic Party would not seat the black delegates, offering them instead two nonvoting seats, which they refused. Here is a portion of Mrs. Hamer’s testimony.
FANNIE LOU HAMER
Mr. Chairman, and the Credentials Committee, my name is Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, and I live at 626 East Lafayette Street, Ruleville, Mississippi, Sunflower County, the home of Senator James O. Eastland, and Senator Stennis.
It was the 31st of August in 1962 that 18 of us traveled 26 miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to try to become first-class citizens…. The plantation owner came, and said. “Fannie Lou, if you don’t go down and withdraw your registration, you will have to leave because we are 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.”
I had to leave that same night.
And in June, the 9th, 1963, I had attended a voter registration workshop, was returning back to Mississippi. Ten of us was traveling by the Continental Trailway bus. When we got to Winona, Mississippi, “It was a State Highway Patrolman and a Chief of Police ordered us out.”
Somebody screamed, “Get that one there,” and when I went to get in the car, then the man told me I was under arrest, and he kicked me.
I was carried to the county jail, and I was placed in a cell with a young woman called Miss Ivesta Simpson. I began to hear the sounds and horrible screams, and I could hear somebody say, “Can you say, yes, sir, nigger? Can you say yes, sir?”
She would say, “Yes, I can say yes, sir.”
“So, say it.”
She says, “I don’t know you well enough.”
They beat her, I don’t know how long, and after a while she began to pray, and asked God to have mercy on those people.
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.
Thank you.