40 years ago this week. Mississippi Freedom Party denied seats in racist convention

[Tom Joad]

By far the most stirring testimony was that of Fannie Lou Hamer, a 46-year-old ex-sharecropper who was said to be SNCC’s oldest but most dedicated field organizer. The youngest of 20 children, Hamer had spent all but two years of her life in Sunflower County, Mississippi, the home of the segregationist senator James Eastland. In 1962, when Hamer attempted to register to vote, the landowner she worked for had demanded that she withdraw her application. “I didn’t go down there to register for you,” she told him. “I went down there to register for myself. ” He kicked her off his plantation, and she went on to become an outspoken, energetic SNCC organizer, enduring prison time and police beatings alongside her younger co-workers.

In a voice that was unschooled yet full of eloquent resilience, wearing new city clothes over her short, stout frame, and bearing an expression of both sadness and hope, Hamer told the Credentials Committee that “if the Freedom 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?”

Watching the coverage from the Oval Office, Lyndon Johnson realized how potentially dangerous Hamer’s testimony was. He immediately called a press conference, forcing television coverage away from the credentials hearing. But to no avail. That evening the networks rebroadcast her testimony before a primetime audience. The next day newspapers ran photographs of Fannie Lou Hamer arm in arm with the family of Michael Schwerner in vigil on the Atlantic City Boardwalk. Telegrams flooded in from across the country, urging that the MFDP be seated. By Sunday, Joe Rauh could count 17 committee members in favor of issuing a pro-MFDP minority report.
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/2004/3/2004_3_59.shtml
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Fannie and the rest were not seated in that convention that nominated a man that would go on to commit the US to a genocidal war based on lies that will cost millions of lives, but they found they could not ignore troublemakers like Fannie Lou Hammer. Let's vow to keep the trouble brewing as long as the Democratic Party refuses to commit itself to peace, but continues to fund illegal wars that destroy homes of our Arab sisters and brothers but denies full funding for housing at home, that refuses to endorse single-payer health care for all, that refuses to end unfair, pro-corporate trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO, that supports government invasion of privacy, that refuses to outlaw torture.

Keep the tradition of Fannie Lou Hamer alive. Keep hope alive.

[Maddy McCall]

1. "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKXoXwYpzmU

Her early life was horrific. If I remember correctly, she went in to the hospital to have a baby, and came out sterilized. Not an uncommon thing back then, sadly.

I wish that youtube had the video of FLH singing "This little light of mine." It is beautiful.