As the Trump impeachment trial gets under way with most Republicans taking the “see no evil” approach, cowards and hypocrites all, I was thinking about some of the people who risked their lives standing up for what this country can be.
One was a woman from Mississippi named Fannie Lou Hamer. She was an advocate for voting rights, women’s rights and human rights. They need to make a movie so young people will know her. She was famous for saying “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired” but there was way more than that.
The 1964 Democratic convention was in Atlantic City, NJ. Hamer and others appeared before the credentials committee, arguing the all-white regular delegation broke party rules by not representing all Mississippi residents.
The Washington Post reported:
“When she arrived at the witness chair, Hamer put her purse on the table, folded her hands and without notes proceeded to speak for 13 riveting minutes, telling the credentials committee and the world about the injustices suffered by black people who wanted to vote.
“Hamer recounted being stopped by police after trying to register to vote, about being fired as a sharecropper, about 16 bullets shot into the home of friends where she had slept after moving off the plantation. She described the beating she endured in a Mississippi jail.”
Then she said:
“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 are threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in America?”
Lyndon Johnson, remembered as a civil rights champion, fought the seating. A compromise was reached where the FDP would get two at large non-voting seats. Johnson ordered neither go to Hamer. He directed Hubert Humphrey to fix it if he wanted to be VP.
“The president has said he will not let that illiterate woman speak on the floor of the Democratic convention,” Humphrey said, explaining that his nomination hung on the Freedom Party accepting the compromise.
“I was amazed,” Hamer remembered later, “and I said, ‘Well, Mr. Humphrey, do you mean to tell me that your position is more important to you than 400,000 black peoples’ lives?’ ”
Hamer’s party rejected the compromise. The white delegates from Mississippi walked out. When her talk to the credentials committee made the network news, she became a hero.
Hamer died in 1977 at 59. Her grandparents were slaves; her childhood was lived in poverty. Born into a Mississippi sharecropping family in 1917, she began working in the fields when she was 6. About 12, Hamer dropped out of school to work full time, She continued to work as a sharecropper and after her 1944 marriage to Perry “Pap” Hamer, they worked together on a cotton plantation near Ruleville, Mississippi. They adopted children because while undergoing surgery to remove a tumor, she was given a hysterectomy without her consent. She was fired from the plantation job for her voting rights activities.
At her memorial service, Hodding Carter III, under Secretary of State in the Jimmy Carter administration whose dad, Hodding Carter Jr., won the Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for his editorials against racial segregation, said “Mrs. Hamer, there are a lot of fraying in her lifetime, and I think that history will say that among those who were freed were white Mississippians. Who were finally free if they had the will to be freed, from their selves, and from their history, from their racism, from their past.”
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