‘Is this America?’ Six decades later, Fannie Lou Hamer gets an answer

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Sixty summers ago, Fannie Lou Hamer told millions of Americans watching the Democratic National Convention that 16 bullets came into her home after she tried to vote in Mississippi.

President Lyndon B. Johnson called a hasty press conference to get television news to cut away from her testimony.

His ploy failed. The evening news featured the sharecropper detailing the violence against her and other Black Mississippians who joined the civil rights movement. “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?” she asked.

On Aug. 22, the 60th anniversary of that testimony, another Black woman, Kamala Harris, is expected to make history when she takes the stage as the Democratic Party’s nominee for President.

This time, the cameras will keep rolling, said Leslie Burl McLemore, founding director of the Fannie Lou Hamer Institute at Jackson State University.

“Mrs. Hamer’s going to be there in spirit,” said her friend, Euvester Simpson. “I know she’s going to be there.”

Two days before Harris takes the stage, a new Mississippi Freedom Trail marker will be unveiled in Atlantic City, where Hamer testified.

“It changed the Democratic Party,” said Stuart Rockoff, executive director of the Mississippi Humanities Council, which manages the Freedom Trail. “It’s extremely appropriate to recognize it at the place where it happened.”

It will be the first Freedom Trail marker erected outside the state.

Sixty years ago, nearly 1,000 college students came to Mississippi as part of Freedom Summer. On the first day of that summer, Klansmen killed three young civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, and buried their bodies 15 feet down in an earthen dam.

Two days later, FBI agents found their station wagon, which Klansmen had burned to destroy all the evidence.

When Schwerner’s wife, Rita, heard the news, she wept, knowing her husband was dead. Hamer held her and comforted her.

Hamer joined Bob Moses, who led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi, and others in forming the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the state’s all-white delegation at the Democratic National Convention. Sixty-eight delegates, made up of everyone from ministers to mechanics, made their way to Atlantic City.

So did Simpson, who sat next to Hamer on the bus ride. A year earlier, she had nursed Hamer’s wounds inside the Winona jail after Hamer and other activists were brutally beaten.

On the trip to New Jersey, freedom songs filled the air, Simpson said. “We all had the sense we were making history.”

She was 18, and Roy DeBerry was 17. They joined other protesters on the boardwalk, and he held up a sign that said, “Freedom Delegation Now.”

“I was a scared kid with a sign,” he said.

Hamer led them in songs like “This Little Light of Mine,” he said. “What was amazing was how connected she was to us and how connected we were to her.”

Dave Dennis Sr., one of the architects of Freedom Summer, said the young people on the boardwalk symbolized the promise of America. “They were making a stand for democracy,” he said. “It changed the narrative of what the country could be like.”

McLemore, who served as vice chair for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, said Hamer’s testimony left many misty-eyed.

“She had the people in the palm of her hands,” Dennis recalled. “We got word that the Credentials Committee would seat the [Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party] delegates.”

But that changed overnight after President Johnson and others “put the screws to people,” he said.

By morning, the plan to seat the Freedom Party delegation had dissolved into a meager offer of two at-large seats and a vow to end racial discrimination in future conventions.

Activists rejected this. “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats,” Hamer responded.

John Spann, who manages the Mississippi Freedom Trail Committee, said, “The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party not only helped change Mississippi; it changed America when it came to voting rights.”

A year after Hamer’s testimony, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, which allowed the federal government to intervene when states tried to block Black Americans from voting.

Fannie Lou Hamer statue in Ruleville, Miss.

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The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party “helped America realize democracy,” Spann said.

The Freedom Trail marker ceremony is set for 10 a.m. Aug. 20 at the Kennedy Plaza on Atlantic City’s Boardwalk. That will be followed at 7 p.m. with a panel of some of those who were there at the Fannie Lou Hamer Event Room at Stockton University’s Atlantic City Campus.

The panel, co-sponsored by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, hopes to include Dennis, DeBerry and Simpson.

It will be DeBerry’s first time in Atlantic City since that summer. “I’m excited about going back,” he said, “and recognizing the heroes and sheroes who made America America.”

-- Article credit to Jerry Mitchell of Mississippi Today --

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