This year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago is a historic moment as Vice President Kamala Harris becomes the Democratic presidential nominee. Harris’ ascent to this position — as the first Black and Asian woman to lead a major political party ticket — would not be possible were it not for the decades-long efforts of Black women activists to assert their political agency even in the most difficult spaces.
The political efforts of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer are a case in point. Sixty years ago this Aug. 22, Hamer delivered an electrifying speech at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J. It paved the way for Harris’s rise and also drew attention to the very challenges still facing many Americans today — especially voter suppression and state-sanctioned violence.
Fannie Lou Hamer’s path to the 1964 Democratic National Convention began in rural poverty. Born on Oct. 6, 1917, Hamer was the granddaughter of enslaved Black people and worked as a sharecropper for much of her life. At the tender age of 12, she concluded her studies at a local schoolhouse so she could help her family meet their growing financial pressures. Still, Hamer’s family remained trapped in poverty — the result of the exploitative nature of the sharecropping system and the violence used to maintain it.
The difficulties of Hamer’s childhood extended well into adulthood when she struggled to make ends meet. Despite her limited material resources and the various challenges she endured as a Black woman living in poverty in Mississippi, Hamer committed herself to making a difference in the lives of others.
On Aug. 27, 1962, at the age of 44, Hamer attended a meeting organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at the William Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in Ruleville, Miss. At the time, only 5% of Mississippi’s 450,000 Black residents were registered to vote. In order to ensure that Black Americans did not uproot decades of restrictive and unconstitutional laws and practices, white Southerners had diligently worked to block African Americans from the vote. Those who dared to defy them met the barrel of a gun.
The violent force that white Americans used to prevent the Black vote only served to underscore its immense power. Hamer came to realize the potentially transformative power of her vote and quickly volunteered to travel with the group of SNCC activists to Indianola, Miss., to try to register to vote at the county courthouse. Hamer realized in that moment that she had the ability to shape local, state, and national politics to build an inclusive democracy that lived up to the promise of the ideals that Americans claimed to treasure. “The only thing they could do to me was to kill me,” she later remarked, “and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.”
Hamer’s newfound sense of agency transformed her life. Over the next few months, she became SNCC’s oldest field secretary, traveling throughout the South to organize residents around voting rights.
Her political work exposed her to constant harassment and violence. In June 1963, Hamer and several other activists were arrested in Winona, Miss., as they were returning from a voter’s workshop in South Carolina. The group was taken to the Montgomery County Jail, where they endured four days of torture. Hamer was beaten by police officers — who enlisted prisoners to aid them — resulting in kidney damage, a blood clot in her eye, and a worsened limp.
Yet Hamer refused to back down after these setbacks. She then set her eyes on the 1964 DNC in Atlantic City, where she used the power of public testimony to confront state-sanctioned violence, the deep inequalities facing Black Americans, and America’s failure to live up to its democratic ideals. The timing of the convention was especially significant. Only several weeks prior, the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination in public places and banned employment discrimination, was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson.
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The primary purpose of Hamer’s trip to Atlantic City was to address to shortcomings of the Democratic Party and demand equal representation. She arrived with a delegation from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), an organization she established with Bob Moses, Annie Devine, Ella Baker, Victoria Gray, and others in April 1964 to challenge the Mississippi Democratic Party’s record of excluding Black Americans from participating in the party’s meetings.
Several civil rights organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), advocated for the MFDP to have an opportunity at the DNC to question the validity of Mississippi’s other all-white delegation to the convention. They hoped that the national party would intervene by giving seats to the MFDP rather than suffer the embarrassment of exposing the Democratic Party’s lack of equal representation.
Hamer joined other members of the MFDP who made their case before the DNC’s Credentials Committee. Her memorable speech drew on her personal experiences to shed light on the racist violence and intimidation Black people in the Jim Crow South endured on a daily basis.
She first addressed voter suppression. She told the story of how when she went down to the courthouse in Indianola, Miss., to register to vote in 1962, she was confronted by one roadblock after another. When she finally succeeded, she returned home, where the owner of the plantation on which she worked as a sharecropper gave her an ultimatum: “If you don’t go down and withdraw your registration, you will have to leave.” She left that night.
She then recounted how white supremacists shot 16 bullets into a home where Hamer had been staying after she was evicted from the plantation. She also described the brutal attack she suffered in Winona in 1963.
Hamer closed 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 telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, 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 by the DNC; she sent the message that silence in the face of degradation and violence was simply not an option. This message was so powerful that President Lyndon B. Johnson intentionally interrupted Hamer’s testimony by calling an impromptu press conference. However, his efforts were in vain, and the entire speech later aired on the evening news. By televising the speech, Hamer’s message had an even greater impact, reaching millions of people from diverse communities across the nation. Hamer had pulled back the curtain: the United States could not claim to be a democracy while withholding voting rights from millions of its citizens.
At this year’s DNC in Chicago, a Black woman will again take center stage — but this time as the Democratic Party’s candidate for president. Hamer’s groundbreaking speech and her tireless fight for civil and human rights paved the way for this historic moment.
And yet despite this progress, the challenges Hamer called out still 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 underscores, Black women and girls are especially vulnerable.
State governments are also still engaging in efforts to limit voting access and employing underhanded measures to attempt to alter election results. By advocating, among other things, an aggressive response to voter suppression and state-sanctioned violence, Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic presidential nominee, has a unique opportunity to make real Hamer’s vision of building an inclusive democracy for all.
Keisha N. Blain is a professor of Africana 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 here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
