Fannie Lou Hamer rattled the Democratic convention with her ‘Is this America?’ speech 60 years ago

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris is accepting the Democrats’ presidential nomination Thursday, exactly 60 years after another Black woman mesmerized the nation with a televised speech that challenged the seating of Mississippi’s all-white delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

The testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer to the credentials committee in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was vivid and blunt.

She described how she was fired from her plantation job in retaliation for trying to register to vote and brutalized in jail for encouraging other Black people to assert their rights. She told of arbitrary tests that white authorities imposed to prevent Black people from voting and other unconstitutional methods that kept white elites in power across the segregated South.

“All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens,” Hamer told the committee.

Whether every eligible citizen can vote and have their vote be counted is still an open question in this election, said U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, who is speaking Wednesday at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He got his first practical experience in democracy at Hamer’s urging in 1966, when he was a college student in Mississippi and she recruited him to register other Black voters.

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