"All of this is on account of 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 be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?" -- Mississippi civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer (10/7/1917 - 3/14/1977), giving testimony to the Democratic Party Convention's credentials committee on August 22, 1964, as they were deliberating whether to seat her delegation from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in place of the Dixiecrat segregationist delegation. Her testimony detailed Hamer's and her associates' brutal treatment by Mississippi police for trying to register black voters.
While the attempt to seat the MFDP delegation failed, they were seated four years later at the 1968 Democratic Party convention. It marked the beginning of the exodus of Dixiecrats from the Democratic Party, who found safe harbor for their racism in Richard Nixon's shameful "Southern Strategy" Republican Party.
(photo: Bettman Archives / Getty)
