Fannie Lou Hamer's Powerful Testimony | Freedom Summer

American Experience | PBS
2014 Jun 23

Former sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer's Congressional testimony is so powerful that President Johnson calls an impromptu press conference to get her off the air. But his plan backfires.

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Fannie Lou Hamer rattled Democratic convention 60 years ago with 'Is this America?' speech

August 21, 2024 9:50 AM
By Associated Press



FILE - Fannie Lou Hamer testifies before the credentials committee of the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on Aug. 22, 1964, as her racially integrated group challenged the seating of the all-white Mississippi delegation.

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.

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