Fannie Lou Hamer’s full testimony before the Credentials Committee, Democratic National Convention (8 min.with transcript).
americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/sayitplain/flhamer.html
Excerpt:
Mr. Chairman, and the Credentials Committee, my name is Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, and I live at 626 East Lafayette Street, Ruleville, Mississippi, Sunflower County, the home of Senator James O. Eastland, and Senator Stennis.
It was the 31st of August in 1962 that 18 of us traveled twenty-six miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to try to become first-class citizens…
[upon returning to her sharecropping post]… I was met there by my children, who told me that the plantation owner was angry because I had gone down to try to register.
After they told me, my husband came, and said that the plantation owner was raising cain because I had tried to register, and before he quit talking the plantation owner came, and said, “Fannie Lou, do you know—did Pap tell you what I said?”
And I said, “yes, sir.”
He said, “I mean that,” he said, “If you don’t go down and withdraw your registration, you will have to leave,” said, “Then if you go down and withdraw,” he said, “You will—you might have to go because we are not ready for that in Mississippi.”
And I addressed him and told him and said, “I didn’t try to register for you. I tried to register for myself.” I had to leave that same night…
All of this is on account 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 of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?
Thank you.
—Fannie Lou Hamer, Testimony before the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. August 22, 1964.
Fannie Lou Hamer, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegate, at the Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey, August 1964, Warren K. Leffler, photographer, Library of Congress, loc.gov/pictures/item/2003688126/