The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
Near Jackson, Mississippi
In the spring of nineteen sixty-four, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Council of Federated Organizations began organizing a parallel political party in Mississippi. The regular Mississippi Democratic Party was all white by practice, by tradition, and by enforcement. Black Mississippians who tried to register to vote faced economic reprisal, violent intimidation, and legal obstruction. The regular party was not going to change.
So the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party organized its own precinct meetings, county conventions, and state convention, following the same rules and procedures as the regular party but doing so openly, with Black and white Mississippians participating together. By August, they had sixty-eight delegates prepared to travel to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and challenge the credentials of the all-white Mississippi delegation.
The delegation included sharecroppers and teachers and ministers and students. Annie Devine of Canton was among them. Victoria Gray of Hattiesburg was among them. Fannie Lou Hamer of Sunflower County was among them.
Hamer testified before the credentials committee on August twenty-second. She described being forced off the plantation where she lived and worked for trying to register. She described being arrested and beaten in the Winona jail in June nineteen sixty-three while returning from a voter registration training. She described what she and other Black Mississippians faced when they tried to participate in the democracy they were told they lived in. President Lyndon Johnson, watching her testimony on television, called an immediate press conference to interrupt the broadcast. He was afraid of what was happening to his convention on live television.
The credentials committee offered the MFDP two at-large seats, to be filled by Aaron Henry and Tougaloo chaplain Edwin King. Hamer's answer to that offer has been quoted ever since: we didn't come all this way for no two seats.
