Fannie Lou Hamer in Atlantic City

In August of nineteen sixty-four, the Democratic Party held its national convention in Atlantic City, inside the building now called Boardwalk Hall. Lyndon Johnson was to be nominated for a full term as president. The country was still raw from the assassination of John Kennedy nine months earlier, and Johnson wanted the convention managed, controlled, smooth, nothing that would upset his carefully arranged consensus.

What he got instead was Fannie Lou Hamer. Hamer was a sharecropper from Sunflower County, Mississippi. She had tried to register to vote in nineteen sixty-two and been fired from the plantation where she worked that same day.

Later she was arrested in Winona, Mississippi, and beaten in jail by police who ordered other prisoners to beat her with a blackjack. She kept working. She helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an integrated alternative to the all-white regular Mississippi delegation, and in August of nineteen sixty-four she brought sixty-eight delegates to Atlantic City to challenge for the convention seats.

On August twenty-second, she testified before the credentials committee. She described what had been done to her and to others trying to exercise the right to vote. She asked, in her closing words: Is this America?

The testimony was carried live on national television until President Johnson, alarmed by what he was watching, called a hastily arranged press conference to pull the cameras away. Every major network replayed the full speech that evening. Johnson's team offered the MFDP delegation two at-large seats, to be chosen by the party.

Hamer spoke for the delegation's response: We didn't come all this way for no two seats. The compromise was rejected. The regular Mississippi delegation kept its seats.

The civil rights movement kept going.