The Civil-Rights Era’s Great Unanswered Question

Sixty years ago, on August 22, 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer, a Black former sharecropper from Sunflower County, Mississippi, who had become a civil-rights activist, delivered one of the most eloquent addresses on race relations ever heard. Testifying before the credentials committee at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, where President Lyndon B. Johnson was days away from being nominated, Hamer joined a group of other Mississippians to demand that the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party be seated at the convention instead of an all-white delegation sent by the state’s Democratic Party. These white Democrats, the group from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party argued, had long discriminated and committed violence against Black citizens like them, and had worked to keep them disenfranchised.

Hamer was one of the many women who had been at the center of a voter-registration drive in the Deep South since the early 1960s. Those efforts culminated in 1964 with the campaign known as Freedom Summer, organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other civil-rights groups. Just weeks before the convention, the nation was horrified to learn that three participants, one Black Mississippian and two white Jewish volunteers from New York—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner—had been murdered by Klansmen with whom local police officers collaborated.

Sitting at a table before the committee members, with television cameras capturing her every word, Hamer recounted how she had been attacked and beaten in the Winona, Mississippi, jail for her voting-rights activities. She concluded her address with these words:

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 the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?

That question has haunted the nation ever since. In this November’s election, all American voters will get the chance to answer Hamer’s question. We can hope they will provide a better answer than Democrats did in 1964.

[William Sturkey: What the Civil Rights Act really meant]

In their time, Hamer and her colleagues felt that the Democratic Party—despite the fact that Johnson had just pushed the Civil Rights Act through Congress—was answering her question by leaning in a reactionary direction. Hamer had reason to be ill at ease: Halfway through her speech to the committee, Johnson called an impromptu press conference—a move that activists believed was intended to prevent the public from hearing her. Nevertheless, all of the major nightly news shows and newspapers reported on what she’d said.

The 68 delegates of the Freedom Democratic Party who’d traveled to the 1964 convention remained hopeful but realistic—and they were open to a possible compromise that would allow both delegations or an equal number from each delegation to be seated. Yet, fearing that any such deal would trigger a southern walkout of the convention, Johnson worked with some of his party’s most prominent liberals, UAW President Walter Reuther, Senator Hubert Humphrey, and Attorney General Walter Mondale (both of Minnesota), to frustrate the Mississippians’ petition. Together, these liberal grandees forced a resolution through the credentials committee that imposed a loyalty oath for all delegates, provided Hamer’s group with just two “at-large seats,” and offered a promise that future conventions would be integrated. Johnson pressured the committee to vote on his plan while civil-rights activists were sequestered in what they believed to be good-faith negotiations with Humphrey and Reuther.

Under the imposed deal, the all-white delegation was seated in full. The Democratic Party also insisted that the two at-large seats would be held by the NAACP leader Aaron Henry and a white preacher named Ed King, neither of whom would be representing Mississippi. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader Bob Moses and his colleagues were furious at the last-minute demand that, on top of legitimizing the white delegates and giving the Mississippians only two symbolic seats, now the president was adding the requirement that the Democratic Party would decide who could take them—and Hamer was not included. Bristling at this outcome, the Freedom Democratic Party members were also distrustful of the promise of an integrated convention in 1968: Although it sounded good, they had heard such pledges so many times before, only to see them reneged upon. Moses left the Jersey Shore profoundly disillusioned. “You cannot trust the system,” he later said. “I will have nothing to do with the political system any longer.”

Many civil-rights activists agreed with Moses. John Lewis, his movement colleague and later a celebrated congressman, declared the so-called compromise a “disaster” that “was the turning point of the civil rights movement” because—in revealing how deeply racism was inscribed into America’s major political institutions, including the Democratic Party—“it sent a lot of people outside the system.” The lesson Lewis took away was that “white liberals were not to be trusted”—a theme echoed by Hamer. “We followed all the laws that the white people themselves made,” she wrote in her autobiography. “But we learned the hard way that even though we had all the laws and all the righteousness on our side—that white man is not going to give up his power to us … We have to take [it] for ourselves.”

Two years later, in 1967, another Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee figurehead, Stokely Carmichael, wrote that “the two major political parties in this country have become non-viable entities for the legitimate representation of the real needs of the masses—especially blacks—in this country.” By then, he had become precisely one of those whom Lewis described as driven “outside the system” by their sense of liberal betrayal: Carmichael had turned his attention to building a more separatist movement around the concept of Black Power.

[Vann R. Newkirk II: Holy Week]

In this year’s presidential election, Americans will decide whom they want to be the 47th president of the United States. The two candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, offer a stark contrast in terms of the political traditions that they represent, both of which have been deeply woven into the country’s culture.

Harris, who will accept her party’s nomination this week, is a product of modern American liberalism. This political tradition, entrenched in the Democratic Party by the New Deal and Great Society, has revolved around domestic policies designed to ensure economic security for working Americans, social rights, cultural pluralism, and environmental protection; and a foreign policy that broadly seeks to maintain U.S. alliances, the international order, and free trade.

These ideas were firmly in place from the time of Harris’s childhood. Her parents were both involved in the civil-rights movement in the 1960s. They took their young daughter to marches, giving her, as she has related, a “stroller’s-eye view of people getting into what the great John Lewis called ‘good trouble.’” Like President Barack Obama, Harris represents the gradual empowerment of a diverse population that has benefited from the legislative outcomes of that era of liberal ascendancy, such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which has now given rise to generations of nonwhite leaders.

And then there is Trump, who has embraced and reveled in an illiberal tradition that also has deep roots in the United States. As the historian Steve Hahn has described, in his book Illiberal America, this set of ideals has centered on a “suspicion of outsiders” that justifies the “quick resort to expulsion.” The demands of the community triumph over the needs of the individual, Hahn argues, and “cultural homogeneity” is prized over pluralism and difference. Those values have repeatedly been defended through intimidation and outright violence. Illiberal politics, he adds, has endorsed resistance to certain forms of state authority, including taxation and regulation, while enforcing submission to other forms, such as religious observance and policing.

Sixty years ago, the limits of American liberalism and the enduring power of American illiberalism were dramatically exposed. Despite their partial progress, Democrats showed that they were not ready to take the steps needed to redress the racial oppression that Hamer and her fellow Mississippians had put before the nation. When the ballots are counted in November, they will reveal what today’s America is.