Fannie Lou Hamer | Address to the Democratic National Convention Credentials Committee, 1964
At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) members attempted to unseat the official all-white Mississippi delegation. Fannie Lou Hamer testified before the credentials committee in front of a national television audience, but that coverage ended when President Johnson quickly held a press conference to divert attention from the controversy. In the following selection, Hamer tells of her arrest in Winona, Mississippi, as she traveled home from a voter registration workshop.
I was carried to the county jail and put in the booking room. They left some of the people in the booking room and began to place us in cells.
And it wasn’t too long before three white men came to my cell. One of these men was a state highway patrolman and he asked me where I was from. And I told him Ruleville. He said, “We are going to check this.” And they left my cell and it wasn’t too long before they came back. He said, “You’s from Ruleville all right,” and he used a curse word. And he said, “We are going to make you wish you was dead.”
I was carried out of that cell into another cell where they had two Negro prisoners. The state highway patrolmen ordered the first Negro to take the blackjack [police baton]. The first Negro prisoner ordered me, by orders from the state highway patrolman, for me to lay down on a bunk bed on my face.
And I laid on my face and the first Negro began to beat. And I was beat by the first Negro until he was exhausted. I was holding my hands behind me at that time on my left side, because I suffered from polio when I was six years old. After the first Negro had beat until he was exhausted, the state highway patrolman ordered the second Negro to take the blackjack. The second Negro began to beat and I began to work my feet, and the state highway patrolman ordered the first Negro [who] had beat me to sit on my feet—to keep me from working my feet. I began to scream and one white man got up and began to beat me in my head and tell me to hush.
One white man—my dress had worked up high—he walked over and pulled my dress, I pulled my dress down, and he pulled my dress back up.
. . . All of this is on account of 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.
Source: Megan Parker Brooks and David W. Houck, eds., The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 44–45.
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