50 years later, right to vote still threatened: Column

She had no notes, but the words were written on her calloused hands and swollen legs. Great orators, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had preceded her, but none were as captivating as Fannie Lou Hamer, a black, uneducated sharecropper who described being beaten in jail, losing her job and being thrown off the plantation where she lived because she wanted to vote. Last week was the 50th anniversary of Hamer's speech at the 1964 Democratic Party national convention in Atlantic City at which she recounted her ordeal and issued a moral challenge to the delegates in the convention center and to the audience: "Is this America, the land of the free," she asked defiantly, "where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives [are] threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings?"

This and the past year have been the golden jubilee anniversaries for such landmark civil rights events as the March on Washington and the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Hamer's speech deserves its place alongside them.

Hamer arrived in Atlantic City as a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) that was intent on challenging the seating of the all-white delegation from Mississippi. The insurgent Democrats charged the statewide party with violating party rules by refusing to let blacks participate in the process to select delegates to the Democratic Party's national convention. Blacks who showed up at meetings of the Mississippi Democratic Party were either refused admittance or encountered an empty room because whites had secretly changed its location.

In response, the MFDP held parallel meetings, culminating in its own statewide convention electing a competing slate of 68 delegates to send to Atlantic City. When the insurgent delegates arrived they began to lobby members of the Democratic Party's credentials committee that would decide which delegation from Mississippi to recognize. A phalanx of dignitaries testified to the committee in favor of seating the MFDP.

And then Hamer spoke. With luminous eyes and a husky voice she described how she lost her home and her job when she tried to register to vote; how police harassed and tried to intimidate her; how nightriders threatened and shot at her; and how she was thrown in jail and savagely beaten. Hamer's presentation was so powerful because the lengths Mississippi would go to deny her basic democratic rights seemed to describe another country, not another state. "Is this America," she challenged, where citizens could be fired, evicted, threatened, jailed, and beaten simply because they wanted to vote?

President Lyndon Johnson called an impromptu news conference in order to divert TV cameras. The president worried that seating the rival delegation from Mississippi would cost him the South's electoral and legislative support. He had the phones of MFDP leaders tapped, and he strong-armed members of the credentials committee. He tried to mollify the MFDP by offering two at-large seats at the convention. The delegates rejected the offer, as Hamer explained, "We didn't come all this way for no two seats."

While the MFDP was not seated in 1964, their efforts were not in vain. Four years later, the 1968 Democratic Party convention denied credentials to an unrepentant Mississippi Democratic Party delegation and seated an integrated slate of challengers from Mississippi that included the MFDP.

Today, Mississippi boasts more black elected officials than any state in the nation. But the struggle for basic democratic rights in Mississippi that Hamer described 50 years ago continues. In 2012 Mississippi passed a law requiring citizens to show a government issued ID in order to vote. But it could not implement this new restriction because Mississippi under the Voting Rights Act still required federal approval to change its voting laws. But the Supreme Court's Shelby decision in 2013 removed this obstacle. Just hours after the Supreme Court's ruling, Mississippi's attorney general announced plans to implement the state's new voter ID law.

Like literacy tests and poll taxes Mississippi used in the past to deprive blacks like Fannie Lou Hamer of the right to vote, the state's new voter ID law will have a discriminatory impact on minorities. Less than 10% of voting age whites in Mississippi do not have a driver's license while almost 30% of voting age blacks are without one. That is, eligible black voters are three times as likely as whites to lack the most common form of government-issued ID required to vote.

Hamer's 50-year-old fight isn't over. The same effort to deprive people of their right to vote, with the same sordid racial overtones continues today.

Alan Draper is professor of government at St. Lawrence University.

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