Fannie Lou Hamer, SNCC and The MFDP

annie Lou Hamer was forty-four when she first learned about SNCC at a 1962 voter registration meeting in a church in Ruleville, Mississippi. The youngest of twenty children of black sharecroppers, she had grown up in Sunflower County unaware that black people had the right to register and vote. Yet when she heard Moses, Forman, and Reginald Robinson call upon blacks at the meeting to go to the courthouse and register, she volunteered, reasoning that there was no point to be scared: "The only thing they could do to me was kill me and it seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember." Hamer was arrested while attempting to register in Indianola, and after her release on bail the owner of the plantation where she lived told her to withdraw her name from the registration roles or leave. Hamer left that night. A few days later, shots were fired into the friend's house where she was staying, forcing her to leave the county for several months. But Hamer did not give up her efforts to vote, despite repeated threats and a severe beating in the Winona, Mississippi, jail which left her permanently injured. In 1963 she became a member of the SNCC's staff, explaining that she had become "just really tired" of what she had to endure. "We just got to stand up now as Negroes for ourselves and for our freedom, and if it don't do me any good, I do know the young people it will do good. . . .

Although they failed in their attempt to bring about massive federal intervention, SNCC leaders still hoped to unseat the regular Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National Convention. By early August, when eight hundred delegates attended the MFDP state convention in Jackson, COFO had built a powerful, though fragile, liberal coalition to support the challenge. The sixty-eight MFDP delegates, including four whites, chosen to go to Atlantic City manifested the continued belief among Mississippi civil rights workers that their appeals to the outside world would be answered. SNCC leaders, though probably less sanguine than most of the delegates, mobilized nearly all of SNCC's resources for the challenge, drawing personnel from its Mississippi projects as well as from projects elsewhere in the South. The delegation included SNCC workers Charles McLaurin, Larry Guyot, Fannie Lou Hamer, E. W. Steptoe, Annie Devine, and Hartman Turnbow. . . .

President Johnson . . . determined to avoid any action that would weaken his southern white support. On August 12, Mississippi governor Paul B. Johnson told the regular delegates that he had been personally assured by the President that the MFDP would not be seated. When Johnson invited Lewis and other civil rights leaders to meet with him at the White House on August 19, he bluntly told them that he would lot discuss his views regarding the convention challenge. Even before the neeting, Johnson had asked the FBI to establish surveillance of the pro-MFDP forces at the convention. Hoover agreed to send a squad to the convention to advise the White House concerning the MFDP plans. Phones in SNCC's Atlantic City offices were bugged as part of this surveillance. . . .

By the start of the convention, most MFDP delegates and supporters knew that the challenge would not receive majority support in the Credentials Committee. Nonetheless, they hoped that their supporters on the committee would be able to bring a minority report to the floor of the convention, where presumably they would receive extensive backing from liberal delegates forced to state their positions openly. . . .

Recognizing that the challenge would be won or lost on political as well as legal grounds, MFDP supporters lobbied day and night among the delegates. . . .

On August 22, the MFDP presented its case to the Credentials Committee. Rauh, King, and Aaron Henry, among others, spoke on behalf of the delegation, but the highlight of the day's testimony was the appearance of Hamer. By then an experienced SNCC organizer, Hamer gave an emotional account of being fired from her job and then beaten in jail by black prisoners on orders from state highway patrolmen:

“The first Negro began to beat, and I was beat until I was exhausted . . .

"After the first Negro . . . was exhausted, the State Highway Patrolman ordered the second Negro to take the blackjack. The second Negro began to beat . . . I began to scream, and one white man got up and began to beat me on my head and tell me to 'hush.'

"One white man — my dress had worked up high — he walked over and pulled my dress down and he pulled my dress back, back up . . . 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."

Although the television networks cut away from Hamer's testimony before the end to cover a hastily called press conference by President Johnson, her remarks had an immediate impact on the television audience and soon on the delegates, who received numerous telegrams urging support for the MFDP. As a result, the Johnson forces tried to arrange a compromise. On August 23, Rauh was told that the Johnson backers were prepared to offer the MFDP delegates the right to participate vocally in the convention proceedings but not to vote. All major MFDP backers rejected this compromise. . . .