Artwork / 2025 / Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977)

President Lyndon Johnson cut in with an impromptu press conference right as Fannie Lou Hamer’s testimony began. A famously powerful speaker, Hamer was a former sharecropper who’d been evicted from her home, fired from her job, arrested, and beaten for registering to vote in Mississippi. When the broadcast of the Presidential address interrupted Hamer’s speech, she’d just started telling her story to the Credentials Committee of the Democratic National Convention, in a meeting in Atlantic City, New Jersey, that was being transmitted on live television.

Hamer was one of several individuals, including Martin Luther King Jr, who were there to ask that the committee dismiss the group of all-white delegates that Mississippi’s regular party organization had sent. Instead they wanted the committee to recognize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and its group of Black and white delegates as the states’ official representatives at the DNC.

Aware that many white Americans feared the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the integration it embodied, Johnson opposed the seating of Hamer and her cohort at the DNC. Right as Hamer’s testimony began, the President called a press conference from the White House. TV stations cut away from Hamer to cover the President, expecting him to announce his running mate, but Johnson only declared that, on that day nine months ago, the governor of Texas had been shot along with President John F Kennedy. This marker of a seemingly arbitrary monthiversary silenced Hamer in that moment, but, later that evening, major news networks played her moving testimony.