This historic second deserves a remembrance of the legacy set ahead by voting and ladies’s rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer. Harris stands on her shoulders.
On Sunday, July 21, 2024, President Joe Biden withdrew from his bid for a second time period within the White Home. Amid requires him to step apart, pundits speculated about who may or ought to fill the function. Speculations have been huge—and a few proposals not solely constitutional: Might Barack Obama run for a 3rd time period? (The reply is not any.) Others speculated about governors in key states and members of his Cupboard, together with Pete Buttigieg, secretary of transportation.
Biden made historical past by stepping apart and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris—the primary girl ever to serve in that function. If she wins the get together’s nomination, she will probably be solely the second girl in our nation’s historical past to clench a significant get together’s nomination for president. And, if elected as the subsequent president of the US, Kamala Harris won’t solely be the primary girl to carry that workplace, however she will even be the primary girl to interrupt by centuries-old limitations that marginalized girls, pressured them to not run, and questioned their talents to manipulate. To take action as a Black girl marks a very poignant time in our nation’s historical past.
In Biden’s endorsement of Harris, a robust nominee who has served in state and federal workplaces emerges—and groundbreaking second in historical past is sealed. In her first day as a candidate for the 2024 presidency, she has already secured a majority of the delegates needed for the Democratic nomination. She would be the nominee.
This second in historical past additionally marks 60 years since voting and ladies’s rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer famously confronted the US on its chilling legacies of racial hostility and animosity, and its horrific and confounding patterns of violence and sexism towards Black girls, on the 1964 Democratic Nationwide Conference. Her speech was notably highly effective then and now.
Hamer’s testimony on Black voter suppression, police violence, and the will to turn into “first-class residents,” continues to resonate for too many. She described being arrested and brought to a neighborhood jail that housed males after she and a gaggle of ladies tried to vote. At that jail she was crushed by an inmate and the guard. In painful element, she described making an attempt to protect her legs as she suffered from polio as a toddler. The punishment for her (and numerous others) making an attempt to vote is its personal tragic legacy in American historical past and politics.
I started to scream and one white man received up and commenced to beat me my head and informed me to hush. … All of that is on account we wish to register, to turn into first-class residents.
Fannie Lou Hamer
Hamer’s unsettling testimony uncovered ugly truths about how Black girls in Southern states like Mississippi have been confronted with literacy exams in the event that they wished to vote. Certainly, in Mississippi, Alabama and neighboring states, Black folks have been compelled to guess what number of bubbles on a bar of cleaning soap or jelly beans in a jar to be able to vote—even within the Sixties.
Fannie Lou Hamer additionally uncovered the soiled secret of Mississippi and surrounding states that coercively sterilized Black girls and ladies. In Sunflower County, the place she lived, she famous, “Six out of the ten Negro girls that go to the hospital are sterilized.” She too was a sufferer of coerced sterilization. The observe was so widespread and steadily carried out that the process got here to be often called a “Mississippi appendectomy.” Due to this, she was by no means capable of have organic youngsters.
Many years later, Hamer’s testimony continues to resonate and instruct. Sarcastically, the state that challenged abortion rights within the U.S., resulting in the overturning of Roe v. Wade is similar Mississippi that Hamer warned about 60 years in the past.
Simply final November, polling venues in Mississippi ran out of ballots, in the end denying Black voters that waited in line for hours the power to forged a vote. In Jackson, Miss., Black residents have had their entry to faucet water fully shut off. The water delivered to “this majority-Black metropolis” is stuffed with “filth and sediment,” in line with the NAACP.
Fannie Lou Hamer uncovered the soiled secrets and techniques of a nation that had not but fulfilled its guarantees of equality, freedom, privateness, liberty and voting rights. A nation the place its Structure had been repurposed for illegitimacy, together with “separate however equal,” judicial interpretation. Within the rolling-back of civil liberties, civil rights and reproductive freedoms, our nation stays tethered to among the stark realities skilled by Hamer.
However that is additionally a second of hope. On the time of the 1964 DNC, Hamer hoped for the seating of delegates from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Celebration (MFDP)—a multiracial coalition—rather than the so-called “Dixiecrats” that engaged in a “net of regulation, intimidation, official and unofficial power, and violence terrorizing Blacks looking for voting rights.” Despite the fact that her effort got here up brief, her efforts, “compelled reforms within the nationwide Democratic Celebration that expanded the participation of ladies and [people of color] going ahead.”
In August, 60 years after Hamer’s well-known attraction, the delegates assembled will vote and title Kamala Harris because the Democratic nominee for president. It will likely be a historic second for a lot of causes. Amid the anticipated and deserved celebration must also be a remembrance of the legacy set ahead by Fannie Lou Hamer. Kamala Harris will probably be standing on her shoulders.
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