From Fannie Lou Hamer to Kamala Harris

Although I had credentials and waited to get into the United Center in Chicago to watch Vice President Harris's presidential nomination, I couldn’t get a seat or even get past the ushers. Understandably, it was way oversold, but seeing the energy was exciting.

I watched the historic and beautiful speech alone, on a couch, which turned out perfectly; I cry more poignantly in private than public.

My mind was focused on Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer and how progress is made.

At the 1964 convention, Mrs. Hamer memorably asked the Rules Committee if “we are the land of the free and the home of the brave?” She and the other members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party rejected Vice President Humphreys' compromise offer of two seats in the delegation that excluded Black citizens and went back to Mississippi, failing at their tactical goals.

She and two other Black women — Victoria Gray and Annie Devine — ran for Congress that Fall, but the all-white Democratic party wouldn’t put them on the ballot, so they collected thousands of slips of papers from voters with their names written on them.

In January 1965, Mrs. Hamer, Gray, and Devine and their supporters came to Congress in busses, demanding to be sworn in as the rightful winners. They couldn’t even get into the Chamber. NY Democratic Congressman William Ryan filed a “fairness motion” to disallow the white members to be sworn in, and while 149 Members voted in favor, it failed. Speaker Carl Albert kicked the matter to a House Committee, and there was a seven-month trial, at which Mrs. Hamer testified about whether they should be seated.

This was four years before Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm’s historic election.

Kamala Harris was born weeks before that 1964 election.

Prosecutor, state attorney general, senator, and vice president — not only the Democratic Party’s nominee, but by acclaim.

If there was any serious dissent, you wouldn’t know it.

There are plenty of examples in America’s history that lead us to question whom our democracy was serving. We at Raben are organized to draw attention to our shortcomings and work to improve our systems and laws.

Mrs. Hamer was thrown off her workplace and house, arrested, and beaten by prison guards for registering to vote, or I should say attempting to register to vote. The safe homes she tried to stay in were shot through and up. Medgar Evers was assassinated while she sat in jail for trying to vote.

She fought with other prominent Democratic women leaders over many things, including their own racial exclusion, and over abortion, which she did not support.

She and her colleagues in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, with their indescribable courage, pried open the door of the Democratic Party. Through those doors have walked Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and now Kamala Harris.

That’s something to be very proud of.