American Black Life In 1964 (Doesn't Sound Too Rosey)

Fannie Lou Hamer, vice-chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an independent political organization formed in response to the racial exclusionary policies of the state’s official Democratic Party.

The party elected delegates to the Democratic National Convention, held in Atlantic City, N.J., that year, and attempted to unseat the all-white official state delegation.

Hamer’s direct appeal to the national credentials committee of the Democratic Party was carried live on national television. Testifying about the horrors of living as an African-American political activist in Mississippi, she noted that “we have to sleep with our telephones off the hook because our lives are being threatened daily.”

The power of her testimony worried the White House under President Lyndon B. Johnson. He immediately called a live press conference in order to get Hamer’s live statement off national television,...