This is a marvelous change in the scheme of things; it’s also long overdue. Remarkable as she is, Harris is part of a continuum of political, social, and cultural engagement. Women – and especially women of color – are finally receiving some of the attention, acclaim, and respect that white patriarchal history has so long denied them.

Civil Rights Activist Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer is a case in point.

– YouTubewww.youtube.com

Hamer’s been mentioned several times over the course of the NDC. If you haven’t heard of her until now, you’re not alone. Once you have, you won’t soon forget her. Hamer’s story is a stunning example of one woman’s perseverance in the face of intense and often violent racism, as well as a testament to the desire for equality and justice that motivated so many in the tempestuous 1960s…and continues to inspire millions to this day.

Born in 1917, Hamer grew up in Mississippi and, like her parents and 19 older siblings, worked as a sharecropper picking cotton, scratching out the meagerest sort of existence. By l961 she was married to Perry Hamer and together they worked on a plantation owned by a white man named W. D. Marlow.

Two events that year set Hamer on her way to an honored place as a freedom fighter. As the Tobacco Farm Life Museum website tells us:

Hamer’s civil rights activism began after she fell victim to a

“Mississippi appendectomy,” a practice of forced sterilization

that was commonly done to black women in Mississippi at

the time, when a doctor conducted a hysterectomy without a

woman’s permission or knowledge while performing surgery

for other reasons.

The second event took place that summer, according to the National Women’s History Museum’s website:

Hamer attended a meeting led by civil rights activists James

Forman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee

(SNCC) and James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership

Conference (SCLC). Hamer was incensed by efforts to deny

Blacks the right to vote. She became a SNCC organizer and

on August 31, 1962, led 17 volunteers to register to vote at

the Indianola, Mississippi Courthouse. Denied the right to vote

due to an unfair literacy test, the group was harassed on their

way home, when police stopped their bus and fined them $100

for the trumped-up charge that the bus was too yellow. That

night, Marlow fired Hamer for her attempt to vote; her husband

was required to stay until the harvest.

Harassment and financial loss, disgusting as they are, were only two of the ways in which Hamer was treated in the wake of her civil rights work. Physical violence was also used. Coming back from a citizenship training program in the summer of 1963, Hamer and colleagues were thrown into jail for a sit-in protest at a bus station’s “whites only” café. Hamer and others were severely beaten in jail and, PBS’ American Experience informs us, “the damage done to Hamer’s eyes, legs, and kidneys would affect her for the rest of her life.”

Biography.com says that in 1964:

Hamer helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party

(MFDP), established in opposition to her state’s all-white

delegation to that year’s Democratic Convention and announced

her bid for Congress. Although she lost the Democratic primary,

she brought the civil rights struggle in Mississippi to the

attention of the entire nation during a televised session at the

convention.

Hamer’s statement included a vivid account of the many forms of persecution she and other Black Americans suffered simply for trying to register to vote and concluded:

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, is this America, the land of the free and the

home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones

off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily

because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?

This brings us back to the present moment and – 60 years later – another National Democratic Convention. Representative Maxine Waters spoke of Hamer’s appearance in’64:

Echoing Hamer, Waters asked: “Is this America?”

The answer is yes. The fight for all of America’s citizens to count is still underway. The bigoted and hateful are still doing their damnedest to disenfranchise people of color, the poor, and women. That’s one of the reasons Fannie Lou Hamer has once again become a part of the nation’s consciousness.

And why Kamala Harris and a vast multitude of Americans draw inspiration and strength from this exceptional woman.