Is This America? 60 Years Later
Offered by Rev. Dr. Leslie Copeland-Tune | | Fannie Lou Hamer, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Delegate, Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA, Warren K Leffler, August 22, 1964. (Photo by: GHI Vintage/Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) | It was in 1964 that Fannie Lou Hamer testified before the Credentials Committee at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, NJ, demanding that the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an integrated political party, have delegates seated instead of the state’s all-white delegation. Hamer, who was a sharecropper and activist, was a member of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and helped to organize Freedom Summer to register and educate voters in Mississippi and to confront the segregated political system in the state. The National Council of Churches USA played an integral role in Freedom Summer sending more than 1200 volunteers and 254 clergy to help with the voter registration and education efforts there. For the last several weeks we have been retracing the steps of Freedom Summer, this pivotal election year, with a multi-city campaign to educate, engage, and empower voters to register and get out to vote in November.
In her powerful address to the Credentials Committee, Hamer courageously posed a question that I believe still reverberates through the American consciousness today. She asked, “Is this America, the land of the free and home of the brave?” After recounting the abuse, threats, mistreatment, and terrorism she and others experienced because they dared to be treated as first-class American citizens and exercise their right to vote in a democracy, she confronts and calls the convention into accountability for its racist, contradictory, and inconsistent policies and rules. Her question echoes through time for so many Black, Brown, poor, and marginalized people today. There are still threats that we must confront daily – voter suppression, unarmed Black people being killed by law enforcement, health disparities, educational inequalities, racial inequities, and other daunting issues that we face. As we consider how far we’ve come and how far we have yet to go, we can say without question that America has much more work to do.
Perhaps it is providential that 60 years to the day that Hamer challenged the Democratic Party and America to live up to the ideals of its creed as the land of the free and home of the brave, Vice President Kamala Harris will give her acceptance speech as the party’s nominee for President of the United States – the first Black woman and the first Asian American to be at the top of the ticket. It is certainly a moment to pause and reflect on the road ahead for our country as we face unprecedented challenges and opportunities to live up to the promise that America holds. | | Rev. Dr. Leslie Copeland-Tune, NCC Senior Associate General Secretary and Director of Advocacy, "Mass Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers Assembly and Moral March on Washington, D.C., and to the Polls," Washington, D.C., June 29, 2024. (Photo by: Poor People's Campaign – A National Call for Moral Revival) | Hamer’s question seemed especially relevant when I spoke at the Poor People’s Campaign’s “Mass Poor People’s & Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on Washington, D.C. & to the Polls” at the end of June. Here are my remarks in their entirety:
I stand before you today with some questions about what it means to live in this democracy we call the United States of America. What it means to be a person of faith and watch as the poor are robbed and taken advantage of just because they are poor and are treated as if they deserve to be mistreated.
My God! I have some questions. And, my questions echo that of civil rights leader, advocate, organizer and one of the architects of the 1964 Freedom Summer project in Mississippi, which sought to register voters and integrate Mississippi’s segregated political system, who once asked, “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in America?” And here we are 60 years later, with our lives still being threatened. While our telephones aren’t off the hooks anymore, they are sending us messages and alerts that our lives are threatened. | |
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