Portside

The patron saint of the 2024 Democratic National Convention was Fannie Lou Hamer—recalcitrant sharecropper turned agitator and, like the Democratic presidential nominee, a black woman. Hamer worked on the plantation of W.D. Marlow near Ruleville, Mississippi—laboring in the fields, cleaning the Marlow manse, and keeping the family’s records. All this, estimates Hamer biographer Kate Clifford Larson, earned her “between $600 and $800 a year, less than half of what white farm families earned in 1948.”

This was by design—the mandate of Mississippi’s ruling class was assured through the reduction of the state’s black residents to near slavery. Hamer took her revenge: She wore the Marlows’ fine clothes while they were away. She stole their perfume. She bathed in their tub. She used the family’s spoons and then watched them eat behind her. It was said that Hamer “didn’t have real good sense,” that she was “uppity,” and filled with “gripes.” But, as Larson recounts, Hamer’s own analysis hinted at something deeper—“I was rebelling in the only way that I could rebel.”

IN THE TRADITION Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee workers at the funeral of four girls killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963.  Danny Lyon/Magnum

In 1962, the rebellion was joined. That was the summer that a bevy of civil rights workers descended on Hamer’s Sunflower County seeking volunteers to help register blacks to vote. Hamer signed up and, through her courage, charisma, and oratory, quickly drew ardent disciples and ruthless adversaries. In 1963, Hamer was arrested, jailed, and at the behest of her white captors, beaten with a blackjack by two African American inmates. She emerged from captivity grievously injured but recalcitrant as ever

.A year later Hamer cofounded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, aiming to displace the segregated delegation to that year’s Democratic convention. This was a problem. Lyndon B. Johnson feared that Hamer’s protest would cost him Mississippi, or perhaps the entire Deep South. When Hamer testified at the convention, it was televised nationally. A flustered Johnson quickly called an impromptu press conference to knock “that illiterate woman,” as he would reportedly call Hamer, off the air. The evening news broadcast Hamer’s testimony anyway.

“If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” Hamer told the convention. “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 hook because our lives be threatened daily.” Hamer died in 1977. But she has become a hero, particularly to black women, who see in her an ancient tradition of politics that extends back to their arrival on these shores. That same political tradition, 60 years later, delivered Kamala Harris to the top of the ticket.

In 2020, when many saw in Joe Biden a floundering candidate, a loose coalition of black women activists saw an opportunity. The coalition included, among others, voting rights activist Melanie Campbell, 2024 Democratic National Convention committee chair Minyon Moore, and investor and strategist Jotaka Eaddy. They organized and applied pressure. They demanded a black woman on the ticket. They got it. They demanded a black woman on the Supreme Court. They got it. They demanded a black woman at the Federal Reserve. They got that too. And they got even more. By the end of 2024, Biden had appointed a record number of black women to the federal bench and cut black unemployment and black poverty levels to record lows. He’d passed a temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit, which in its single year of operation reduced black child poverty rates by half. This was an enviable string of political victories. And when Biden withdrew from the campaign and endorsed Harris, the most tantalizing victory of all was at hand. Now the same coalition of black women who could credibly claim the first fulfillment of a black agenda in recent memory pressed their advantage.