Learning Module 4: Activity One
Civil Rights v. Black Power
General
Information: This activity provides two points of view
about the Black Freedom Movement of the 1960s: The Civil Rights Movement and
the Black Power, Black Nationalism movement.
The objective of those associated with the Civil Rights Movement was to
end segregation and discrimination of blacks and to gain full equality. To
achieve this objective, the participants applied a strategy of non-violent
direct action. The objective of those associated with Black Power/Black
Nationalism was to empower the black community so that blacks would unite and
take control of their communities and gain self-reliance, race pride and
political and economic empowerment. To achieve this objective, the participants
stated that they would take control by “any means necessary” and liberate
themselves from white domination. In this activity, we will evaluate and
compare the effectiveness of (1) non-violent direct action and (2) empowerment
of the black community.
Timing: December 1
Assessment:
20 points.
Process:
The
Documents: Attached and Posted on the Class Website.
The
Civil Rights Movement:
Black Power, Black Nationalism – Read only these documents
Questions
of the Documents: The answers to these
questions will be the basis for the quiz. These questions are at the end of
each document.
Introduction:
The Civil Rights Movement[1]
In 1955 a bus boycott in Montgomery,
Alabama, initiated a new phase in the African American struggle for racial
justice. Civil rights activists now employed a .new strategy--= nonviolent
direct action-"----which used marches, boycotts, and similar mass
actions to create crises intended to
force segregated southern communities to abandon their Jim Crow laws and practices.
It called for nonviolence on the part of participants, in spite of racial
taunts, arrest, or physical attack. The most visible and eloquent spokesman
for· this approach was a black Baptist preacher named Martin Luther King Jr.
(1929-1968), who had studied the ideas and technique of India's Mohandas Gandhi
and sought to apply a similar method in the struggle for black equality. As the
leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), he set out to
employ his nonviolent strategy in community after community throughout the
South. King became an internationally known figure and in 1964 won the Nobel
Peace Prize for his civil rights activities. Although assassinated in 1968, he
remains the most potent symbol of the Civil Rights movement.
As King and SCLC
brought their strategy to communities throughout the South, new groups adopted
the technique. In February 1960 four black college students sat down· at a
"whites only" lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and
refused to leave unless they were served. Within weeks, the sit-in movement had
spread to seventy southern cities and attracted thousands of black college
students. Many of them came together in April to form the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Their tactics were soon expanded to include
kneel· ins at segregated churches and wade·ins at segregated public pools. In
1961 the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sent an interracial group of
“freedom riders" across the South on buses to force compliance with a
Federal ban on segregation in interstate travel. After repeated physical
assaults in Alabama forced them to go home, SNCC volunteers carried on these
so-called Freedom Rides. In 1962 SNCC turned its attention to a voter
registration campaign with the assistance of SCLC, CORE, and the NAACP.
Before 1963 the
Civil Rights movement achieved many local successes. In that year, it started
to pressure the federal government for sweeping change. This resulted in
several landmark pieces of civil rights legislation. In August the March On
Washington for Jobs and Freedom brought nearly 250,000 Americans to the
nation’s capital to demonstrate on behalf of a pending civil rights bill. It
was capped by King's stirring "I Have a Dream” speech envisioning an
integrated America. Congress responded by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
the most comprehensive civil rights law it had ever enacted. This act
prohibited discrimination or segregation in employment and public facilities,
outlawed bias in federally assisted programs, and authorized the attorney
general to institute lawsuits challenging discrimination in public schools and
other facilities operated by state and local governments.
The movement
then stepped up its campaign for voting rights. In 1964 the Twenty-fourth
Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, ending use of the poll tax. After a
Selma-to-Montgomery march in Alabama publicized continuing disfranchisement,
Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed literacy tests
and similar devices and sent federal examiners to register voters in areas
that had historically excluded blacks from the ballot. A century after
emancipation, African Americans had finally gained legal equality.
Question: Be familiar with the contents of this
overview
Martin Luther
King, Jr., The Strategy of Nonviolent Direct Action
The lessons of Montgomery convinced King and other
civil rights activists to employ the strategy of nonviolent direct action
against Jim Crow throughout the South. In 1957 they gathered in Atlanta and
formed SCLC for that purpose. Under King's leadership, SCLC organized
nonviolent direct action campaigns in dozens of cities over the next decade,
most notably Albany (1961), Birmingham (1963), S10 Augustine (1964), and Selma
(1965). But the strategy was not without its critics. Many whites, especially
in the South, condemned the tactics and timing of the campaigns and accused
King and other SCLC officials of being "outside agitators." Some
blacks criticized the strategy of nonviolent direct action as too passive and
called for a more forceful approach. On the heels of the Selma campaign, which
used a controversial march to the Alabama state capitol in Montgomery to
publicize African American demands for equal access to the ballot in Alabama
and the South, King penned the following piece for the Saturday Review. He noted the strategy's forceful nature-how it
worked to provoke crises in segregated southern communities in order to prompt
federal action in behalf of civil rights. In response to the Selma campaign,
President Lyndon B. Johnson called on Congress to pass voting rights
legislation to address the historic disfranchisement of blacks in the South[2]
The goal of the
demonstrations in Selma, as elsewhere, is to dramatize the existence of
injustice and to bring about the presence of justice by methods of nonviolence.
Long years of experience indicate to us that Negroes can achieve this goal when
four things occur:
1.
Nonviolent
demonstrators go into the streets to exercise their constitutional rights.
2.
Racists
resist by unleashing violence against them.
3.
Americans
of conscience in the name of decency demand federal intervention and legislation.
4.
The
administration, under mass pressure, initiates measures of immediate intervention
and remedial legislation.
The working out
of this process has never been simple or tranquil. When nonviolent protests
were countered by local authorities with harassment, intimidation, and
brutality, the federal government has always first asked the Negro to desist
and leave the streets, rather than bring pressure to bear on those who commit
the criminal acts. We have always been compelled to reject vigorously such
federal requests and have rather relied on our allies, the millions of
Americans across the nation, to bring pressure on the federal government for
protective action in our behalf. Our position has always been that there is a
wrong and right side to the question of full freedom and equality for millions
of Negro Americans and that the federal government does not belong in the
middle on this issue.
During our
nonviolent direct-action campaigns we have always been advised, and again were
so advised in Selma, that violence may ensue. Herein lies a dilemma: Of course
there always exists the likelihood that because of the hostility to our demonstrations,
acts of lawlessness may be precipitated. We realize that we must exercise
extreme caution so that our direct-action program is not conducted in a manner
that might be considered provocative or an invitation to violence. Accordingly,
each situation must be studied in detail; the strength and temper of our
adversaries must be estimated and any change in any of these factors will
affect the details of our strategy. Nevertheless, we often must begin a march
without knowing when or where it will actually terminate.
Questions:
How does Martin Luther King define and promote nonviolent
direct action? Explain the concept
behind the strategy.
Fannie
Lou Hamer, Fighting for the Vote in Mississippi
While national attention focused on King and other
prominent figures in the Civil Rights movement, the success of the struggle
often depended upon mobilizing the African American masses. Even though SCLC,
SNCC, and other civil rights organizations sent trained workers into southern
communities to coordinate campaigns against Jim Crow laws and disfranchisement,
those campaigns required the courage and determination of local people. In 1962
SNCC initiated a voter registration drive in Mississippi, where only five percent
of the black residents were registered to vote. One of the first local blacks
to respond was a sharecropper named Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977). But after
attempting to register to vote, she was subjected to unceasing economic
intimidation, arrest, and physical violence. In 1964 she joined the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which organized mock elections among blacks
in the state and sought representation in that year's Democratic National
Convention. The following testimony by Hamer before the convention's
Credentials Committee exposed the hazards of trying to vote in Mississippi and
called for the nation to live up to its democratic ideals.[3]
Mr. Chairman and
the Credentials Committee, my name is Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, and I live at 626
East Lafayette Street, Ruleville, Mississippi, Sunflower County, the home of
Senator James O. Eastland, and Senator [John] Stennis.
It was the 31st
of August in 1962 that eighteen of us traveled twenty -six miles to the county
courthouse in Indianola to try to register to try to become first-class
citizens. We was met in Indianola by Mississippi men, highway patrolmen, and
they only allowed two of us in to take the literacy test at the time. After we
had taken this test and started back to Ruleville, we was held up by the City
Police and the State Highway Patrolmen and carried back to Indianola, where the
bus driver was charged that day with driving a bus the wrong color.
After we paid the
fine among us, we continued on to Ruleville, and Reverend Jeff Sunny carried me
four miles in the rural area where I had worked as a timekeeper and
sharecropper for eighteen years. I was met there by my children, who told me
the plantation owner was angry because I had gone down to try to register.
After they told me, my husband came, and said the plantation owner was raising
cain because I had tried to register, and before he quit talking the plantation
owner came, and said, "Fannie Lou, do you know-did Pap tell you what I
said?"
I said,
"Yes, sir."
He said, "I
mean that," he said. "If you don't go down and withdraw your registration,
you will have to leave," he said, "Then if you go down and
withdraw," he said. "You will-you might have to go because we are not
ready for that in Mississippi."
And I addressed
him and told him and said, "I didn't try to register for you. I tried to
register for myself." I had to leave that same night.
On the 10th of
September 1962, sixteen bullets was fired into the home of Mr. and Mrs. Robert
Tucker for me. That same night two girls were shot in Ruleville, Mississippi.
Also Mr. Joe McDonald's house was shot in.
And in June, the
9th, 1963, I had attended a voter registration workshop, was returning back to
Mississippi. Ten of us was traveling by the Continental Trailway bus. When we
got to Winona, Mississippi, which is Montgomery County, four of the people got
off to use the washroom, and two of the people-to use the restaurant-two of the
people wanted to use the washroom. The four people that had gone in to use the
restaurant was ordered out. During this time I was on the bus. But when I
looked through the window and saw they had rushed out, I got off the bus to see
what had happened, and one of the ladies said, "It was a State Highway
Patrolman and a chief of police ordered us out."
I got back on
the bus and one of the persons had used the washroom got back on the bus, too.
As soon as I was seated on the bus, I saw when they began to get the four people
in a highway patrolman's car. I stepped off the bus to see what was happening
and somebody screamed from the car that the four workers was in and said,
"Get that one there," and when I went to get in the car, when the man
told me I was under arrest, he kicked me.
I was carried to
the county jail, and put in the booking room. They left some of the people in
the booking room and began to place us in cells. I was placed in a cell with a
young woman.... After I was placed in the cell I began to hear sounds of licks
and screams. I could hear the sounds of licks and horrible screams, and I could
hear somebody say, "Can you say, yes sir, nigger? Can you say yes,
sir?"
And they would
say other horrible names. She would say, "Yes, I can say yes, sir."
"So say it."
She says,
"I don't know you well enough."
They beat her, I
don't know how long, and after a while she began to pray, and asked God to have
mercy on those people.
And it wasn't
too long before three white men came to my cell. One of these men was a State
Highway Patrolman and he asked me where I was from, and I told him Ruleville.
He said, "We are going to check this." And they left my cell and it
wasn't too long before they came back. He said, "You are from Ruleville
all right," and he used a curse word, and he said, "We are going to
make you wish you was dead."
I was carried
out of that cell into another cell where they had two Negro prisoners.
The State
Highway Patrolman ordered the first Negro to take the blackjack. The first
Negro prisoner ordered me, by orders from the State Highway Patrolman for me,
to lay down on a bunk bed on my face, and I laid on my face. The first Negro
began to beat, and I was beat by the first Negro until he was exhausted, and I
was holding my hands behind me at that time on my left side because I suffered
from polio when I was six years old. After the first Negro had beat until he
was exhausted, the State Highway Patrolman ordered the second Negro to take the
blackjack.
The second Negro
began to beat and I began to work my feet, and the State Highway Patrolman
ordered the first Negro who had beat to set on my feet to keep me from working
my feet. I began to scream and one white man got up and began to beat me in my
head and tell me to hush. One white man-my dress had worked up high, he walked
over and pulled my dress down-and he pulled my dress back, back up....
All of this 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 the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want
to live as decent human beings, in America?
Questions
Black Power, Black
Nationalism – Introduction
In the wake
of its greatest legislative triumph, the Civil Rights movement began to fragment.
On 11 August 1965, less than a week after the passage of the Voting Rights Act,
the black Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts exploded into a firestorm of
looting and violence. When the riot ended, 34 people lay dead and property
damage exceeded 35 million dollars. But Watts was only one incident in a half
decade of rage. From 1964 through 1968, the ghettoes of the North and West
combusted in some three hundred riots involving at least a half million
African Americans.
The riots
illustrated the limits of the Civil Rights movement. By the 1960s, a majority
of African Americans lived in inner-city neighborhoods, most of them outside
the South. They faced no Jim Crow laws or disfranchisement devices, only the
economic ills and social alienation of places like Watts-widespread poverty,
massive unemployment, welfare, inadequate housing and schools, and racist
police. The boycotts, marches, sit-ins, and freedom rides had raised black
awareness and expectations but could do little to ameliorate the conditions of
ghetto life. Now many black activists, especially younger ones, searched for a
different strategy.
"Black
Power" became the new watchword. The term, coined by Stokely Carmichael in
1966, became a rallying cry for urban blacks increasingly alienated from the
Civil Rights movement. The idea derived from Black Nationalism-the belief that
people of African descent share a common experience, culture, world view, and
destiny. Most Black Power advocates were heavily influenced by Malcolm X, who
urged African Americans to band together and take control of their communities
"by any means necessary." Like Malcolm X, they generally eschewed the
goal of integration and the strategy of nonviolence. But Black Power meant
different things to different people. Most whites and some older blacks saw it
as synonymous with violence. For younger black activists, it usually referred
to self-reliance, race pride, and political and economic empowerment. The
rising importance of Black Power became evident in 1966 when both SNCC and CORE
embraced this more radical direction.
Black Power
advocates shared a common goal empowering black communities-but they differed
on how that would best be achieved. Revolutionary nationalist groups, such as
the Black Panther Party, called for armed struggle and espoused Marxist
thought. Seeing racism as an inevitable product of capitalism, they welcomed
alliances and coalitions with like-minded whites. Cultural nationalist groups,
such as the US Organization based in Los Angeles, insisted that African Americans could liberate themselves
from white domination only after they had adopted a cohesive culture,
completely divorced from white ways. Its founder and leader, Maulana Ron
Karenga, urged his fellow blacks to adopt African clothing and hairstyles,
abandon their European surnames, learn Swahili, and celebrate distinctive
holidays like Kwanzaa. He viewed Marxism as alien to the black struggle,
rejected alliances and coalitions with whites, and maintained that armed
struggle was impossible until blacks had rediscovered their cultural roots. By
the time the Black Power movement drifted into decline in the 1970s, both
approaches had left their mark. Revolutionary nationalists had raised the
political and economic consciousness of a generation of African Americans,
while cultural nationalists had revolutionized their cultural values and
practices. These changes were to be the chief legacies of Black Power.
Question: Be familiar with the contents of this
overview
Malcolm X, Black Nationalism and
Black Revolution
Most Black Power advocates were
inspired by the life and legacy of Malcolm X (1925-1965). Born Malcolm Little,
he suffered through a troubled childhood, only to become a teenage hustler,
pimp, and cocaine addict on the streets of Boston and Harlem. After a bungled
burglary, he was sent to prison, where he read voluminously and converted to
the separatist doctrines of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. Released
in 1952, he was appointed the minister of a Harlem mosque. Before long, his
trenchant analysis of white racism, his confrontational language, and his
charismatic style made him into the chief evangelist for the Black Muslims. But
his growing popularity and independence brought estrangement from Muhammad and
the Nation. After a 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm X became convinced of the
possibility of white redemption, rejected his unequivocal separatism, and
considered politics as a possible vehicle for black empowerment. But to the
end, he continued to preach the value of black nationalism and the likelihood
of black revolution, as in the following 1964 speech. After his assassination
one year later, The Autobiography of
Malcolm X (1965) became a "nearly universal sacred text" for
the Black Power movement.
Friends and
enemies, tonight I hope that I can have a little fireside chat with as few
sparks as possible being tossed around. Especially because of the very
explosive condition that the world is in today. Sometimes, when a person's
house is on fire and someone comes in yelling fire, instead of the person who
is awakened by the yell being thankful, he makes the mistake of charging the
one who awakened him with having set the fire. I hope this little conversation
tonight about the black revolution won't cause many of you to accuse us of
igniting it when you find it at your doorstep....
I'm still a
Muslim but I'm also a nationalist, meaning that my political philosophy is
black nationalism, my economic philosophy is black nationalism, my social
philosophy is black nationalism. And when I say that this philosophy is black
nationalism, to me this means that the political philosophy of black
nationalism is that which is designed to encourage our people, the black
people, to gain complete control over the politics and politicians of our own
community.
Our economic
philosophy is that we should gain economic control over the economy of our own
community, the businesses and the other things which create employment so that
we can provide jobs for our own people instead of having to picket and boycott
and beg someone else for a job.
And, in
short, our social philosophy means that we feel that it is time to get together
among our own kind and eliminate the moral evils that are destroying the moral
fiber of our society, like drug addiction, drunkenness, adultery that leads to
an abundance of bastard children, welfare problems. We believe that we should
lift the level or the standard of our own society to a higher level wherein we
will be satisfied and then not inclined toward pushing ourselves into other
societies where we are not wanted....
By the
hundreds of thousands today we find our own people have become impatient,
turning away from your white nationalism, which you call democracy, toward the
militant uncompromising policy of black nationalism. I point out right here
that as soon as we announced we were going to start a black nationalist party
in this country we received mail from coast to coast, especially from young
people at the college level, the university level, who expressed complete
sympathy and support and a desire to take part in any kind of political action
based on black nationalism, designed to correct or eliminate immediately evils
that our people have suffered here for 400 years.
The black
nationalists too many of you may represent only a minority in the community.
And therefore you might have a tendency to classify them as something
insignificant. But just as the fuse is the smallest part or the smallest piece
in the powder keg it is yet that little fuse that ignites the entire powder
keg. The black nationalists to you may represent a small minority in the
so-called Negro community. But they just happen to be composed of the type of
ingredient necessary to fuse or ignite the entire black community. And this is
one thing that whites-whether you call yourselves liberals or conservatives or
racists or whatever else you might choose to be-one thing that you have to
realize is, where the black community is concerned, although there the large
majority you may come in contact with may impress you as being moderate and
patient and loving and long-suffering and all that kind of stuff, the minority
who you consider to be Muslims or nationalists happen to be made of the type
of ingredient that can easily spark the black community. This should be
understood. Because to me a powder keg is nothing without a fuse.
1964 will be
America's hottest year; her hottest year yet; a year of much racial violence
and much racial bloodshed. But it won't be blood that's going to flow only on
one side. The new generation of black people that have grown up in this country
during recent years are already forming the opinion, and it's a just opinion,
that if there is to be bleeding, it should be reciprocal-bleeding on both
sides....
So today,
when the black man starts reaching out for what America says are his rights,
the black man feels that he is within his rights-when he becomes the victim of
brutality by those who are depriving him of his rights-to do whatever is
necessary to protect himself. An example of this was taking place last night at
this same time in Cleveland, where the police were putting water hoses on our
people there and also throwing tear gas at them and they met a hail of stone, a
hail of rocks, a hail of bricks. [A] Couple weeks ago in Jacksonville, Florida,
a young teenage Negro was throwing Molotov cocktails.
Well,
Negroes didn't do these ten years ago. But what you should learn from this is
that they are waking up. It was stones yesterday, Molotov cocktails today; it
will be hand grenades tomorrow and whatever else is available the next day. The
seriousness of this situation must be faced up to. You should not feel that I
am inciting someone to violence. I'm only warning of a powder-keg
situation. You can take it or leave it. If you take the warning perhaps you
can still save yourself. But if you ignore it or ridicule it, well, death is
already at your doorstep. There are 22,000,000 African Americans who are ready
to fight for independence right here. When I say fight for independence right
here, I don't mean any non-violent fight, or turn-the-other-cheek fight. Those
days are gone. Those days are over.
If George
Washington didn't get independence for this country non-violently, and if
Patrick Henry didn't come up with a non-violent statement, and you taught me to
look upon them as patriots and heroes, then it's time for you to realize that I
have studied your books well....
This is a real
revolution.... Revolution is never based on begging somebody for an integrated
cup of coffee. Revolutions are never fought by turning the other cheek.
Revolutions
are never based upon love your enemy, and pray for those who spitefully use
you. And revolutions are never waged singing, "We Shall Overcome."
Revolutions are based upon bloodshed. Revolutions are never compromising.
Revolutions are never based upon negotiations. Revolutions are never based upon
any kind of tokenism whatsoever. Revolutions are never even based upon that
which is begging a corrupt society or a corrupt system to accept us into it.
Revolutions overturn systems, and there is no system on this earth which has
proven itself more corrupt, more criminal than this .system, that in 1964 still
colonizes 22,000,000 African Americans.
Questions
Stokely Carmichael, Black Power
Defined
In 1966 Stokely Carmichael
(1942-1998), the new chairman of SNCC, gave the growing black nationalist sentiment
among younger activists both a name and a slogan when he called for "Black
Power." Born in the West Indies and raised in New York City, he became
active in SNCC while a student at Howard University, then participated in
Freedom Summer in Mississippi. In the following document, written in 1966,
Carmichael defines and explains the need for Black Power. He later expanded
this discussion in the volume, Black
Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967), which he coauthored
with a political scientist. Carmichael eventually adopted a Pan African
perspective, changed his name to Kwame Ture, and moved to the African nation of
Guinea.
We shall
have to struggle for the right to create our own terms through which to define
ourselves and our relationship to the society, and to have these terms
recognized. This is the first necessity of a free people....
Negroes are
defined by two forces, their blackness and their powerlessness. There have been
traditionally two communities in America. The White community, which controlled
and defined the forms that all institutions within the society would take; and
the Negro community which has been excluded from participation in the power
decisions that shaped the society, and has traditionally been dependent upon,
and subservient to, the White community.
This has not
been accidental. The history of every institution of this society indicates
that a major concern in the ordering and structuring of the society has been
the maintaining of the Negro community in its condition of dependence and
oppression. This has not been on the level of individual acts of discrimination
between individual whites against individual Negroes, but as total acts by the
White community against the Negro community. This fact cannot be too strongly
emphasized-that racist assumptions of white superiority have been so deeply
ingrained in the structure of the society that it infuses its entire
functioning, and is so much a part of the national subconscious that it is
taken for granted and is frequently not even recognized .... The ghetto itself
is a product of a combination of forces and special interests in the white
community, and the groups that have access to the resources and power to change
that situation benefit, politically and economically, from the existence of
that ghetto.
It is more
than a figure of speech to say that the Negro community in America is a victim
of white imperialism and colonial exploitation. This is in practical economic
and political terms true. There are over twenty million black people comprising
ten percent of this nation. They for the most part live in well-defined areas
of the country-in the shanty-towns and rural black belt areas of the South, and
increasingly in the slums of northern and western industrial cities. If one
goes into any Negro community, whether it be Jackson, Miss., Cambridge, Md., or
Harlem, N.Y., one will find the same combination of political, economic, and
social forces are at work. The people in the Negro community do not control
the resources of that community, its political decisions, its law enforcement,
its housing standards; and even the physical ownership of the land, houses, and
stores lie outside that community.
It is white
power that makes the laws, and it is violent white power in the form of armed
white cops that enforces those laws with guns and nightsticks. The vast
majority of Negroes in this country live in these captive communities and must
endure these conditions of oppression because, and only because, they are
black and powerless....
SNCC
proposes that it is now time for the black freedom movement to stop pandering
to the fears and anxieties of the white middle class in the attempt to earn its
"goodwill," and to return to the ghetto to organize these
communities to control themselves. This organization must be attempted in
northern and southern urban areas as well as in the rural black belt counties
of the South.... We must organize black community power to end these abuses,
and to give the Negro community a chance to have its needs expressed.
Questions:
[1]
Roy E. Finkenbine, “Introduction The Civil Rights Movement.”In Sources of the African America Past, Second
Edition (Pearson Education, 2004)
[2]
Saturday Review (3 April 1965)
[3] "Testimony of Fannie
Lou Hamer Before the Credentials Committee of the Democratic National Convention,"
22 August 1964, Joseph Rauh Papers, Library of Congress.