Learning
Module 4: Activity One – History 101
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: April 28
Assessment: 20 points.
Process:
The Documents: Attached and Posted on
the Class Website.
The Civil Rights Movement:
Black Power, Black Nationalism
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][1][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][2][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][3][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][1][1]
Roy E. Finkenbine, “Introducation
The Civil Rights Movement. ”In Sources of the African
[2][2][2]
Saturday Review (3 April 1965)
[3][3][3] "Testimony of Fannie
Lou Hamer Before the
Credentials Committee of the Democratic National Convention," 22 August
1964, Joseph Rauh Papers, Library of Congress.