Testifying at the Democratic National Convention
- By Willow Naomi Curry
(Willow Naomi Curry; photo by Pin Lim, courtesy of the author)
In 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democrats spoke at the Democratic National Convention, despite attempts to suppress them. Fannie Lou Hamer’s televised testimony of being threatened and nearly beaten to death, to prevent her registering Black Mississipians to vote, turned the political tide in the United States. Subsequent pressure from the American populace forced President Lyndon B. Johnson to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Sixty years later, in 2024, Uncommitted Democrat delegates were denied a chance to speak at the DNC.
Both the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Uncommitted delegations were democratically elected representatives of Democrat voters. Both supported the National Democratic Party under the condition of true democratic representation of the people. Both were born of opposition to heinous abuses of civil and human rights. And both delegations were intentionally obstructed by the presumptive nominee for fear of alienating the White supremacist voters who formed and continue to form a key part of their constituency.
The differences between 1964 and 2024 only show how far the Democratic Party has regressed. Firstly, because the certification process was televised in 1964, the American public got to see and hear a part of Fannie Lou Hamer’s speech live. Secondly, the 1964 Democratic Party compromised. They offered the Mississippi Freedom Democrats two “at-large” seats, alongside the official Mississippi Democratic Party delegation, and non-voting observer seats for the rest of the delegation. Thirdly, the MFDP refused the compromise and left the convention. "We didn't come all the way up here to compromise for no more than we'd gotten here,” declared the indomitable Fannie Lou. “We didn't come all this way for no two seats when all of us is tired." By contrast, the Uncommitted delegation in 2024 hung on to the bitter end of the convention, even with no such compromise. Their experience recalled the words of late Congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis, in his 1998 memoir: “We had played by the rules, done everything we were supposed to do, had played the game exactly as required, had arrived at the doorstep, and found the door slammed in our face.”
The role played by media, and television in particular, in these differences cannot be overstated. In 1964, when television’s outsized impact on politics was still new, the televising of something like certification proceedings was likely as much naïveté as a desire or respect for transparency. Hamer’s Southern Black vernacular speech, her size, and her deep blackness likely made the top guns of the Democratic Party rest even easier: who would really pay attention to her? But as she spoke, the weight of her testimony and its political significance was immediately recognizable.
In a 1993 New York Times review of a biography of Hamer, political author and journalist Nicolaus Mills wrote, “She described her beating in such moving terms that President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was watching the proceedings on television, worried that his re-election chances would be hurt by a Southern walkout.” Johnson attempted to interrupt Hamer with an impromptu press conference. At this concocted event, he delivered nothing but a nine-month-old news item before cutting back to the convention, where, conveniently, Hamer had just finished her speech. This obvious cover-up became the biggest news of the convention. All major news networks decided to air Hamer’s testimony in full. “In less than two years,” Mills continued, “Fannie Lou Hamer had gone from a woman nearly beat to death in a small Mississippi jail to someone who could worry a sitting President.”
Such a slip-up – an accidental exposure of this country’s innate and inexorable brutality and the human rights abuses, so carefully kept from public consciousness by idyllic sitcoms and postwar consumerism, a slip-up that forced real change – was never repeated. Since that moment, the Democratic Party has made no meaningful concessions to its voters or oppositional voices from within. The Democratic Party of 2024, armed with six decades of insight into the influence of live, televised media, an influence magnified a hundredfold by the hyper-individually tailored worlds of social media and the splintering of traditional media, has more power than ever before to prevent the accidental broadcasting of truth. No matter how much the Uncommitted might have tried to “play by the rules, done everything they were supposed to do, and played the game exactly as required,” they and their proposed speaker, Palestinian-American Georgia State Representative Ruwa Romman, never stood a chance. Even though the text version of Romman’s testimony was published by the mainline Democratic magazine Mother Jones, it was effectively squelched, given its lack of reach beyond Mother Jones readers and already-interested onlookers. You had to be looking to find it.
Across the span of sixty years, it is clear that the testimony of witness and experience unsettles power and those who submit to it. The official DNC smothering of Palestinian-American voices was paralleled in tragicomic fashion by convention attendees, who covered their ears against or mockingly drowned out protesters reading the names and ages of the murdered children of Gaza. What were they afraid of hearing? Our roots in Protestantism and the Enlightenment-era establishment of laws governing all of mankind have made us still a country whose every fiber is shot through with the weight of testimony. It still pricks at our exposed underbellies.
Imagine that the proceedings of the DNC – behind the stage show and party music, it was a bitter clash between those who oppose the American “rules-based international order” in all its brutality, and those who defend and advance it – had taken place in that ideal Enlightenment court of law . The International Court of Justice was founded on those Enlightenment values we claim to hold close. This body – the highest court of the world – has found Israel to be guilty of apartheid and credibly guilty of genocide. This would be the natural setting for such an examination, if not for the USA’s apparently inexhaustible get-out-of-jail-free card.
Still, for fantasy’s sake, I will think of how often, in this imagined court setting, the invisibilized defense (for it is, and seemingly will remain, the victims of this genocide who are constantly forced to defend themselves) would exclaim, “Objection!”: on the grounds of speculation, of irrelevance, of lack of foundation, of hearsay. The baseless narratives, the omission of any evidence, and most importantly, the willful suppression of key testimony in the spectacle put on by the DNC would compel even a biased jury to condemn them. Any halfway decent judge would censure them for wasting the time of the court and, more likely, would throw out the entire case. Of course, though a prosecutor did preside over it, the 2024 DNC was not a court of law or justice. It was a court in the older sense, the entourage of a ruler with unchecked power. A court of decadence and deception, of smoke and mirrors, of bread and circuses, of royals and fools.
And yet, elsewhere, outside the convention center, the testimony of witness and experience was delivered – and it broadcast truth to the world.
WILLOW NAOMI CURRY (Twitter: @willathewisp) is an artist, critic, curator, and design researcher based in Houston, Texas. Her art and curatorial work have appeared in exhibitions by Photoville NYC, DiverseWorks, Houston Museum of African American Culture, and the Houston Climate Justice Museum. Curry has held fellowships in art and political commentary and criticism with the Boston Review and the National Book Critics Circle, and her essays have appeared in or are forthcoming with Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Literary Hub, Southwest Contemporary, and the National Gallery of Art. She is currently at work on a photography series for DiverseWorks' upcoming River on Fire exhibition, as well as her debut novel, The Last Man in the Happy Land, forthcoming from Levine Querido.
