Let justice roll down like water, righteousness like a mighty stream.
For our grandsons and granddaughters remember to remember the dream
Welcome to Songs and Stories from Home as we continue to Remember the Dream. This week Fannie Lou Hamer.
This week, the third week of August in 2020, a woman of color will be nominated at the Democratic National Convention to become Vice President of the United States. It a significant step forward both substantively and symbolically.
Fifty-six years ago the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party sent delegates to represent their state at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. The Civil Rights Act had become reality a month earlier. The Voting Rights Act still a year away from becoming the law of the land. Ultimately the Democratic Freedom Party delegates were not recognized, and an all white delegation was seated instead. But not before representatives of the Freedom Party had stated their case before the credentials committee and on national television.
Among those who spoke, Fannie Lou Hamer who shared her moving and evocative life story as a sharecropper on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta and the brutal retaliation inflicted on her and others who had the audacity to want to register to vote. Fannie Lou Hamer died in 1977 at 59. She and her husband, Pap, are buried in a garden spot in Ruleville, Mississippi on some land they bought to create what she called a Freedom Farm, making vegetables grown on the site available to neighbors for an annual fee of a dollar. Her struggle for freedom, for dignity, for equality, for all citizens to have the right to vote and access to voting continued until the day she died.
She would rightfully be appalled to think that the current President, who himself votes by mail, is suppressing the vote and making voting more dangerous by starving the Postal Service during this time of the pandemic. This week a woman of color is nominated to be the Vice President of the United States. We have come so far but only so far.
Let justice roll down like water, righteousness like a mighty stream.
For our grandsons and granddaughters remember to remember the dream
