Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Barack Obama gave his victory speech not more than half an hour from where I am writing this. I had an invitation to attend, but my disability prevented it. On this historic day when an African American captured the Democratic nomination for the Presidency I could not help but think of a woman from Mississippi who must smiling down on this from up above.

This woman who was the daughter of slaves died in poverty, largely forgotten by an America she tried to hold accountable to its own ideals. She was buried under a tombstone that read “I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Last summer they named the extension of the Voting Rights Act after her, but it was an honor long overdue.

The reason I thought about her tonight is that she predicted something like it many years ago. She was dying and had little money, yet even then she could muster optimism about the future. At the close of an oral history interview she talked about the future:

I talked to some young people in Washington, and they said, ‘You know we’re going to find out one day just how many blacks there are in Mississippi because we’re going to travel that state over.’

But Fannie Lou Hamer would be the first to note that at this moment it is important to remember those who made this moment possible, for without the efforts of thousands of people, Barack Obama would not only not be running for President, he would not have even been on the ballot of many states and African Americans would not have been able to vote for him.

The roll call that should be summoned at this time is a long one, with names familiar and unknown. The familiar have already received their due in history books, but it was those whose names are largely unknown who participated in what was known as The Movement who deserve to be remembered tonight. They braved death just for the sheer act of trying to register to vote. Someday there should be a monument to all of them.

After the Brown v. Board decision the state of Mississippi formed the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a government agency dedicated to preserving segregation. In honor of Barack Obama I cite some of entries in their records, for like the Nazis, they seemed to take a perverse pride in documenting evil.

One memo captures the atmosphere::

It was pointed out to Shiboh by the writer, that he was going a bit beyond the tutoring in Leland and he was advised to be very careful he did not go beyond the provisions of the law and create a problem which could bring about serious trouble.

In another entry, an agent recommended pressuring a black college to purge itself of Civil Rights “agitators” by threatening to revoke the teaching licenses of all the faculty and of those who graduated with teaching licenses. A third memo tells of a plant visit by representatives of a racist group that threatened the plant owner if he did not stop hiring African Americans.

Reporting on a closed meeting an investigator noted:

The writer could not gain access to the meeting but is very close to some of those who will attend so I should be able to find out what was discussed.

The there was this one:

Rita Schwerner [the wife of slain Civil Rights worker Michael Schwerner] recently purchased a Singer sewing machine in Meridian and had it delivered to 2505 1/2 5th Street in Meridian.

Testimony given by a Mississippi registrar to a 1965 Congressional Subcommitee sounds strangely familiar after the Supreme Court’s recent Indiana :voter ID decision:

For a day and a half Shankle sweated on the stand trying to explain…why he had closed down one of the two voter registration offices in the county and forced a large part of the Negro residents to trek an additional 25 or 30 miles to register; why he refused to appoint deputy registrars to handle applications, with the result that Negroes were prevented from voting the two months when he was acting as the clerk of the circuit court…why he had denied a Negro applicant the right to register…even though she had answered the 21 questions on the application…she had signed the application in only one of the two required places.

Finally there is the testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer herself about what it cost. On June 3, 1963, she was riding in a rented bus on her way to a SNCC convention in South Carolina when police in Winona, Mississippi stopped the bus and jailed those on board. She described what happened next:

Three white men came into my room. One was a state highway policeman (he had the marking on his sleeve)… They said they were going to make me wish I was dead. They made me lay down on my face and they ordered two Negro prisoners to beat me with a blackjack. That was unbearable. The first prisoner beat me until he was exhausted, then the second Negro began to beat me. I had polio when I was about six years old. I was limp. I was holding my hands behind me to protect my weak side. I began to work my feet. My dress pulled up and I tried to smooth it down. One of the policemen walked over and raised my dress as high as he could. They beat me until my body was hard, ’til I couldn’t bend my fingers or get up when they told me to. That’s how I got this blood clot in my eye ‑ the sight’s nearly gone now. My kidney was injured from the blows they gave me on the back.

When someone asked Hamer how she could endure such beatings for the cause of voting rights she answered:

The only thing they could do to me was to kill me, and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.

A colleague described the atmosphere of the time and Hamer’s response to it:

Fannie Lou Hamer was sick in bed when we got there. Lee Bankhead stated she did not know if she was going to live long because white people had been driving by her house during the night. She stated once she saw a gun sticking out of a car window, and that they had shot a dog once. Lee Bankhead was asking Fannie Lou Hamer if she should buy a gun and keep it. Mrs. Hamer stated that the Bible was her gun, but she indicated two guns that she had in the room. She said you had a right to protect yourself in your own home but cautioned against shooting the wrong person and getting in a lot of trouble.

There are parallels between The Movement and the Obama campaign that are almost uncanny. Because The Movement was a genuine mass uprising involving thousands of African Americans and others, there was no way the old tactic of lynching could work. To paraphrase Billie Holliday, there would have been a lot of strange fruit hanging from Southern trees.

Like authoritarian regimes, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and other bastard children of the Klan hoped to intimidate The Movement using all the tactics of the modern police state. At the center of these efforts lay a few deliberate acts of intimidation: the murders of Medgar Evers, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, the burnings and bombings of churches including one with children inside, the police dogs, fire hoses and night sticks of the Bull Connors of Southern “law enforcement,” and finally the beatings of Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis and others.

I remember when a college acquaintance underwent such a beating in Mississippi, although it was nothing like Hamer’s. His harrowing description and the stories of Freedom Riders like him rippled across college dorms, radicalizing a generation.

Like The Movement, the Obama campaign’s strength lies in its base of anonymous volunteers. Like the movement it has suffered attempts at intimidation, although thankfully nothing approaching the tactics of the 1960s. The modern equivalents of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission instead have employed the mass media as the latest permutation of white resistance.

If Hillary Clinton cries “foul” every time she thinks Tim Russert is out to get her, the media have directed most of their big ammunition at Obama, turning his pastor into a household word and ultimately forcing Obama to sever one of the most sacred ties in the African American community. Then there is the myth of unelectability which uncannily corresponds with the 1960s dogma that you can’t change a culture overnight.

The most despicable and dangerous attacks, like those random 1960s acts of intimidation have used the new tool of the Internet to employ words like bullets and billy clubs. The most notorious of these is that Obama is a Muslim. Then there are the sick distortions of his name. Like the theme of outside agitators as the cause of The Movement, the modern equivalents of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission try to tar Obama for being an “elitist” whose bowling score shows he is from another place than the average American.

Yet like The Movement, the Obama campaign continues to grow. The media again misunderstand, as they did in the 1960s, likening Obama’s success to “charisma” the way they tended to see The Movement as dependent on public personalities like Dr. King. But Barack Obama’s success has less to do with charisma than it has to do with millions of Americans who sense that finally after all these years it might be possible to turn the political tide just as a similar hope fueled The Movement. Obama supporters are fed up with the Republican Counterrevolution and the capitulation to it of groups like the New Democrats and the Democratic Leadership Council.

Most of all, what I wrote about Fannie Lou Hamer also applies to Barack Obama. His nomination:

Demonstrates a fundamental liberal principle: a level playing field will produce uncommon people, because you never know when someone will seize the threads they have been given and weave them into something singular.

Now we await what promises to be the most singular election In American history.

Tags: Barack Obama, democratic presidential nomination, equity, Fannie Lou Hamer, level playing field, Mississippi Soverignty Commission, voting rights
Tagged with: Barack Obama • democratic presidential nomination • equity • Fannie Lou Hamer • level playing field • Mississippi Soverignty Commission • voting rights