The voice of a Black woman at a Democratic party convention can bring back powerful memories.
Sixty years ago, in late August 1964, with the heat curdling above the Atlantic City boardwalk and the marine breezes thick with the smell of saltwater taffy, I listened to Fannie Lou Hamer from Ruleville, Mississippi, trying to persuade the credentials committee of the Democratic National Convention to replace her state’s all-white, unrepentantly segregationist delegation with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party slate.
The plea, spoken with the full force of Sunday church eloquence, and simple sharecropper (for she had been one) vernacular was, of course, in vain. Not for want of sympathy in the hall. Three weeks earlier, the bodies of three students, one Black and two Jewish, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, murdered for registering Black voters, had been discovered beneath an earthen dam near the city of Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Horror and revulsion had swept through much of the country. For her own temerity in attempting to register herself and organise others in the Delta to do likewise, thus acquiring, as she put it, the due rights of “first-class citizens”, Hamer had been arrested, taken to a jailhouse and viciously beaten with blackjacks. She already had the status of a hero, and the story of her ordeal shook the emotions of the crowd in the smoky room. But Democratic party elders, alarmed at losing segregationist state votes, were not about to grant what democratic equality and justice minimally required.
The previous month, President Lyndon Johnson, for whom the convention had been designed as coronation, had signed the Civil Rights Act, proscribing discrimination in housing, employment and service in public spaces. That legislation had largely been the work of his predecessor John F Kennedy, murdered in the alienated South. Now, his Texan successor was already being demonised as a traitor.
Absent from the convention until its final acceptance session, Johnson interceded, offering what he deemed a compromise. Two members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party could be seated as “delegates at large”, without dislodging the regular slate. In other words, the Mississippi Freedom people would be allowed to listen but not speak, precisely the kind of humiliation they had been founded to reject. “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats when all of us is tired,” Hamer said.
But Hamer had already spoken and no one who was there, certainly not me, will ever forget the account of her ordeal; especially when, six decades later, with a minority nominee at the top of the Democratic ticket, efforts in the all-important swing state of Georgia are still being made to put obstacles in the way of Black voting, and, after the polling stations close and the votes have been counted, to permit partisan officials to delay certification of the result, based merely on their own, partisan, suspicion of irregularities.
Fannie Lou Hamer died in 1977, the notion of a Black woman president surely beyond her wildest dreams. But the words that closed her speech posed a question that still haunts America in the era of online death threats and toxic disinformation. If her wish to register and be a “first-class citizen” was to be thwarted, “Is this America? The land of the free and the home of the brave? Where we have to sleep with our telephone off the hook because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in America?”
The question of American authenticity has never gone away, with two seemingly irreconcilable versions claiming to be the real thing; the USA to which the country must return to save itself. The Democrats, habitually accused by their adversaries of being bicoastal out-of-touch elites, alien to true America, knew what they were doing when they invited the Team USA basketball coach Steve Kerr to speak at their convention last month. Basking in the glow of an Olympic gold, Kerr held up his team, comprised of men trained in the regular season to beat each other yet united when playing for their country, as an example for a nation that ought to have “common purpose”. He was interrupted by a chant of “USA, USA”, surely more usual in Trump occasions and a sign that this edition of the Democrats meant to contest the Republicans’ monopoly on unembarrassed patriotism.
Their own reminted brand of American pride, though, tries to differentiate itself from crude swagger of the kind on show at Donald Trump’s photo-op at the Arlington National Cemetery on August 26, when he posed for grinning thumbs-ups with the families of soldiers killed by the suicide bombing at Kabul airport during the chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan in 2021.
Trump had milked the occasion with a presidential hand on heart and wreath-laying at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, accompanied by wounded veterans. But when a member of the cemetery staff attempted to stop photography in Section 60, largely reserved for those fallen in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, where photography for political purposes is forbidden by federal law, she was brushed aside.
Trump’s campaign people described her efforts as those of someone undergoing “a mental health episode”; and the scene posted to Trump’s TikTok page advertised his devotion to country and, by invidious implication, the Biden administration’s responsibility for the debacle. JD Vance is blunter, suggesting that Kamala Harris could “go to hell” for criticising Trump after herself failing the casualties of the airport bombing.
An immediate firefight for patriotic decencies erupted on social media, not least among veterans’ organisations — some defending Trump on the grounds that the families had asked him to be there on the anniversary of the suicide bombing; others, such as Veterans for Responsible Leadership, assailing him for exploiting the sacrifice of service personnel for low political advantage. The resort to video was intended to project an image of the ex-president as devoted to the military rather than as someone who could describe the fallen as “suckers” and “losers”, as reported by John Kelly, the retired general who served him as White House chief of staff and whose own son was killed in Afghanistan and is buried at Arlington.
Kait Wyatt, the widow of a fallen Marine and former Marine herself, told MSNBC that Arlington cemetery had been “desecrated” by Trump’s “egregious trespassing on sacred ground”. It didn’t help that just over a week earlier at his New Jersey golf club, Trump had characterised the Presidential Medal of Freedom he had awarded the lavish donor Miriam Adelson as “better” than the Medal of Honor given for acts of valour in the field, since, he said, the military medalled were either “in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead”.
Given how many wars America has been involved in since 1945 — Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (twice), Afghanistan — it’s not surprising that election seasons have seldom been able to avoid finger-pointing or, worse, poisonous takedown campaigns. The Democrat Michael Dukakis’s campaign against the authentically heroic George Bush Sr was over as soon as his helmeted head popped up from the turret of a tank. John Kerry’s record as commander of a Mekong river patrol boat took a brutal hit from veterans nursing resentment at his subsequent opposition to the war. Bill Clinton and Donald Trump have both been attacked as draft dodgers; the bone spur diagnosis that got the latter five deferments was described by the daughters of the physician who supplied them as a personal favour to Donald’s father, Fred.
No sooner had Tim Walz made something of his 24 years in the Army National Guard than the ex-Marine Vance pounced on his opponent, accusing him of committing “stolen valour” (properly applied to those receiving medals without having earned them) for suggesting he had carried weapons in a combat zone. Vance himself served in Iraq in a non-combat position, writing articles and taking photographs for the Public Affairs office.
But though his National Guardsman years have certainly been important in his presentation as all-American good egg, the genial teddy-bear shaped Walz was selected by Harris as her VP as an embodiment of a kind of patriotism that has less to do with battlefield fatigues than down-home virtues, the kind that Democratic messaging suggests have been swallowed alive by corporate ruthlessness, plutocratic glitz (of the gilt bathroom variety), the yahoo lust for abuse; the sucker-manipulation of disinformation and the sheer pumped-up call-and-response high of synchronised hatred. Nothing betrayed the inexhaustible appetite for Trumpian ridicule more than the mockery of Walz’s neurodivergent son Gus for standing and shouting in teary joy, “That’s my dad.”
Against the carnival of contempt, Walz and Harris are trying to offer an alternative patriotism, defined by what Barack Obama, summoning his inner Lincoln (never very far away) at the convention, called America’s “bonds of affection”. That America is imagined as a community of inclusion rather than a fortress of exclusion; a welcome mat rather than a gated barrier; one in which a neighbourhood is more than a zip code. That America is less a social philosophy than a set of benevolent instincts of mutual decency: an immediate willingness to dig a neighbour’s car out of a Minnesota snow bank or give a gay high-school student reassurance; an America of church bake sales and high-school proms; of multitudes of George Baileys rather than Mr Potters somehow hanging on in the era of diabolical trolling.
So when the Democrats present themselves as the forward-facing, page-turning party of the future, chorusing “We’re not going back,” they only half mean it. Not going back, certainly, to the Comstock Act of 1873 under which women could be prosecuted for mailing or receiving objects that might be used for abortion — the legislation invoked by those wanting to criminalise the sending and receiving of mifepristone and misoprostol. But yes to reverting to a political universe in which it is possible to disagree, even profoundly, with an opponent without requiring destruction or, as Trump has promised should he prevail, “retribution”.
It may well be, of course, that this honey-dripped pancake-stack version of yesteryear America is a fantasy. It was the now-beatified George Bush Sr who had no scruple in 1988 in encouraging his campaign strategist Lee Atwater to use the case of Willie Horton, a Black convicted murderer who raped a white woman while on weekend furlough from prison in Massachusetts, to argue that Michael Dukakis, the state’s then governor, was soft on crime. For that matter, John Adams thought accusing his adversary Thomas Jefferson of atheism would be bound to sink him at the polls.
But when Trump, perhaps winkingly, perhaps not, suggests he would complete the day of his inauguration by establishing a dictatorship (just for 24 hours), even some ultra-conservatives such as the jurist Michael Luttig believe that he will indeed violate his oath to uphold and defend the constitution. We have plenty of detail on what is planned: a purge of 50,000 politically neutral civil servants, to be replaced by loyalists; the deployment of the military to suppress protests, courtesy of the Insurrection Act of 1807 and the weaponising of the department of justice to prosecute political opponents — all standard tactics from the fascist playbook of the 1930s.
The contest, then, is of Mother Country against Fatherland. While Kamala Harris has been at pains not to make her candidacy about identity politics or the breaking of glass ceilings, no one deludes themselves into thinking gender is tangential to the outcome of the election. Polls have revealed sharp divisions along lines of generation, race and education. But the sharpest polarisation is between the genders, especially among the young. An Emerson College poll in late August found that women intended to vote for Harris rather than Trump in a number of swing states by decisive margins: 12 per cent in Pennsylvania; 15 per cent in Michigan; 11 per cent in Wisconsin and a surprising 10 per cent in Georgia. A New York Times/Siena College poll had 55 per cent of women in key swing states voting for Harris as opposed to 40 per cent for Trump.
How much of this lopsided division of allegiance is due to the bitter debate over reproduction rights following the Supreme Court’s jettisoning of Roe vs Wade is still unclear. But the issue is evidently making Trump nervous. A day later he switched from saying he would vote yes on a Florida referendum that would over-rule the present law banning abortion after six weeks, to promising a no. He has said that his presidency would be terrific for the reproductive rights of women, but if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.
Two years ago at the Hay Festival, Hillary Clinton reflected on what might have gone wrong for her in the debates with Trump. She acknowledged that a tipping point was the melodramatic moment when her opponent left his lectern to walk over to her, looming at her back. It was, she thought, a lose-lose predicament; if she told him in no uncertain terms to get the hell out of her space, she risked reinforcing the caricature of witchy-bitch aggression; but by going for unconcerned indifference she may have appeared too passive for a prospective commander-in-chief.
Should Trump think of pulling a comparable stunt in the all-important televised showdown on September 10, you can bet Harris won’t take it lightly. She is, after all, a seasoned prosecutor and her opponent an indicted felon. But while she may not be Going Back, she might be emboldened by the example of the second woman to run for president on the Equal Rights party ticket in 1884: the brilliant and formidable lawyer Belva Lockwood. Prevented from receiving the law degree she had earned at the National University School of Law, in 1873 Lockwood wrote directly and boldly to the chancellor, who happened to be President Ulysses S Grant. A week later her diploma arrived.
It would be due to Lockwood’s persistent efforts that Congress passed a bill finally allowing women to argue cases before the Supreme Court and she was the first to do so. In a second case in 1906, three quarters of a century after Andrew Jackson’s monstrous eviction of the Cherokee nation from its ancestral homeland, and the failure of the federal government fully to honour its promise of compensation for the ceded land, Lockwood won the then substantial amount of $5mn for her clients, a rare case of honourable amends for Native Americans.
“The glory of each generation,” Lockwood once wrote, “is to set our own precedents” — to which, on November 6, the United States and the ghost of Fannie Lou Hamer may yet say amen.
Simon Schama is an FT contributing editor
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