Today's Liberal News

Julian E. Zelizer

The Civil-Rights Era’s Great Unanswered Question

Sixty years ago, on August 22, 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer, a Black former sharecropper from Sunflower County, Mississippi, who had become a civil-rights activist, delivered one of the most eloquent addresses on race relations ever heard. Testifying before the credentials committee at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, where President Lyndon B.