Stockton Voices
To embrace diversity is to care enough to listen with an open mind and to speak up during difficult conversations. The #StocktonVoices series gives students, faculty and staff a platform to both speak and listen to our own diverse voices.
The featured profiles highlight reflections on current events, ways to see a different perspective and stories that center on the themes of race, culture, equality, inclusion and diversity.
60 years ago, to this day, Fannie Lou Hamer traveled from Ruleville, Mississippi, to Atlantic City and stood before the Democratic National Convention to challenge the all-white delegation representing her home state.
Her bravery was met with jeering, vitriol and even censorship as television broadcasts quickly cut off her speech from reaching the homes of the convention’s constituents. However, her plea for justice and civil rights still resounded all over the world, especially when she took her story all the way to the Capitol in order to protest the 1964 Mississippi House election in which she and the rest of the state’s Black population were barred from voting in.
People have said year after year, ‘Those people in Mississippi can't think.’ But after we would work ten and 11 hours a day for three lousy dollars and couldn't sleep, we couldn't do anything else but think. And we have been thinking a long time. And we are tired of what's going on. And we want to see now what this here will turn out like for the 4th of January. We want to see, ‘Is democracy real?’”
Fannie Lou Hamer, shortly before her and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party made their trip to the U.S. Capitol