I’ll admit it — as a Black woman, I shed a tear or two watching Kamala Harris at the DNC

CHICAGO — Fannie Lou Hamer, a Black sharecropper and activist from Mississippi, couldn’t get a seat at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.

So, she went before the DNC credentials committee and described how she had been fired from her job after attempting to register to vote. How she had been arrested and brutally beaten while jailed. How Medgar Evers, the leader of the state’s chapter of the NAACP, had been killed the year before. And how the integrated group she cofounded, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, should be seated at the convention instead of her state’s official delegation, which was racially segregated.

“If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” Hamer said during her speech, which was televised.

“Is this America?” she asked. “The land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”

The Democrats should have escorted the entire group onto the convention floor after that.

But America was still too deeply steeped in its own denial to recognize the contradictions between the lofty ideals upon which it was founded and its shameful second-class treatment of African Americans. Instead, while she was still speaking, President Lyndon B. Johnson called an impromptu news conference to cut into the TV coverage her testimony got. Stations aired her testimony anyway.

Sixty years later to the day, Vice President Kamala Harris formally accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination to run for president.

Hamer, who died in 1977, would have been amazed. I am amazed. We’ve come so far.

It was important for me to attend in person.

I did so in memory of my late parents, faithful Democrats who never gave up on the promise of America, despite being treated like second-class citizens during the early part of their lives because of their race.

I did so in memory of both sets of my grandparents, who were denied the right to vote and suffered all manner of discrimination in the Jim Crow South.

I did so in memory of my great-grandparents, including the late Robert Armstrong, who was born into slavery in South Carolina.

Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, may write me off as a “childless cat lady” with no stake in the country’s future, but I also wanted to be there for myself. My time at Howard University, a historically Black university, overlapped for two years with Harris’ time. Seeing a fellow Bison, who attended classes inside Frederick Douglass Hall and studied at the Founder’s Library, reach this pinnacle fills me with so much pride.

I felt it in my gut Monday night when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said: “I wish my mother and Kamala’s mother could see us. They would would say, ‘Keep going.’”

I would add my mother’s name to that list. She would say the same thing. Anne Armstrong greatly admired Clinton, and I know she would feel similarly about Harris. She was an elementary school librarian who would stop and watch each time U.S. Rep. Shirley Chisholm showed up on our black-and-white TV.

I was way too young to understand the significance of Chisholm being the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. Same thing when Chisholm became the first woman, as well as the first African American, to seek the nomination of the presidency from one of the two major political parties.

Years later, Harris credited Chisholm as having helped inspire her. In 2019, she told the Grio — a website geared toward African Americans, “I stand — as so many of us do — on her shoulders.”

There was nowhere else I would have rather been last week than at that convention, watching history unfold. Like many attendees, I wiped away a tear or two. But as former first lady Michelle Obama reminded the crowd at the United Center, it’s not time to take a victory lap. She pointed out that while Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, “are doing great right now … this is still going to be an uphill battle.”

But as Clinton said, we need to “keep going.”

That’s what Hamer did.

That’s what Chisholm did.

That’s what Harris is doing.

That’s what we all must do to ensure everyone has a chance to claim a seat at the political table — and answer Hamer’s question: “Is this America?”