ABSTRACT
AT the 1964 Democratic National Party Convention, Fannie Lou Hamer, a middle-aged black sharecropper, was a leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) delegation. Because they had been chosen in an election open to all adults, black and white, Hamer and the other MFDP delegates claimed that they should be seated in place of the regular, all-white state delegation. When a reporter asked Hamer if she was seeking total equality between the races she told him, “What would I look like fighting for equality with the white man? I don't want to go down that low. I want the true democracy that'll raise me and that white man up…raise America up.” 1 Hamer's words, “the true democracy/’ capture the history of the sixties that has been largely forgotten: the attempt to practice a participatory kind of democracy that would raise not just blacks, but all of America, up.
