From Mary Watkins “Dark River” (Act 2, Scene 6)
Listen to I Question America (Fannie Lou Hamer: Raina Simon Parks)
Music and lyrics ©2009, Mary Watkins, All Rights Reserved, BMI
Fannie Lou Hamer
In this scene, Fannie Lou Hamer (sung by Raina Simon Parks) delivers her famous speech to the credentials committee of the 1964 Democratic National Convention to protest their decision to seat an all-white delegation from Mississippi instead of the mixed-race delegation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
Although President Johnson called a press conference to divert attention from Hamer’s speech, television and radio networks carried her remarks in full on the evening news. Her speech led to negotiations with the party leadership. Hubert Humphrey offered the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party two non-voting seats at the convention, which they rejected. They focused national attention on voter inequality. A year later Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, outlawing literacy tests, poll taxes and other discriminatory election practices.
FANNIE LOU HAMER:
If the Freedom Party is not seated today
I question America.
If the Freedom Party is not seated now
I question America
I question America
Is this the land of the free?
Home of the brave?
If the Freedom Party is not seated today
I question America.
I question America.
Is this the land of the free?
Is this the home of the brave?
If the Freedom Party is not seated today
If the Mississippi Freedom Party is not seated
I question America,
The home,
The home of the free and the brave
Is this America?
Where we sleep with our phones off the hook?
Because our lives are threatened daily!
When all we want is to live our lives
as decent Americans in America?
They shoot up our houses,
They burn down our churches,
They threaten to kill us,
They take away our jobs,
They evict us from our homes,
They beat us, they lynch us
They make our lives hell!
They make our lives HELL,
HELL, HELL!
Is this America?
Music and lyrics ©2009, Mary Watkins, All Rights Reserved, BMI