When Mississippi Rep. Mike Espy took the stage at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, he was a rising star casting a vision for a New South. Thirty-two years later, Espy believes his state is finally ready to turn the page and elect him to the U.S. Senate.
Less than two years before his prime-time slot speaking slot, Espy had become the first African American elected to Congress from Mississippi since Reconstruction. He had won a majority-white district in the Delta region and came to Washington in the same class as the late John Lewis of Georgia.
Espy’s presence at the Atlanta convention and prominent role introducing the keynote speaker, Texas Treasurer Ann Richards, was part of the elevation of Black voices within the Democratic Party as a result of the strength of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns.
Espy’s convention speech paid homage to civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer. In famous remarks to the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the sharecropper from Ruleville, Mississippi, shared her powerful story of being jailed and beaten for trying to register to vote as a Black woman.
Hamer also famously said she was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
As a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Hamer was pushing to unseat the state’s all-white delegation or be seated with them. Her request was denied that year, but four years later in Chicago, Hamer became the first African American to be an official delegate at a national party convention since Reconstruction.
And nearly 56 years to the day from Hamer’s initial speech, Black women were chosen to headline two of the four...