Our view: Hamer statue a welcome Boardwalk addition when theres money for it – Press of Atlantic City

Atlantic City Council recently decided to ask the state for a grant to create a statue on the Boardwalk honoring civil rights and womens rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer.

Hamers contribution to the mid-1960s push for voting rights and participation by Blacks and women in politics is enough to merit remembering and honoring her anywhere in America outside her Mississippi home. Doing so at Jim Whelan Boardwalk Hall would be especially appropriate in light of her effort there to advance those rights, in particular within the Democratic Party.

Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to give African-Americans a voice in a region dominated by an all-white Democratic organization. She represented the MFDP at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.

She and other activists urged the convention to accept them as the official delegation from Mississippi.

In nationally televised testimony urging that her group be declared the delegates, Hamer said, All of this is on account we want to register, to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America.

National Democratic leaders offered a compromise that would include two members of the Hamer group on the state delegation, but the MFDP rejected it and afterwards all of the white members from the Mississippi delegation walked out. Not until the following party convention in 1968 were the MFDP members seated, after the Democratic Party demanded more equal representation from state delegations.

Hamer also co-founded the National Womens Political Caucus, which seeks to recruit, train and support women of all races in their quest for elected office.

A statue of Hamer at the site of her memorable stand for civil and womens rights would help bring her story to the general public. Stockton Universitys nearby Fannie Lou Hamer Event Room advances that awareness too in a more limited way.

Too bad, though, that Atlantic City Council the very same day it sought the grant for the Hamer statue paid $19,000 to remove the statue of Christopher Columbus that had long stood at the Atlantic City Expressway entrance to the city. That gives the days proceedings the appearance of advancing a partisan ideology, as if they were seeking to suppress one remembrance of the past in favor of another.

Awareness of and understanding history is like free speech best served by unfettered and diverse efforts ever working toward mutual agreement about better ideas. The melding of more perspectives on the past is crucial to people knowing who they are, how they got here and where theyre going.

As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said in his famous opinion on the value of free speech, those who achieved the nations independence knew that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies, and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.

In Atlantic City, South Jersey and across America, the effective response to regret about the past is to better understand the history and resolve to do better in the future.

Those who cannot remember and understand the past may not be condemned to repeat it exactly, but theyre at much greater risk of again succumbing to forces that prompt behavior theyll later regret.

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Our view: Hamer statue a welcome Boardwalk addition when theres money for it - Press of Atlantic City