January 4, 1965
Hundreds of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) supporters, who had journeyed by bus from Mississippi, supported the Challenge to the seating of the Mississippi delegation. It is illegal to carry signs or conduct a protest inside Capitol buildings, so they lined the underground tunnels that Representatives use to reach the House chamber.
Stokely Carmichael reported: “On opening day, as congressmen and their aides made their way through these tunnels, they turned a corner and found themselves passing between two lines of silent, working Black men and women from Mississippi. The people, spaced about ten feet apart, stood still as statues, dignified, erect, utterly silent. … It’s hard to describe the power of that moment. All seemed deeply affected in some way. To those passing congressmen, the issue of Southern political injustice could no longer remain an abstract statistic, distant, and dismissable.”
