Harvey Richards filmed and produced Dream Deferred for Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for its southern civil rights movement voter registration drive in the spring of 1964, just before the famous 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer. It is one of five civil rights films in the Harvey Richards Media Archive. It is the second film Richards made in collaboration with Amzie Moore, a civil rights leader and resident of Cleveland, Mississippi. The other film is “We’ll Never Turn Back”.
Amzie Moore in Dream Deferred
Amzie Moore appears in Dream Deferred speaking about conditions of life in the Mississippi delta. The film contains interviews with other civil rights activists, voter registrants, including Fannie Lou Hamer. Fannie Lou Hamer is shown addressing an assembly of sharecroppers in a church during her campaign for election in the ‘freedom votes’ that the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party held to gain black voters representation within the regular segregated Democratic Party. These votes led to the fight to unseat the all white Democratic Party establishment in the famous 1964 Democratic Party convention. Speaking her famous line in the church, Fannie Lou Hamer declared “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired”.
To learn more about the story of how Harvey Richards’ two Mississippi films were made, see my essay “Primary Source Documentaries” available on this web site.
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