Riders, civil rights activists who in 1961 rode interstate buses from Washington D.C. to New Orleans on routes through the segregated South to bring attention to the fact that localities in those states were ignoring federal desegregation law. When the buses made it to the Mississippi state line, by an arrangement between Governor Barnett and the Kennedy administration, police and the National Guard escorted them into Jackson where they were arrested and jailed for trying to use the bus station's whites-only facilities. Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Established in April 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) aimed to challenge discrimination based on race in the electoral process. It consisted of mainly disenfranchised African-Americans, although its membership was open to all Mississippians. The party was formed out of collaborative efforts from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). In August 1964, a bus of MFDP delegates arrived at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City with the intention of asking to be seated as the Mississippi delegation There they challenged the right of the Mississippi Democratic Party's delegation to participate in the convention, claiming that the regulars had been illegally elected in a completely segregated process that violated both party regulations and federal law, and that furthermore the regulars had no intention of supporting Lyndon B. Johnson, the party's incumbent president, in the November election. They therefore asked that the MFDP delegates be seated rather than the segregationist regulars. The Democratic Party referred the challenge to the Convention Credentials Committee, which televised its proceedings, which allowed the nation to see and hear the testimony of the MFDP delegates, particularly the testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer, whose evocative portrayal of her hard brutalized life as a sharecropper on the plantation owned by Jamie Whitten, a long time Mississippi congressman and chairman of the House Agricultural Committee, drew public attention. Some of the all-white delegations from other southern states threatened to leave the convention and bolt the party as in 1948 if the regular Mississippi delegation was unseated, and Johnson feared losing Southern support in the coming campaign against Republican Party candidate Barry Goldwater. With the help of Vice President Hubert Humphrey (chief sponsor of the 1948 civil rights resolution which sparked the 1948 Dixiecrat walk-out) and Party leader Walter Mondale, Johnson engineered a "compromise" in