After meeting Fannie Lou Hamer in the summer of 1964 and hearing her experiences in the Civil Rights Movement , Blackwell decided to join the SNCC . As a project director for the SNCC , she organized voter registration drives across Mississippi . Later that year , she became a member on the executive committee of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party ( MFDP ) , which provided a party for voters that SNCC had been registering to vote . In late August she and 67 other elected MFDP delegates traveled to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City , New Jersey , intending to get the MFDP seated as " the only democratically constituted delegation from Mississippi " . They were eventually offered two at-large seats but refused that compromise ; the event , particularly Hamer 's nationally televised testimony before the credentialing committee , brought the party and the Mississippi civil rights movement into the public eye
1964 Democratic National Convention
1964 Democratic National Convention
Unita Blackwell