In August 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, led by civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, demanded that their delegates be seated at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, rather than the segregationist Democrats—as they were also called—who dominated the official state party. That led to a walkout of the all-white Mississippi delegation, and the MFDP refused a party offer to compromise by giving them just two seats with no voting power.Segregationist Mississippi politician Charles Pickering—later a prominent Republican judge whose name would surface in the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings—attributed the actions of Hamer and her compatriots to his decision to leave the Democratic Party. Pickering said the people of Mississippi "were heaped with humiliation and embarrassment at the Democratic Convention.” He left the party a month later.Espy, who is a gun owner. “That's because I believe in the Second Amendment—I did then and I do now. I'm not running away from that, but things have changed. You know how Republicans who were Democrats say, ‘I didn't leave the party; the party left me?’ I can just say, ‘I didn't leave the NRA; the NRA left me.’ Because

. In July of that pivotal year, as white resistance to civil-rights efforts turned bloody in the South, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, enraging white southerners who had identified as Democrats since slavery, secession and Reconstruction times. They had also hated Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party, which eventually forced the end of slavery and oversaw a Reconstruction that Dixiecrats despised while it lasted and beyond, in no small part because black officials were elected to national office by former slaves who could finally vote. Jackson Free Press