Fannie Lou Hamer: Education and Activism as Catalysts for Change
Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi sharecropper, profoundly impacted the nation's perspective on democracy through her unwavering commitment to political, social, and economic equality for herself and all African Americans. Her life story exemplifies how education, both formal and informal, combined with relentless activism, can challenge systemic injustices and inspire future generations. "Sometimes it seem like to tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I’ll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom." These words encapsulate her courageous spirit.
Early Life and Education
Fannie Lou Townsend was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi, in 1917, the youngest of twenty children. From the age of six, she worked in the cotton fields, a harsh reality that limited her formal education. Although she dropped out of school at age twelve, she continued her education with Bible study, demonstrating her thirst for knowledge and spiritual guidance. When she was twelve, her parents accumulated enough money to rent a farm and buy mules and tools for farming. A white neighbor poisoned their mules, forcing them into even greater debt. On the plantation where she worked, she met her future husband, Perry Hamer. Her early experiences with racial discrimination and economic hardship fueled her later activism.
The Spark of Activism: Voter Registration
In 1962, the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came to Hamer’s town and encouraged African Americans to register as voters. Hamer volunteered, even though she had not previously known that voting was a constitutional right. This marked a turning point in her life. After registering herself and working with SNCC, she lost her job, received death threats, and was severely beaten by the police in an effort to intimidate her. The plantation owner demanded she retract her application or face eviction. Mrs. Hamer refused and was immediately kicked off his land. When she moved into town to stay with a family, white men pumped 16 shots into the house where she was staying, barely missing the occupants. Despite threats and violence, her spirit was unbowed, and her voice became more powerful and influential.
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)
Hamer helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in 1964 because African Americans were not allowed in the all-white Democratic Party delegation. The MFDP sought to challenge the dominant force in Mississippi politics, the pro-segregation Democratic Party. In early 1964, Hamer ran for Congress as the MFDP candidate, challenging veteran Congressman Jamie Whitten in the Democratic primary. Though she lost her bid, her run put Mississippi and its systemic racism into the spotlight.
The work of MFDP was one part of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, or Freedom Summer, which brought hundreds of college students to the state to work for Civil Rights. Although some SNCC organizers were wary of bringing in a group of outsiders, mostly whites from the North, Hamer saw value in an integrated movement and convinced many to abandon their objections.
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Hamer traveled to Oxford, Ohio, to train the volunteers who would be teaching classes and registering voters -- and to sing the spirituals and movement songs she was known for. Tracy Sugarman, who spent the summer in Mississippi as both a volunteer and a journalist, accompanied Hamer as she visited Delta churches to encourage parishioners to register to vote. “Mrs. Hamer rose majestically to her feet,” he wrote. “Her magnificent voice rolled through the chapel as she enlisted the Biblical ranks of martyrs and heroes to summon these folk to the Freedom banner.
While the student volunteers knocked on doors and taught classes, Hamer was busy with the MFDP. The party held its own conventions at the precinct, county, and state levels to select a group to send to Atlantic City in August, where they would challenge the seating of the all-white Mississippi delegates at the Democratic National Convention. The MFDP’s goal was to persuade the convention’s Credentials Committee to seat them as Mississippi representatives. President Lyndon Johnson, who needed Southern Democrats’ support in his bid for re-election, was determined to block them.
Testimony at the 1964 Democratic National Convention
At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Hamer’s televised testimony of being forced from her home and brutally beaten (suffering permanent kidney damage) for attempting to exercise her constitutional right to vote gripped the nation. Johnson's ploy to keep Hamer off television did not work. Her testimony was compelling enough for many evening news programs to broadcast it, incidentally granting it a much larger audience. Hamer held the committee’s attention as she spoke from memory about her eviction from the Marlow plantation and her brutal beating in the Winona jail. After less than 10 minutes she concluded: “If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Nonetheless, under pressure from Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, members of the Credentials Committee dropped their support for the MFDP. As a conciliatory gesture, Democratic officials offered two at-large seats to MFDP representatives, though Humphrey made it clear Johnson would not stand for one of the seats going to Hamer, “The President has said he will not let that illiterate woman speak on the floor of the Democratic convention.” The MFDP rejected the offer, and Hamer’s voice was one of the loudest in opposition.
Continued Activism and Community Work
After the MFDP delegation returned to Mississippi, Hamer was in high demand as a speaker. Her appearances were good for fundraising, always a concern for civil rights organizations, and she spent the remainder of the 1960s balancing national activism with her work within Mississippi. Voting rights remained a priority, even after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and Hamer took the lead in lawsuits that led to the first elections in which large numbers of black residents of Sunflower County were registered and eligible to vote in 1967. She also organized plaintiffs for a school desegregation lawsuit, instituted livestock and agricultural co-ops to improve economic prospects in the Delta, and was involved in the introduction of Head Start programs for low-income children of all races.
During her lifetime, Hamer organized a strike for Black cotton pickers, worked alongside the National Council of Negro Women to establish farm cooperatives and banks for poor residents to have better food access, advocated for more federal funding for Head Start programs and housing, and helped form the National Women’s Political Caucus to encourage women’s participation in politics.
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With the help of the National Council of Negro Women, Hamer starts a “Pig Bank” in Sunflower County to provide protein to malnourished members of her community. With money she raised by speaking to audiences across the country, Hamer buys the first 40 acres of “Freedom Farm,” a cooperative established to provide food and jobs for people in her community.
Personal Life and Challenges
Though Hamer wanted children, a white doctor had sterilized her without permission, so she adopted daughters instead. The Hamers adopted two daughters, girls whose own families were unable to care for them. (They later adopted their two grandchildren after the older daughter’s death.) Hamer’s own pregnancies had all failed, and she was sterilized without her knowledge or consent in 1961. The forced sterilization was one of the moments that set Hamer on the path to the forefront of the Mississippi Civil Rights movement, but the incident that brought her into a leadership role came a year later.
She lived with the long-term effects of polio, and a violent beating in 1963 in a Mississippi jailhouse left her with kidney damage, a blood clot behind one eye, and a permanent limp.
Hamer's Oratorical Skills and Influence
After she got involved in the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s, Hamer's oratorical skills quickly became apparent. The Reverend Edwin King said of Hamer, "She was an extraordinarily good cook of down-home foods…she liked to mix, to make whatever she was feeding people at midnight after they would come home from jail or somewhere else, to fix the perfect spices or recipe for her guest…after she became the orator, she began picking and choosing the spicy parts she'd put in her speeches. She was always doing the best she had with whatever she had. At speaking engagements, Hamer made speeches and also sang, often with the Freedom Singers. Charles Neblitt, one of its members, said of Hamer, "We'd let her sing all the songs we did that she knew. She put her whole self into her singing, adding a power to the group…When somebody puts their inner self into a song, it moves people. Her singing showed the kind of dedication that she had-the struggle and the pain, the frustration and the hope…
Hamer's "Southern black vernacular", indicative of the denial of blacks', particularly black Southerners', access to standard American English, captures the feelings and experiences of black Southerners. According to Davis W. Houck and Maegan Parker Brooks in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, "the designation 'black' acknowledges aspects of Hamer's racialized experience that influenced her speech. One of Hamer's most famous speeches was at Williams Institutional Church in Harlem. In her speech, "Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired", she chronicled the violence and injustices she experienced while trying to register to vote. While highlighting the various acts of brutality she witnessed in the South, she was careful to tie in the fact that blacks in the North and all over the country were suffering the same oppression.
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People listened to Hamer because, with her strong southern accent, she spoke from the heart. She elicited a positive response from both the black community (who loved her dearly) and progressive whites throughout the country. In the eyes of black people, she was a champion who cared deeply about their rights as citizens and the future of their children. Hamer wholeheartedly believed that African Americans needed to address the intractable racial issues that affected their lives, because whites in the Deep South wouldn’t voluntarily do anything to advance the cause of freedom for black people.
Legacy and Honors
Hamer died in 1977 of breast cancer in Mississippi, leaving behind a legacy for the activists of today to model. Her efforts to give voice to marginalized groups were foundational to the Civil Rights movement, the women’s rights movement, and the disability rights movement. Hundreds of local residents turned out for her funeral, as did most of the leaders of the civil rights movement.
In her last years, she received many honors and awards. Hamer also received the Paul Robeson Award from Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, the Mary Church Terrell Award from Delta Sigma Theta sorority, the National Sojourner Truth Meritorious Service Award. She is an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta.
The Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School opens in the Bronx, New York. The Fannie Lou Hamer Middle School also in the Bronx opens for the 2004-2005 school year. The United States Congress reauthorizes the 1965 Voting Rights Act and names it the Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006. The US Postal Service included Fannie Lou Hamer among twelve civil rights pioneers honored on postage stamps in recognition of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s 100th Anniversary. At the request of Myrile Evers-Williams, Hamer shared a stamp with her husband, slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers. In her hometown of Ruleville, Mississippi, an eight-foot bronze statue of Fannie Lou Hamer is dedicated on what would have been her 95th birthday. Mississippi residents support the Fannie Lou Hamer Cancer Foundation by purchasing a historic automobile license plate that bears the foundation's name and Hamer’s initials. At the inauguration of the National African American Museum in Washington, D.C., President Barack Obama mentions Fannie Lou Hamer in acknowledging the efforts of the many brave individuals whose efforts contributed to the museum. The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum opens in Jackson, Mississippi with a permanent exhibit on Fannie Lou Hamer, This Little Light of Mine. Stockton University names a new room in the Atlantic City Academic Center, the Fannie Lou Hamer Event Room.
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