Fannie Lou Hamer

6 Key excerpts on "Fannie Lou Hamer"

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  Reader's Guide to American History

  • Peter J. Parish(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  H

   

  Hamer, Fannie Lou 1917–1977

  Civil rights campaigner

  Collum, Danny, “Stepping Out into Freedom: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer,” in Sojourners , 12 December 1982

  Crawford, Vicki L., Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods (editors), Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965 , New York: Carlson, 1990

  Garland, Phyl, “Builders of a New South: Negro Heroines of Dixie Play Major Role in Challenging Racist Traditions,” Ebony , 21, August 1966

  Grant, Jacquelyn, “Civil Rights Women: A Source for Doing Womanist Theology,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement (see Crawford, above)

  Locke, Mamie, “Is This America? Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement (see Crawford, above)

  Mills, Kay, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer , New York: Dutton, 1993

  Peterson, Franklynn, “Sunflowers Don't Grow in Sunflower County,” Sepia , February 1970

  Peterson, Franklynn, “Mother of Black Women's Lib,” Sepia , December 1972

  Reagon, Bernice Johnson, “Women as Culture Carriers in the Civil Rights ovement: Fannie Lou Hamer,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement (see Crawford, above)

  In the early 1960s, when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) went into the rural Deep South to challenge existing racial structures, they hoped to create opportunity, or spaces, in which local grassroots black leadership might grow and develop. Testimony to SNCC's faith in this approach to combating institutionalized racism was provided by the emergence of Fannie Lou Hamer, who became one of the most inspirational and influential figures of the black freedom movement. The twentieth child of poor Mississippi Delta sharecroppers, herself a sharecropper and timekeeper for many years on a local plantation, Hamer went on to become a voter registration worker; a SNCC field secretary; a founder, vice-chair, and candidate for office of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; and a welfare rights activist.

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  Women, War, and Violence

  Topography, Resistance, and Hope [2 volumes]

  • Mariam M. Kurtz, Lester R. Kurtz, Mariam M. Kurtz, Lester R. Kurtz, Mariam M. Kurtz, Lester R. Kurtz(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  8

  For Fannie Lou Hamer—as for many women—the hope and desire for fulfillment could not be found on a road that led to separation from men. She would not have understood what was meant by the Redstockings Manifesto statement of the late 1960s radical feminists identifying the agents of oppression as men. Nor did she see herself as the “slave of a slave,” as some black women feminists phrased it (Beal, 1970, p. 343). Alienation from male partners—whether fathers, brothers, or sons—or opposition to men was unthinkable to Mrs. Hamer, who had a different slant: “I’m not hung up on this about liberating myself from the Black man, I’m not going to try that thing. I got a Black husband, six feet three, two hundred and forty pounds, with a [size] 14 shoe, that I don’t want to be liberated from” (Hamer, 1970, p. 612).

  Figure 25.4

  Fannie Lou Hamer’s leadership in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party brought to national attention the abuses and violations faced by Mississippi’s black citizens, when she testified in August 1964 at the Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, NJ, about being beaten and tortured for attempting to register to vote.

  (From a Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party filmstrip, made in winter 1964–1965, by the author and others, Tougaloo, Mississippi. Notes for a script to accompany it are found here: http://cdm15932.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15932coll2/id/25907 , Mary E. King Collection, Wisconsin State Historical Society.)

  Mrs. Hamer was philosophical and searched for basic truths; she pondered the meaning of events. For example, she claimed, “I work for the liberation of all people, because when I liberate myself, I’m liberating other people” (Hamer, 1970, p. 610). She thought about the connections between colliding forces, about what her experience showed, as she deliberated and drew conclusions. “In the past, I don’t care how poor this white woman was, in the South she still felt she was more than us,” Mrs. Hamer observed. “In the North, I don’t care how poor or how rich this white woman has been, she still felt like she was more than us. But coming to the realization of the thing, her freedom is shackled in chains to mine, and she realizes for the first time that she is not free until I am free” (Hamer, 1970, p. 611). As Bernice Johnson Reagon phrased it, “Mrs. Hamer was and is timeless and relentless in her honesty. She insisted that the relationships between maids and nursemaids and their employers be a part of any discussion about sisterhood” (Reagon, 1990, p. 213).

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  American Prophets

  Seven Religious Radicals and Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice

  • Albert J. Raboteau(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 7

  “IS THIS AMERICA?”

  Fannie Lou Hamer AND THE VOICES OF LOCAL PEOPLE

  The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed.

  —Luke 4:28

  COTTON FIELDS STRETCH AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE . Waves of heat beat down on the bent backs of black sharecroppers, steadily plucking the white bolls in the breezeless humid air. Battered straw hats and head rags offer scant protection from the unrelenting Mississippi Delta sun. For generations they have labored from daybreak to first dark, eking out a bare subsistence working the white man’s land, and living in dilapidated wood shacks without running water or indoor toilets. Mississippi, where brutal violence customarily suppressed any and all challenges to white supremacy, and where law or subterfuge blocked any attempts by black people to vote; Mississippi, whose rivers, the Tallahatchie, Big Black, Yazoo, and Mississippi, held untold numbers of mutilated black bodies. On October 6, 1917, Fannie Lou Townsend, the youngest child of a sharecropping family, was born in Tommolen, Montgomery County, Mississippi. All told, her parents, James Lee Townsend and Lou Ella (Bramlett) Townsend, had twenty children (six girls and fourteen boys). When she was two years old, the family moved to Ruleville in Sunflower County, where she would spend the rest of her life. In addition to sharecropping, her father served as a Baptist preacher and sold bootleg whiskey on the side to help make ends meet. Still, there was little money to support the large family. Hamer recalled how her mother coped with their constant hunger: “So many times for dinner we would have greens with no seasonin’ … and flour gravy. My mother would mix flour with a little grease and try to make gravy out of it. Sometimes she’d cook a little meal and we’d have bread.”1

  Figure 7.1 Fannie Lou Hamer. Ken Thompson / General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church.

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  Through the Eyes of Titans: Finding Courage to Redeem the Soul of a Nation

  Images of Pastoral Care and Leadership, Self-Care, and Radical Love in Public Spaces

  • Danjuma G. Gibson(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Cascade Books

    (Publisher)

  For Hamer, the connection between a praxis of love and education, the health of the democracy, and justice and equality represented an inter-locking and reciprocating interchange that was self-evident and irreducible. That is to say, you cannot have one without the other. Perhaps in her most damning critique of a racialized America, Hamer uses the praxis of love to challenge the normalization of racial hatred, arguing that if equal rights meant internalizing and adopting (as that which is morally right) the values of a racist power structure, then she will not aspire to any such equivalency. It is clear then that when she uses the phrase “white America,” she is not referring to people of European descent, but those who adhere to the social construct of white American supremacy. While current scholarship understands this centuries-old binary as racism vs. anti-racism, for Hamer, it is love vs. hate:

  But what I’m trying to say to you tonight, we are faced with some difficult days ahead. And I hope white America learns to love, before they teach every one of us to hate . This is what is happening in this country. And you see I couldn’t tell anybody in my right mind that I am fighting for equal rights because I don’t want any. I am fighting for human rights, because I don’t want to be equal to the people that rape my ancestors, dead, kill out the Indians, dead, destroyed my dignity, and taken my name.178

  This chapter is not a biographical interpretation of Fannie Lou Hamer. There has been significant and commendable scholarship done in this area.179 The goal here is to profile a salient psychospiritual practice embodied by Hamer that lends itself to redeeming the soul of the nation. In this case, that psychospiritual practice is the ethic of love—emphasizing what a praxis of love entails. We know what violence looks like. But as a matter of both pastoral theology and practical theology, the fundamental question remains, how do we know love when we see it? I suggest we see the praxis of love embodied in the life of Hamer. Perhaps one of the pivotal moments in the life of Fannie Lou Hamer was the unimaginable evil she suffered at the hands of prison officials and other inmates at the Winona, Mississippi, jail on June 9 , 1963 . Having traveled throughout Mississippi to encourage black people to vote, Hamer and her colleagues were arrested when their bus arrived at Staley’s Café in Winona. The beating that Hamer endured at the jail was nothing short of savage. Her testimony at a federal trial (on December 2 , 1 963

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  Sisters in the Struggle

  African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement

  • Bettye Collier-Thomas, V.P. Franklin(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • NYU Press

    (Publisher)

  Malcolm’s promise of protection assumes a stance of victimization on the part of those who need to be protected without allowing much room for their agency in other spheres. It places the woman in the hands of her protector—who may protect her, but who also may decide to further victimize her. In either case her well-being is entirely dependent on his will and authority. Note Malcolm’s words upon hearing the dynamic Fannie Lou Hamer speak of her experiences in Mississippi:

  When I listen to Mrs. Hamer, a black woman—could be my mother, my sister, my daughter—describe what they have done to her in Mississippi, I ask myself how in the world can we expect to be respected as men when we will allow something like that to be done to our women, and we do nothing about it? How can you and I be looked upon as men with black women being beaten and nothing being done about it? No, we don’t deserve to be recognized and respected as men as long as our women can be brutalized in the manner that this woman described, and nothing being done about it, but we sit around singing “We shall overcome.”6

  Later, when introducing her at the Audubon, Malcolm would refer to her as “the country’s number one freedom-fighting woman.” However, the predominant tone of this passage refers to Hamer only as victim in need of protection—not the protection afforded to citizens by their governments (which the South and the nation at large did not provide) but the protection of a black man. Hamer’s victimization makes black men the subject of Malcolm’s comment. When read closely, the above statement is not a paragraph about Fannie Lou Hamer but about the questionable masculinity of black men, particularly those black men of the southern Civil Rights Movement such as Martin Luther King. If black men protected “their” women, then Ms. Hamer would not be a victim of such abuse. Nor would she be a freedom fighter—that would be a position monopolized by black male protectors.

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  The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer

  To Tell It Like It Is

  • Maegan Parker Brooks, Davis W. Houck, Maegan Parker Brooks, Davis W. Houck(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • University Press of Mississippi

    (Publisher)

  Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer by Dr. Neil McMillen,April 14, 1972, and January 25, 1973, Ruleville, Mississippi;Oral History Program, University of Southern Mississippi

  Of the many interviews Hamer gave during the last fifteen years of her life, this oral history interview—conducted by Dr. Neil McMillen, professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi—is distinctive. While several newspapers and magazines published interviews with Hamer throughout the 1960s, by the early 1970s the nation’s gaze followed the civil rights workers out of the Mississippi Delta and toward urban centers where race riots and antiwar rallies raged. This shift in focus left many Americans in the dark about the local work Hamer continued to do in her community. Most regrettably, information about her Freedom Farm Cooperative, which secured food, shelter, and jobs for the Delta’s poor, is not widely known. McMillen’s two-part interview with Hamer, conducted at her Ruleville home in April of 1972 and January of 1973, helps fill this gap in knowledge about Hamer’s local activism with her own commentary about Freedom Farm, in addition to the school integration and voting rights struggles she continued to wage

  .

  The later period in Hamer’s activist career, during which this particular interview occurred, is also significant, as the lapsed time imbues Hamer’s memories of her most well-known struggles and popularized experiences with additional perspective. McMillen prompts Hamer to reflect upon the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s 1964 challenge, their subsequent relationship to the Loyalist delegation, the 1972 Democratic National Convention, her trip to Africa, and much more. Through the process of sharing these memories, Hamer explores her past and present relationships with local and national politicians as well as civil rights leaders; and, in so doing, she fashions an aperture through which to view the alterations in her activist ideology over time

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