Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977), field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was an outspoken advocate for civil rights for African Americans.

For more than half of Fannie Lou Hamer's life, she was a rural agricultural worker who saw no end to the cycle of poverty and humiliation that was the plight of most southern African Americans. Fannie Lou, born October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, was the last of twenty children born to Jim and Ella Townsend. When she was two years old the family moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi, where Fannie resided for the rest of her life. At age six she joined the other family members working as a sharecropper picking cotton. By the time she was 13 she could pick between two and three hundred pounds of cotton a day.

In spite of intensive labor the Townsends were always in need because sharecroppers had to give a portion of their crop, as well as repayment for seeds and supplies they had purchased on credit, to the owner of the land on which they toiled. One year, when their crop was especially bountiful, Jim Townsend, hoping that his family's economic status would permanently improve, rented a parcel of land with a house and purchased some animals and farm implements to boost the farm's productivity. The family's hopes for prosperity were dashed, however, when a jealous white neighbor poisoned the Townsend's animals.

The condition of African Americans in the South caused young Fannie to wonder why they had to suffer such hardship while working so hard. In spite of her circumstances Fannie was able to attend school for a few months each year until she reached the sixth grade. After her formal schooling ended, she continued to study and read the Bible under the direction of teachers at the Stranger's Home Baptist Church. Fannie's religious beliefs and training were dominant influences during her entire life. She regularly prayed that someday she would have the opportunity to do something to improve the condition of African Americans in Mississippi.

During the 1940s Fannie Lou married Perry "Pap" Hamer, who worked on the W.D. Marlow plantation near Ruleville, Mississippi. Fannie also worked for the Marlows, first as a sharecropper and then - after the owner learned that she was literate - as the timekeeper. In the evenings she cleaned the Marlow's home. The Hamers supplemented their income by making liquor and operating a small saloon. Unable to have children of their own, the Hamers adopted two girls, Dorothy Jean and Vergie Ree.

In 1962, when she was in her mid-forties, Hamer's life changed drastically. She was invited to attend a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced "Snick") meeting at a church near her home. SNCC, an organization founded in 1960 by a group of young African Americans who used direct action such as sit-ins and other forms of civil disobedience as a means of ending segregation in the South, encouraged its workers to travel throughout the South to win grassroots support from African Americans. When Hamer heard the SNCC presentation she was convinced that the powerlessness of African Americans was based to a degree on their complacency and fear of white reprisals. She decided that no matter what the cost, she should try to register to vote. Though her first attempts to pass the voter registration test were unsuccessful they nevertheless resulted in the loss of her job and threats of violence against her and those who attempted to register with her for trying to alter the status quo.

In 1963 Hamer became a registered voter and a SNCC field secretary. She worked with voter registration drives in various locales and helped develop programs to assist economically deprived African American families. She was regularly threatened and faced beatings, a bombing, and ridicule. Nevertheless, she was a founding member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), formed in April 1964 to challenge the all-white Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention. The MFDP sent 68 representatives in August 1964 to the Democratic National Committee meeting in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Hamer was one of the representatives who testified before the party's Credentials Committee. In a televised presentation, Hamer talked about the formidable barriers that southern African Americans faced in their struggle for civil rights. She talked about the murders of civil rights activists such as Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.

"If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America, " she said. "Is this America? The land of the free and the home of the brave? Where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hook, because our lives be threatened daily." Hamer discussed the abuse she had suffered in retaliation for attending a civil rights meeting. "They beat me and they beat me with the long, flat blackjack. I screamed to God in pain. … " As a compromise measure the Democratic Party leadership offered the MFDP delegation two seats, which they refused. Hamer said, "We didn't come for no two seats when all of us is tired." And no MFDP member was seated.

In 1965 Hamer, Victoria Gray, and Annie Devine ran for Congress and challenged the seating of the regular Mississippi representatives before the U.S. House of Representatives. Though they were unsuccessful in their challenge, the 1965 elections were later overturned. Hamer continued to be politically active and from 1968 to 1971 was a member of the Democratic National Committee from Mississippi.

Hamer was also a catalyst in the development of various programs to aid the poor in her community, including the Delta Ministry, an extensive community development program, and the Freedom Farms Corporation in 1969, a non-profit operation designed to help needy families raise food and livestock, provide social services, encourage minority business opportunities, and offer educational assistance. In 1970 Hamer became chair of the board of Fannie Lou Hamer Day Care Center, an organization established by the National Council of Negro Women. She also served as a member of the boards of the Sunflower County Day Care and Family Services Center and Garment Manufacturing Plant. She became a member of the policy council of the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971, and from 1974 to 1977 was a member of the board of trustees of the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

Hamer underwent a radical mastectomy in 1976 and died of cancer March 14, 1977, in the Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Hospital.

Further Reading

There are several biographies of Hamer, including Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine:the Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (1993), and a children's book, Fannie Lou Hamer:From Sharecropping to Politics, by David Rubel with an introduction by Andrew Young (1990). Many histories of the civil rights movement in the South include information about Hamer. These include Vicki Crawford, Jacqueline Rouse, and Barbara Woods, Women in the Civil Rights Movement:Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-1965 (1990); Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize:America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 (1987); and various histories of SNCC and its leaders. A collection of Fannie Lou Hamer papers is available on microfilm from the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana.

civil rights activist; public speaker

Personal Information

Born Fannie Lou Townsend, October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, MS; died of heart failure (as a result of cancer, diabetes, and hypertension), March 14, 1977, in Mound Bayou, MS; daughter of Jim and Lou Ella Townsend (sharecroppers); married Perry "Pap" Hamer (a tractor driver and sharecropper), 1944; children (adopted): Dorothy Jean, Virgie Ree, Lenora, Jacqueline.
Religion: Baptist.

Career

Plantation worker in Mississippi, beginning 1923; left school to work full time, 1929; plantation timekeeper, 1944-62; voter registration field worker for Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 1962; Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, founding member, became vice-chairperson and party spokesperson at Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, 1964; ran for Congress in Democratic primary, 1964; appeared with Malcolm X at rallies in Harlem, 1964; traveled to Guinea with other SNCC workers, 1964; led cotton pickers' resistance movement, 1965; Democratic National Committee representative, 1968-71; created Pig Bank with National Council of Negro Women, 1968; founded Freedom Farm Cooperative, 1969; founding member, National Women's Political Caucus, 1971; ran for Mississippi State Senate, 1971; delegate to the Democratic National Convention, 1972.

Life's Work

Fannie Lou Hamer spent most of her life in rural southern poverty, entering politics late in life out of anger and a passionate desire to change a racist system. She is probably best known for her work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the group that was at the forefront of the American voter registration drives of the 1960s. Hamer captured national attention as a spokeswoman for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which eventually succeeded in electing many blacks to national office in Mississippi. She was also deeply committed to grass-roots antipoverty projects in her own community, Ruleville, Mississippi. As Henry Kirksey, one of Mississippi's first black senators, told Hamer's biographer Kay Mills, "If Fannie Lou Hamer had had the same opportunities that Martin Luther King had, then we would have had a female Martin Luther King."

Hamer was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi, in 1917, the youngest of 20 children. Her parents, Jim and Lou Ella Townsend, were sharecroppers who fed their whole family on $1.25 a day. Hamer began working in the fields at age six when the plantation owner promised her goods from the commissary store. At that time, it was common for bosses to lure workers into debt in that way. Hamer later told Scott O'Dell of Freedomways journal, "He was trapping me.... I never did get out of his debt again."

By the time Fannie Lou was 12, the Townsends had saved up enough to rent some land and buy a tractor of their own. A white neighbor, resenting their small success, poisoned their cattle. The family was then worse off than before. Hamer later recalled in her interview with O'Dell, "Things got so tough I began to wish I was white." According to Mills in her biography This Little Light of Mine, Hamer's mother scolded her: "Don't ever, ever say that.... You respect yourself as a little black child. And as you grow older, respect yourself as a black woman. Then one day, other people will respect you." Her mother taught her to be proud of who she was, and the hardship of the sharecropping life taught her to be angry. Hamer told O'Dell that as things got worse for her and her family, she vowed to "do something for the black man of the South if it would cost my life."

Fannie Lou dropped out of school in the sixth grade, but she continued her education through Bible study with the Stranger's Home Baptist Church. Her Christian faith was a source of strength for her throughout her life. Mills cited Hamer as saying that "Christ was a revolutionary person." Her political speeches made eloquent use of scriptural language--to her own radical purposes. She told O'Dell: "'The land of the free and the home of the brave' is all on paper. It doesn't mean anything to [black Americans]. The only way we can make this thing a reality in America is to ... destroy this system and bring this thing to light that has been under the cover all these years.... I believe in Christianity because the Scriptures said 'The things that have been done in the dark will be known on the house tops.'"

She became known in the civil rights movement as a captivating preacher and singer. Everywhere she went, the sound of her voice gave people hope and made them want to join her in song; she would lead busloads of activists--black and white--in fervent spirituals like "This Little Light of Mine." Mills quoted former White House aide Liz Carpenter, who worked with Hamer on the founding of the National Women's Political Caucus, as saying that Hamer "made [evangelist] Billy Graham look like amateur night."

Fannie Lou married Perry "Pap" Hamer in 1944, and the two settled on the Marlow plantation outside Ruleville, Mississippi. She found that, as a black worker, she was frequently treated as less than human. As documented by Mills, Hamer noted, "When I was cleaning the boss's house ... his daughter came up to me and said 'You don't have to clean this [room] too good.... It's just Old Honey's.' Old Honey was the dog. I couldn't get over the dog having a bathroom when the owner wouldn't even have the toilet fixed for us. But then, Negroes in Mississippi [were] treated worse than dogs."

Although Fannie Lou adopted four daughters, she always wanted children of her own. Tragically, this basic right was denied to her. Like many poor women of color worldwide, Fannie Lou Hamer was sterilized without her permission by a white doctor. The experience underscored the lack of control she felt she had over her own life.

In 1962 Hamer attended an SNCC meeting for the first time. They asked for volunteers to try to register to vote, and she agreed. According to biographer David Rubel, Hamer did not remember being frightened: "I guess if I'd had any sense I'd a been a little scared, but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do to me was kill me, and it seemed like they'd been trying to do that ever since I could remember." At that time, the threat of organized white racist violence, combined with strict and biased literacy requirements, combined to make voting impossible for most Mississippi blacks.

The first time Hamer tried to register, she failed, not knowing the answer to an obscure question about the Mississippi constitution. George Sewell of Encore American & Worldwide News recalled her joking about this: "I never knew that Mississippi had a constitution," she laughed. On her second try, she failed the test again, but, according to Sewell, she told the county clerk, "You'll see me every 30 days till I pass."

Hamer was fired from the Marlow plantation for attempting to register to vote. She then started working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee on voter registration. She saw voting as fundamental to bringing about change in America. In the Freedomways interview, she vowed: "I am determined to become a first-class citizen.... I am determined to get every Negro in the state of Mississippi registered." Around the same time, she filed a lawsuit-- Hamer v. Campbell-- in an attempt to block elections in some Mississippi communities where black voters had not had the opportunity to register to vote.

In 1963 Fannie Lou Hamer attempted to register for the third time and finally passed the test. Several months later, she was arrested in Winona, Mississippi, and brutally beaten by two black prison inmates on orders from white police officers. Sewell quoted Hamer's recollections of the horrifying event: "They just kept beatin' me and telling me, 'You nigger bitch, we're gonna make you wish you were dead.' When they finally quit they told me to go to my cell, but I couldn't get up, I couldn't bend my knees. Every day of my life I pay with the misery of that beatin'." The U.S. Justice Department later filed charges against the Winona officials, but the men were acquitted by an all-white jury.

The SNCC organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964 so that blacks in Mississippi would have an alternative to the regular Democratic party, which excluded them. In the 1964 Mississippi primary, the MFDP got more votes than the regular Democratic party; yet, at the convention in Atlantic City, the national party would not seat the MFDP's delegates. Hamer spoke on behalf of the Freedom delegation and described her Winona beating before the entire convention, asking, "Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we are threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings?" When the Democratic Party offered to seat two of the MFDP delegates, Hamer said, as recounted by Rubel: "We didn't come all this way for no two seats when all of us is tired." If the challengers were not seated, she told a national television audience, "I question America."

U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson refused to support the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party because he was afraid of losing his white southern support. The delegation was not seated. In the ensuing years, however, many MFDP candidates were elected to local and state offices. The MFDP, and Fannie Lou Hamer's moving testimony, had won support all over the nation and was no doubt partly responsible for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which made it illegal to deny any adult U.S. citizen the right to vote and guaranteed federal protection of that right. The passage of this law was a major achievement for the civil rights movement.

The 1964 convention, and Hamer's speech, was also important in helping the rest of the country realize that racism was a national concern. According to Sewell, Hamer told the convention, "This is not Mississippi's problem. It is America's problem." Many northern white liberals were tempted to think of racist oppression as a southern problem, but, as Hamer later reminded a 1971 NAACP convention, the North was "no different. The man'll shoot [you] in the face in Mississippi, and you turn around he'll shoot you in the back here [in New York]."

That September, Hamer traveled to Guinea with other SNCC workers and activist/singer Harry Belafonte. She was greatly inspired, seeing a country where black people were in power, running both the government and the major financial institutions. The group met the president of Guinea, Sekou Toure, one of the few individuals who ever truly awed Fannie Lou Hamer. She had been taught all her life, she told O'Dell, that black Africans were "heathens, savages" and "downright stupid.... It would bring tears to your eyes to ... think of the type of brainwashing the white man will use in America to keep us separated from our own people." The trip to Africa gave her the courage to keep fighting for black access to power in the United States.

Throughout her life, in addition to her high-profile struggles in the national political arena, she organized grass-roots initiatives in her own rural Mississippi community. She favored cooperatives--not-for-profit businesses owned and operated by their customers--because she believed this gave people a greater degree of control over their economic lives. It was also an effective way for people of little means to pool their resources and have more. In 1968, with the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), she created the Pig Bank, a livestock cooperative to help poor people in Mississippi get more meat in their diets. The next year she founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative, a project through which 5,000 people came to grow their own food and collectively own 680 acres of land.

In 1971 Fannie Lou Hamer helped found the National Women's Political Caucus. She was, however, often politically at odds with white feminists, feeling that they did not always have an understanding of the oppression experienced by women of color. She was often blunt in her criticism of white women and eloquent about why they should fight for black liberation. Speaking to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Institute in 1971, she stated: "Sometimes I really feel sorrier for the white woman than I feel for ourselves because she been caught up in this thing, caught up in feeling special.... I been watching you, baby.... You had this kind of angel feeling that you were untouchable.... But [the white woman's] freedom is shackled in chains to mine, and she realizes that she is not free until I am free."

Hamer spent the last ten years of her life organizing for low-income housing, child day-care, economic development, and school desegregation. (In 1970 she filed a lawsuit, Hamer v. Sunflower County, challenging the Mississippi county to properly desegregate schools.) She died on March 14, 1977, of complications resulting from cancer, hypertension, and diabetes. Guests at her funeral included U.N. ambassador Andrew Young, Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael, civil rights leader Ella Baker, and more friends and admirers than could fit into the small Ruleville church. Andrew Young spoke, and according to Kay Mills, remembered Hamer as the woman who "shook the foundations of this nation." Her headstone bears words for which she was well known all her life: "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."

Awards

Resolution praising Hamer's national and statewide political contributions passed by Mississippi House of Representatives, 116-0, 1972; award from Congressional Black Caucus, 1976; named a leader for change in Mississippi by University of Mississippi School of Journalism; inducted into National Women's Hall of Fame, October 1993; recipient of several honorary degrees.

Further Reading

Books

• Crawford, Vicki L., Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods, Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-1965, Carlson, 1990.
• Lerner, Gerda, Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, Vintage Books, 1972, p. 611.
• Meier, August, editor, Black Protest in the Sixties: Articles from the New York Times, Markus Wiener Publishing, Inc., 1991.
• Mills, Kay, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, Dutton, 1993.
• Rubel, David, Fannie Lou Hamer: From Sharecropping to Politics, Silver Burdett Press, 1990.

• Encore American & Worldwide News, July 18, 1977, p. 3.
• Facts on File, Facts on File, Inc., 1977.
• Freedomways, Second Quarter, 1965, pp. 231-42.
• Journalism Quarterly, Fall 1991, p. 515.
• Nation, June 1, 1964, pp. 548-51.
• The following interviews with Fannie Lou Hamer are available on audiotape: Black Oral History Interview, Fisk University Library, October 6, 1962; and Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer: Civil Rights Documentation Project, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, August 9, 1968.
• Hamer's papers are housed at the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana.

— Liza Featherstone

Fannie Lou Hamer worked for voter registration for African Americans in the U.S. South and helped establish the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party (MFDP), which successfully challenged the all-white Democratic party in Mississippi.

Hamer was born October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi. She was the twentieth and youngest child of Jim Townsend and Lou Ella Townsend, who were sharecroppers in rural Mississippi. Hamer grew up in a tar paper shack and slept on a cotton sack stuffed with dry grass. She first went into the cotton fields to work when she was six years old, picking thirty pounds of cotton a week. By the time she was thirteen years old, Hamer was picking two hundred to three hundred pounds of cotton each week. Because of her family's poverty, she was forced to end her formal education after the sixth grade.

In 1944, when she was twenty-seven, Hamer married Perry ("Pap") Hamer, a sharecropper on a nearby plantation owned by the Marlowe family, near Ruleville, Mississippi. Hamer spent the next eighteen years working in the fields chopping cotton. Her husband also ran a small saloon, and they made liquor to sell.

In August 1962, Hamer attended a meeting sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced Snick). The SCLC was founded in 1957 by a group of black ministers led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and coordinated the civil rights activities of ministers. SNCC was organized in 1960 by students and other young people, and SNCC workers had recently come to Ruleville to organize voter registration drives. At that time, only five percent of African Americans in Mississippi who were old enough to vote had been allowed to register. Ten days later, a group of white men rode through the town and fired sixteen shots into the homes of those involved in the black voting drive. That night Hamer fled to her niece's house forty miles away. A few weeks later, SNCC workers brought her to the SNCC annual conference in Nashville. She later returned to the Marlowe plantation, where she found that her husband had been fired from his job and her family had lost its car, furniture, and house.

Hamer then became a field secretary for SNCC in Ruleville, earning $10 a week, and began organizing a poverty program. She worked with the local people, educating them about their right to vote, and she became an effective fund-raiser for SNCC, traveling to northern towns to speak about life as an African American in Mississippi, and participating in civil rights demonstrations across the country. Hamer and her associates were often harassed, intimidated, and even beaten.

Hamer helped found the Council of Federated Organizations, which brought large numbers of white northerners into Mississippi in the summer of 1964, known as Freedom Summer. These volunteers helped with voter registration and other civil rights activities, and their work focused national attention on the segregation still rampant in the South.

In April 1964, Hamer helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party. The MFDP was organized as an alternative to the all-white Mississippi Democratic party, which barred African Americans from its activities. The MFDP planned to challenge the regular Democratic party's right to represent Mississippi at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in August 1964 and hoped to win the right to be seated as the state's legal delegation. Before leaving for Atlantic City, the MFDP held its own convention and elected sixty-four African Americans and four whites as delegates to the national convention. Hamer was elected vice chairwoman.

Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson, who was running for reelection in 1964, became worried that the MFDP would disrupt party unity and cause him to lose the election to Republican senator Barry M. Goldwater. Johnson went to work to stop the MFDP by having his supporters threaten and harass MFDP supporters on the Credentials Committee, which was scheduled to hear the MFDP's case at the convention. In nationally televised proceedings before the committee, Hamer testified about the difficult life of African Americans in Mississippi and how they were prevented from participating in the political process. She also described a brutal beating she received while in jail for violating segregation laws. The beating left Hamer nearly blind in one eye.

Following Hamer's testimony, viewers from across the United States telegrammed their delegates, urging them to support the MFDP. Realizing he would now have to deal with the new party, Johnson worked out a settlement that called for the seating of two at-large delegates from the MFDP and a pledge that segregated delegations would not be seated at the 1968 convention. Hamer spoke out strongly against the compromise, and the delegation voted to reject it.

Following the 1964 convention, Hamer continued her work in the civil rights movement. In March 1965, she joined King and hundreds of others in a fifty-four-mile march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, Alabama. She also traveled with a SNCC delegation to Africa.

Back in Ruleville, Hamer and two other women ran for Congress against white congressmen in a special counterelection organized by SNCC. In the Democratic primary, their names were not on the ballot because the Mississippi election commission said they did not have enough signatures of registered voters on their petitions, and the white candidates won. In the SNCC election, however, the women's names were listed on the ballot, and they won. The women pressed their claim to be seated in Congress in Washington, D.C. They argued that Mississippi county registrars had refused to certify the signatures of black voters on their petitions. In September 1965, after nine months of investigation into their claim that the state had illegally obstructed their attempts to place their names on the ballot, the U.S. House of Representatives rejected their challenge by a margin of eighty-five votes.

In August 1968, Hamer again traveled to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as a member of the alternative Mississippi delegation, renamed the Mississippi Loyalist Democratic party (MLDP). Again, the party went before the Credentials Committee seeking recognition, and again, a compromise was offered, this time to seat twenty-one members of each delegation. The MLDP refused to compromise, and this time, the regular delegation was unseated. When Hamer finally took her seat at the convention, she received a standing ovation.

Hamer went on to serve on the Democratic National Committee from 1968 until 1971. She also continued her civil rights work in Mississippi. In May 1970, Hamer and officials of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Indianola filed a class action lawsuit in federal district court, claiming that the Sunflower County, Mississippi, school districts maintained a dual school system for black and white students and that black teachers and principals were not adequately protected against losing their jobs. The suit asked the court to order that one integrated school system be established and maintained. In Hamer v. Sunflower County (N.D. Miss., June 15, 1970), the district court, relying heavily on data in a report from a biracial committee headed by Hamer, ordered the county to merge its schools into one public school system. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed the district court in United States v. Sunflower County School District, 430 F.2d 839 (5th Cir. 1970).

Hamer continued to work for the poor in Ruleville, organizing poverty programs, raising money for low-income housing, and starting a day care center. Her favorite project was the Freedom Farm Cooperative. She started the farm with 40 acres, which eventually increased to 650 acres on which five thousand people grew their own food.

In 1976, Hamer was honored in Ruleville on Fannie Lou Hamer Day. She died the following year from heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. Engraved on the headstone of her grave in Ruleville are the words I Am Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired.

Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer
Fannie Lou Hamer in 1964
Born	October 6, 1917 (1917-10-06) Sunflower County, Mississippi
Died	March 14, 1977 (1977-03-15) (age 59) Mound Bayou, Mississippi
Other names	Fannie Lou Hamer
Known for	Civil Rights Activist; vice chair of Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party

Fannie Lou Hamer (born Fannie Lou Townsend on October 6, 1917 – March 14, 1977) was an American voting rights activist and civil rights leader.

She was instrumental in organizing Mississippi Freedom Summer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and later became the Vice-Chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, attending the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in that capacity. Her plain-spoken manner and fervent belief in the Biblical righteousness of her cause gained her a reputation as an electrifying speaker and constant champion of civil rights.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Beginnings of activism 2 Hamer at the Democratic National Convention 2.1 Later activism 3 Quotes of Fannie Lou Hamer 4 References 5 External links

Biography

Beginnings of activism

Hamer attended several annual conferences of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL) in the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi. The RCNL was led by Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a civil rights leader and wealthy black entrepreneur, and was a combination civil rights and self-help organization. The annual RCNL conferences featured entertainers, such as Mahalia Jackson, speakers, such as Thurgood Marshall and Rep. Charles Diggs of Michigan, and panels on voting rights and other civil rights issues. ^[1] Without her knowledge or consent, she was sterilized in 1961 by a white doctor as a part of the state of Mississippi's plan to reduce the number of poor blacks in the state.^[2]

On August 23, 1962, Rev. James Bevel, an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and an associate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a sermon in Ruleville, Mississippi and followed it with an appeal to those assembled to register to vote. Black people who registered to vote in the South faced serious hardships at that time due to institutionalized racism, including harassment, the loss of their jobs, physical beatings, and lynchings; nonetheless, Hamer was the first volunteer. She later said, "I guess if I'd had any sense, I'd have been a little scared - but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they [white people] could do was kill me, and it seemed they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember."

On August 31, she traveled on a rented bus with other attendees of Bevel's sermon to Indianola, Mississippi to register. In what would become a signature trait of Hamer's activist career, she began singing Christian hymns, such as "Go Tell It on the Mountain" and "This Little Light of Mine," to the group in order to bolster their resolve. The hymns also reflected Hamer's belief that the civil rights struggle was a deeply spiritual one.

Hamer's courage and leadership in Indianola came to the attention of SNCC organizer Bob Moses, who dispatched Charles McLaurin from the organization with instructions to find "the lady who sings the hymns". McLaurin found and recruited Hamer, and though she remained based in Mississippi, she began traveling around the South doing activist work for the organization.

On June 9, 1963, Hamer was on her way back from Charleston, South Carolina with other activists from a literacy workshop. Stopping in Winona, Mississippi, the group was arrested on a false charge and jailed by white policemen. Once in jail, Hamer and her colleagues were beaten savagely by the police, almost to the point of death.

Released on June 12, she needed more than a month to recover. Though the incident had profound physical and psychological effects, Hamer returned to Mississippi to organize voter registration drives, including the "Freedom Ballot Campaign", a mock election, in 1963, and the "Freedom Summer" initiative in 1963. She was known to the volunteers of Freedom Summer - most of whom were young, white, and from northern states - as a motherly figure who believed that the civil rights effort should be multi-racial in nature.

Hamer at the Democratic National Convention

In the summer of 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, or "Freedom Democrats" for short, was organized with the purpose of challenging Mississippi's all-white and anti-civil rights delegation to the Democratic National Convention of that year as not representative of all Mississippians. Hamer was elected Vice-Chair.

The Freedom Democrats' efforts drew national attention to the plight of African-Americans in Mississippi, and represented a challenge to President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was seeking the Democratic Party's nomination for reelection; their success would mean that other Southern delegations, who were already leaning toward Republican challenger Barry Goldwater, would publicly break from the convention's decision to nominate Johnson — meaning in turn that he would almost certainly lose those states' electoral votes in the election. Hamer, singing her signature hymns, drew a great deal of attention from the media, enraging Johnson, who referred to her in speaking to his advisors as "that illiterate woman".

Hamer was invited, along with the rest of the MFDP officers, to address the Convention's Credentials Committee. She recounted the problems she had encountered in registration, and the ordeal of the jail in Winona, and, near tears, concluded:

"All of this is on account we want to register [sic], to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings - in America?"

In Washington, D.C., President Johnson called an emergency press conference in an effort to divert press coverage away from Hamer's testimony; but many television networks ran the speech unedited on their late news programs. The Credentials Committee received thousands of calls and letters in support of the Freedom Democrats.

Johnson then dispatched several trusted Democratic Party operatives to attempt to negotiate with the Freedom Democrats, including Senator Hubert Humphrey (who was campaigning for the Vice-Presidential nomination), Walter Mondale, Walter Reuther, and J. Edgar Hoover. They suggested a compromise which would give the MFDP two seats in exchange for other concessions, and secured the endorsement of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for the plan. But when Humphrey outlined the compromise, saying that his position on the ticket was at stake, Hamer, invoking her Christian beliefs, sharply rebuked him:

"Do you mean to tell me that your position is more important than four hundred thousand black people's lives? Senator Humphrey, I know lots of people in Mississippi who have lost their jobs trying to register to vote. I had to leave the plantation where I worked in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Now if you lose this job of Vice-President because you do what is right, because you help the MFDP, everything will be all right. God will take care of you. But if you take [the nomination] this way, why, you will never be able to do any good for civil rights, for poor people, for peace, or any of those things you talk about. Senator Humphrey, I'm going to pray to Jesus for you."

Future negotiations were conducted without Hamer, and the compromise was modified such that the Convention would select the two delegates to be seated, for fear the MFDP would appoint Hamer. In the end, the MFDP rejected the compromise, but had changed the debate to the point that the Democratic Party adopted a clause which demanded equality of representation from their states' delegations in 1968.

Later activism

Hamer continued to work in Mississippi for the Freedom Democrats and for local civil rights causes. She ran for Congress in 1964 and 1965, and was then seated as a member of Mississippi's legitimate delegation to the Democratic National Convention of 1968, where she was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War.

She continued to work on other projects, including grassroots-level Head Start programs, the Freedom Farm Cooperative in Sunflower County, and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign.

Hamer died of breast cancer on March 14, 1977, at the age of 59 at a hospital in Mound Bayou, Mississippi and is buried in her hometown of Ruleville, Mississippi. Her tombstone reads, "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired".

Quotes of Fannie Lou Hamer

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Fannie Lou Hamer

"We didn't come all the way up here to compromise for no more than we’d gotten here. We didn't come all this way for no two seats, 'cause all of us is tired."

"I am sick and tired of being sick and tired." (This quote was later employed as her epitaph.)

"Nobody's free until everybody's free."

References

1. ^ David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard's Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 199-200.
2. ^ Nelson, Jennifer (2003). Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement. New York: NYU Press. ISBN 0814758274.

• Asch, Chris Myers (2005). No Compromise: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer. PhD Dissertation, University of North Carolina.
• Lee, Chana Kai (1999). For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. Athens: University of Georgia Press. ISBN 0-252-06936-6
• Marsh, Charles (1997). God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-02134-1
• Mills, Kay (1993). This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. New York: Dutton.
• Nelson, Jennifer (2003). Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement. New York: NYU Press. ISBN 0814758274.
• Payne, Charles M. (1995). I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-20706-8

External links

• Oral History
• National Women's Hall of Fame entry
• Ron Schuler's Parlour Tricks: Fannie Lou Hamer
• Fannie Lou Hamer's Gravesite
• Fannie Lou Hamer Collection (MUM00215) owned by the University of Mississippi, Archives and Special Collections.

v • d • e African-American Civil Rights Movement Topics and events (timeline) Albany Movement · Birmingham campaign · Black Power · Brown v. Board of Education · - Chicago Open Housing Movement - Civil Rights Act of 1964 · Civil Rights Act of 1968 · Emmett Till · Freedom Riders · Mississippi Freedom Summer · Greensboro sit-ins · Greyhound Bus Station (Montgomery, Alabama) · Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections · Little Rock Nine · March on Washington · Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party · Montgomery Bus Boycott · Nashville sit-ins · Poor People's Campaign · Selma Voting Rights Movement · 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing - Twenty-fourth Amendment · Voting Rights Act of 1965 Activists Ralph Abernathy · Victoria Gray Adams · Ella Baker · James Bevel · Stokely Carmichael · Shirley Chisholm · Dorothy Cotton · Claudette Colvin · Vernon Dahmer · Annie Devine · Medgar Evers · Chuck Fager - James Farmer · James Forman · Marie Foster · Prathia Hall - Fannie Lou Hamer · Dorothy Height · Lola Hendricks - Aaron Henry - Myles Horton - T. R. M. Howard · Jesse Jackson · Jimmie Lee Jackson - T.J. Jemison · Judge Frank Johnson - Matthew Jones · Clyde Kennard · A.D. King - Coretta Scott King · Martin Luther King, Jr. · Bernard Lafayette · James Lawson · Bernard Lee - John Lewis · Viola Liuzzo · Joseph Lowery · Clara Luper · Malcolm X · Thurgood Marshall · James Meredith · Amzie Moore - Bob Moses · William Moyer · Diane Nash · E. D. Nixon · James Orange · James Peck · Rosa Parks · Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. · A. Philip Randolph · Amelia Boynton Robinson · Bayard Rustin · Charles Sherrod - Fred Shuttlesworth - Modjeska Monteith Simkins · Kelly Miller Smith · Charles Kenzie Steele · C. T. Vivian · Wyatt Tee Walker · Roy Wilkins · Hosea Williams · Andrew Young · Whitney Young Activist groups Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) · Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) · Highlander Folk School - Leadership Conference on Civil Rights · Montgomery Improvement Association - National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) · NAACP Youth Council · National Council of Negro Women - National Urban League - Operation Breadbasket · Regional Council of Negro Leadership - Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) · Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) · Women's Political Council Historians Taylor Branch - Clayborne Carson - Michael Eric Dyson - Chuck Fager - Adam Fairclough - David Garrow - Diane McWhorter

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