Background
Fannie L. Hamer was born on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the daughter of James Lee Townsend and Lou Ella, who were sharecroppers.
( Most people who have heard of Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-19...)
Most people who have heard of Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) are aware of the impassioned testimony that this Mississippi sharecropper and civil rights activist delivered at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Far fewer people are familiar with the speeches Hamer delivered at the 1968 and 1972 conventions, to say nothing of addresses she gave closer to home, or with Malcolm X in Harlem, or even at the founding of the National Women's Political Caucus. Until now, dozens of Hamer's speeches have been buried in archival collections and in the basements of movement veterans. After years of combing library archives, government documents, and private collections across the country, Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck have selected twenty-one of Hamer's most important speeches and testimonies. As the first volume to exclusively showcase Hamer's talents as an orator, this book includes speeches from the better part of her fifteen-year activist career delivered in response to occasions as distinct as a Vietnam War Moratorium Rally in Berkeley, California, and a summons to testify in a Mississippi courtroom. Brooks and Houck have coupled these heretofore unpublished speeches and testimonies with brief critical descriptions that place Hamer's words in context. The editors also include the last full-length oral history interview Hamer granted, a recent oral history interview Brooks conducted with Hamer's daughter, as well as a bibliography of additional primary and secondary sources. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer demonstrates that there is still much to learn about and from this valiant black freedom movement activist.
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Fannie L. Hamer was born on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the daughter of James Lee Townsend and Lou Ella, who were sharecroppers.
When Hamer 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.
Hamer attended school in a one-room schoolhouse on the plantation, from 1924 to 1930, at which time she had to drop out to help support her family. By the time she was 13, she could pick between two and three hundred pounds of cotton a day. In spite of her circumstances, Hamer was able to attend school for a few months each year until she reached the sixth grade.
After her formal schooling ended, Hamer continued to study and read the Bible under the direction of teachers at the Stranger's Home Baptist Church.
Fannie Hamer received a Doctor of Law from Shaw University, and honorary degrees from Columbia College Chicago in 1970 and Howard University in 1972.
During the 1940s Hamer 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.
In the summer of 1962, Hamer made a life-changing decision to attend a local meeting held by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who encouraged African Americans to register to vote. On August 31, 1962, Hamer tried to register, but neither she nor any of the other eighteen aspirants could interpret the Mississippi constitution to the white registrar's satisfaction. On the way home, police stopped their bus, a black-owned vehicle used for transporting field hands, and arrested the driver for operating a bus of the "wrong color. " When Hamer finally reached home, the plantation owner threw her off his land. That night sixteen shots were fired into the house where she attempted to hide. She then became a fugitive. Robert Moses of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) saw Hamer's potential as a civil rights leader and invited her to a SNCC convention at Fisk University in Nashville in the fall of 1962. This meeting was the start of her total commitment to the cause.
In January 1963 Hamer tried to register again, feeling a sense of freedom because now there was nothing anyone could take from her. She had no job or house. This time she passed, but she could not vote until 1964 because she did not have the two required annual poll-tax receipts. Hamer became increasingly active and outspoken in voter-registration drives and education.
In June 1963 Hamer attended a workshop in Charleston, South Carolina, with several other black women. They were arrested in Winona, Mississippi, on June 9, on the way home. Their crime was entering the whites-only bus station restaurant to eat. The women were roughly taken to the Montgomery County jail where they were beaten severely. Hamer was shoved on a bed facedown, and two black prisoners, supervised by a plainclothes policeman, were forced to beat her with a blackjack until they were exhausted. She tried to protect herself with her hands, which were beaten until they turned blue. The long-term results of the violence were a blood clot in one eye, kidney damage, and permanent injury to a leg. After three days with no medical care, she was finally released, through the efforts of James Bevel, Andrew Young, and a young law student named Eleanor Holmes Norton. She then learned that Medgar Evers, the field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, had just been assassinated in Jackson, the state capital. None of this stopped Hamer.
In the spring of 1964 Hamer cofounded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party, and her dramatic speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City helped galvanize the nation to right the wrongs of discrimination and forced the Democrats to mandate integrated state delegations in 1968.
In 1964, Hamer also attempted to run for the House of Representatives from Mississippi's Second Congressional District. She was not allowed on the regular ballot, so the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party established a "Freedom Ballot" that included all candidates, black and white. Hamer defeated incumbent Jamie L. Whitten on this unofficial ballot, in which those kept from the regular polls participated, 33, 009 to 49.
The following year she, Victoria Gray, and Annie Devine were the first black women to sit on the floor of the United States House of Representatives when they unsuccessfully protested the seating of the Mississippi delegation, including Whitten, that had been elected through a segregated ballot. In 1968 Hamer was a member of the integrated Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and was a committeewoman on the Democratic National Committee. Hamer was elected to the steering committee of the newly formed National Women's Political Caucus in 1971.
In 1965, Hamer helped organize a black cotton pickers strike, and in 1969 she established the 680-acre Freedom Farm Cooperative in Sunflower County. People began to call her "Pig Lady" because of her establishment, with the help of the National Council of Negro Women, of a "pig bank" that provided free pigs for blacks to breed, raise, and slaughter. Two piglets were to be returned to the "bank" from every newly born litter. Hamer established Head Start in the Delta and acquired federal funding for housing projects.
Hamer never left Ruleville and Sunflower County, nor did she move from her simple three-room house into town until late in her life.
Unlike other civil rights leaders of the 1960's, she was an uneducated older woman, not a well-educated male religious leader or student. She remained active despite a mastectomy for cancer in 1976. Fannie L. Hamer died on March 14, 1977, in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. The nation's civil rights elite gathered for her funeral.
( Most people who have heard of Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-19...)
book
Fannie Hamer unsuccessfully ran for Mississippi senator in 1964 and the Mississippi State Senate in 1971. In 1970 she led legal action against the government of Sunflower County, Mississippi, for continued illegal segregation.
Quotations:
"You can pray until you faint, but unless you get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap. "
"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. I'm not backing off. "
"When I liberate myself, I liberate others. If you don't speak out ain't nobody going to speak out for you. "
"Never to forget where we came from and always praise the bridges that carried us over. "
"Black people know what white people mean when they say "law and order". "
"I feel sorry for anybody that could let hate wrap them up. Ain't no such thing as I can hate anybody and hope to see God's face. "
"I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. "
"With the people, for the people, by the people. I crack up when I hear it; I say, with the handful, for the handful, by the handful, cause that's what really happens. "
Fannie L. Hamer was the co-founder and vice-chair of the Freedom Democratic Party, which she represented at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Hamer also organized Mississippi's Freedom Summer along with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Hamer 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.
She was also a co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus, an organization created to recruit, train, and support women of all races who wish to seek election to government office. Hamer was an Honorary lifetime member at Delta Sigma Theta.
Fannie Lou Hamer was a large, dark-complected woman of some two hundred pounds with a strong voice.
In 1945 Fannie Lou Townsend married Perry "Pap" Hamer. Unable to have children of their own, the Hamers later raised two impoverished girls, whom they decided to adopt.