What Every Woman Should Know about Fannier Lou Hamer
April 27, 2009
by Anna Belle Pfau
|What Every Woman Should Know is a bi-weekly series on American Women’s History.
Hamer in Washington, D.C. 1964
Fannie Lou Hamer was born and lived in Mississippi, where she was given a scant education and worked from the age of six. Hamer was a leader in the Civil Rights movement. She was also the twentieth child born to her mother.
While still a sharecropper on a plantation in Mississippi, Hamer became politically active in 1962 at the age of 45 when she attended her first civil rights meeting. Her passions were enflamed and she answered the call, going with 17 people to register to vote at the Sunflower County Courthouse. They were stonewalled for the entire business day, their bus was pulled over on the way home and the driver was arrested for “driving a bus of the wrong color.” Hamer was subsequently fired from her job as a sharecropper, and she lost her home in the process. She received a $9,000 water bill for a house that had no running water. Her daughter and husband were arrested and she was shot at and threatened when racists targeted her house. She was relentlessly harassed but stood her ground.
She received no protection from the police or City Hall, despite repeated requests. She was later arrested and beaten severely twice, assaults which caused serious nervous and kidney damage. After the first beating the Justice Department pressed charges against five police officers, but the trial was a mockery of American justice and all five were acquitted.
Hamer ran for Congress in 1964, though she was defeated in the Primary. Of the 68% black population in her voting district, estimates put registered voter numbers at 8% because of the obstacles put before black registrants. During that election season she helped form the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party, which dispatched a party of black delegates to attend the Democratic National Convention that year where they protested the whites-only Mississippi delegation. As speaker for the party, she spoke before the Credentials Committee at the convention, which was nationally televised. As a result of the hearing, two black Mississippi delegates were seated and the rest were admitted as honorary guests. The Democratic Party created a new rule that disallowed seating delegates from states where anyone was illegally denied the right to vote.
It was during this time that she gave the interview to The Nation in which she spoke the line that America still remembers her for: All my life I’ve been sick and tired. Now I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.
Fannie Hamer contributed hugely to the Civil Rights movement as it swept through America in the 60s. Her example, speeches, and grassroots activism helped ignite a generation to action, leading to, among other things, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In just 14 short years she managed to make an indelible impression on American Women’s history, as well as Black history. Fannie Lou Hamer died in 1977 at the age of 59.
Anna Belle, just this weekend we (group of Hillary fans) talked about why women generally participate less in rallies. one obstacle seems to be that women often don’t have the back up from their family. They can’t leave their families, the kids or elderly relatives.
Anything known where Fanny Hamer ‘s support came from. Relatives or a political organization or neighborhood?
marille:
The MFDP (mentioned in AnnaBelle’s summary) was in fact started by SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC was the group that held the “first civil rights meeting” attended by Fanny Lou Hamer in August of 1962. She became an officer and field activist in SNCC.
She was arrested and brutalized during a trip to Winona, Mississippi, on behalf of SNCC. SNCC bailed her out of jail and the organization’s lawyers represented her.
She also received support and help in many ways from her Sunflower County, Miss. community and her husband, as well as from countless individuals who opened their homes to her, despite the likelihood of being harrassed and subjected to violence (threats often made real with shootings, beatings, arson).
The omission of SNCC from the summary should be corrected. Good links would help in this regard.
With many links to choose from, here are a few:
http://www.essortment.com/all/.....r_rgrh.htm
http://americanradioworks.publ.....hamer.html
transcript & audio of her speech,
“Testimony Before the Credentials Committee, Democratic National Convention”
plus essential references to Clayborne Carson’s In Struggle book on SNCC and Sina Dubovoy’s Civil Rights Leaders as well as to Jerry DeMuth’s article in the Nation mag. in 1964.
http://www.press.uillinois.edu.....21510.html
For Freedom’s Sake
by History Prof. Chana Kai Lee
http://www.gale.cengage.com/se.....8;id=D3628
“The Papers of Fannie Lou Hamer, 1917-1977″
mentions her board positions, honorary degrees, other names/groups for further research
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