Fannie Lou Hamer's America

Fannie Lou Hamer might just be the embodiment of grit. Born into a family of Mississippi sharecroppers, Hamer organized for voting rights and founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which she represented at the Democratic National Convention in 1964. Hamer endured harassment, death threats, and brutal beatings, only to continue to raise her voice and move her feet in service of liberation. 

Hamer's grandniece Monica Land celebrates the Civil Rights icon's activism and contributions to the Movement  in “Fannie Lou Hamer's America.” The PBS documentary employs the power of Hamer’s own voice and song to narrate her story. But the film is also a portrait of Hamer’s shimmering humanity, and Land hopes viewers witness the vulnerabilities of a woman who fought so tenaciously and tenderly for others. 

In speaking with Land, it struck me how hard we continue to work to combat Black women’s erasure in the American public sphere and how this work of visibility-making is both a deep blessing and something that exacts an irrevocable toll.

~ Watch the Trailer ~

Jasmin Pittman Morrell: Can you tell me what it was like to construct the documentary, and what feelings arose in you as you explored your family’s legacy? Did those feelings guide your narrative choices?

Monica Land: As far as the process, it was a difficult one. I had the idea for it in 2005, was fortunate enough to formulate a team in 2007. All of us had so many other things going on, and because of other responsibilities, we weren’t able to fully commit to it for about another nine years. 

Around 2016, I began to actively try to raise funds for the project by applying for grants. My whole motivation for doing this was out of a desire to see another aspect of Aunt Fannie Lou’s life explored. I’d seen many documentaries on her, all of which were wonderful, but I always saw that the family element was missing. And I thought, “You know what? I’ve been hearing stories about her my entire life. It would be really great to see that side of her projected on the screen.”

The groundwork [for our research] had been laid by our senior researcher and consultant, Dr. Maegan Parker Brooks, who is also a Fannie Lou Hamer historian and author. We started looking for archival footage. What we found steered the film in another direction.

We were finding footage that probably hadn’t been seen in 50 years. …  We were like kids in a candy store seeing all of this great footage of her talking and being interviewed on a lot of mainstream programs. That was really exhilarating to see how far-reaching her influence was. I was still hoping to integrate somehow, into the documentary, elements about her family, but once we reached the decision — because we had these speeches, because we had all of this other footage in her voice — we just let her tell her own story. We decided we didn’t want to have talking heads. We didn’t want a narrator. We just wanted her voice to be the only voice to be heard.

It’s so powerful, it’s so strong. It commanded respect. She was a motivator. She influenced and moved other people. So why not focus solely on that? All of the songs heard in the film are sung by her, and she sings them a cappella. Those were the freedom songs, the gospel songs that her mother taught her. She used them to motivate other people [to action], and she certainly did that. 

The [filmmaking] process was a difficult one. …  It was a learning experience. Finding the footage wasn’t so difficult because Maegan [Parker Brooks] laid the foundation. But we knew there was a lot of footage out there. We found a lot … is not digitized, and it’s not properly archived. Some places don’t know what they have. We know they have it, but they don’t know where it is because they either don’t have the staff to digitize it, or they’re in the process of digitizing.

We also found that because Aunt Fannie Lou lived in the Civil Rights era, a lot of media outlets did not consider what she said to be important. Footage of her was not properly identified. … References to her might be listed possibly as — and I hate to say this — “portly Black woman discussing voter registration.” They didn’t see the need to identify her.

We know a lot of archival houses or newspaper outlets have footage; she simply wasn’t named because she wasn’t a prominent figure at the time. That’s why we’re finding a lot of things by mistake. We’ll look through photos of someone else [like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or Stokely Carmichael] and then say, “Oh my gosh, there’s Aunt Fannie Lou.” Or we’ll look through footage of Freedom Summer and see Aunt Fannie Lou, but it wasn’t listed. 

Having an organized system of being able to easily find the footage has been such a challenge. That is one of the reasons for our educational website. The website serves as a resource center for students and researchers looking for information on Aunt Fannie Lou.

We don’t want anyone to have to search as hard as we have to find footage. It should not be that difficult to find footage on such an important historical figure. 

JPM: I love that. It sounds like such a reclamation of someone who was so central to and important [to the Movement but who] we don’t get to see in such depth.

ML: Exactly. And you will see her. She goes through a range of emotions in this film. I don’t think this has ever been mentioned, but if people pay attention to it, you also see a progression of her illness. And the stress. You’ll see the toll of what she did took on her. If you look at some of the footage, she almost looks like two different people. She aged … so quickly. Her career spanned for about 15 years, from 1962 to 1977. People can change a lot in 15 years, but you really see the wear and tear on her physical person in some instances in this film.

JPM: In the summer of 1963, when she was arrested and beaten in the Winona [Mississippi] jail, who cared for her in the aftermath?

ML: Immediately after she was released, she came to my mother’s house. My maternal grandfather and Aunt Fannie Lou’s husband were brothers. 

At the time, my mother only lived about 15 miles from Winona. [Fannie Lou] was brought to her in-laws’ house, and she was sent to a Black physician in Greenwood who helped her recover. … She could barely walk when she left that place. And that was something from which she never recovered, mentally or physically. I don’t know how anybody could. 

JPM: Another piece of her history that resonates with me is the non-consensual hysterectomy that she received at the hands of a white doctor. What must have been the pain of that violation? And yet she still went on to raise children. Could you speak to that attempted erasure, and also to her mothering?

ML: That’s something that was unique and beautiful about her. She was such a nurturing person. She had such strong maternal instincts. 

That “Mississippi appendectomy” was very common. [Women] had been forced through that atrocity in an effort to control the population. And also to govern who they deemed was deserving to have children or not, which is an extreme violation.  Aunjanue Ellis said [in the panel discussion] — and I actually said something similar a couple years ago in an article that I wrote — that what happened to her was equivalent to a rape.That was an extreme violation and one that affected Aunt Fannie Lou very much.

She did go on and take children in, whose own family wasn’t able to care for them. Each of the children were in some way related to her. … In the case of the youngest two, she became a parent to them because she raised their mother, Dorothy Jean. When Dorothy Jean died, she had two girls — Lenora and Jacqueline. Their father was about to go to Vietnam, and they were going to separate the girls. 

Aunt Fannie Lou said, “No, that’s not going to happen. You know my baby [their mother] would not want that.” After she died, Uncle Pap [Perry Hamer, Fannie Lou Hamer’s husband] raised them. People asked him, “What are you going to do with these girls now that Fannie Lou is gone?” And he said, “What do you mean? I’m going to raise them. These are my children.”

Aunt Fannie Lou was very, very nurturing. She was drawn to young people. That’s why she was so committed to SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] — because SNCC was all about the young people moving toward positive action. She just gravitated toward children and young people. … She loved children, and you could just tell that affection was so natural and so beautiful.

JPM: Related to family, and nurturing, and raising up kids, I was thinking about food. And how that can say so much about who we are and where we come from. Are there any family recipes or favorite dishes that you know she enjoyed?

ML: No, and that’s something I’ve never been asked, but I know she loved to eat. … When you’re from the South, vegetables and beef and pork, those are things you grow up around. I know she loved to cook. I heard stories about when she and Uncle Pap would come to visit my grandparents and other relatives, she would spend that time in the kitchen. With the women. Talking, eating, cooking, tasting. I think that’s a very common thing in the South. The kitchen is the community center. Everything takes place in the kitchen, and she was no different.

It was wonderful when she started the Freedom Farm. She said she knew poverty; she knew what it was like to be hungry, to be without food, to be without clothes and without shoes. She experienced that so much, that’s why she worked so hard with the Freedom Farm to give others that opportunity. 

If you were hungry, hungry is hungry. It has no color lines. That’s why she often said she wasn’t fighting for Civil Rights, she worked for human rights. 

JPM: I imagine this film will humanize her even more.

ML: That’s what I hope. There’s a family segment in the end that I hope people will continue to watch and not zone out after the credits, where some of the letters to her best friend, Rose Fishman, are read. And she’s pouring out her heart to Rose. 

She expresses the brunt, the burden of the load she carried [that] was truly so heavy. She expresses wondering whether or not what she was doing truly made a difference. She talks about how sick she was. 

“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired” — she was saying that before 1962. She was saying that when she came out of the cotton fields. So when she became active in SNCC and other organizations in the effort to help Blacks register to vote, that just came with her. 

We hope that people will see a different side of her. Our attempt was to show her personal life, because everybody has one. It’s such a gift to be able to see that.

When you see her in the documentary, she's so forceful and so powerful when she’s fighting for other people. But then you see pictures of her in the family segment with her children — you wonder, “Is that the same person?” She’s so gentle and so tender. It’s amazing to see the contrast.

JPM: Who do you see as her successors fighting for Black people’s right to vote today?

ML: When I was working on this, it was never about politics. I never really gave that any thought, since it wasn’t my focus. I tried to focus on what I wanted — my dear aunt, who I know suffered and sacrificed so much for other people, to see her get the credit that she deserves as a part of our history, because she was so much a part of it. She was very influential in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

JPM: Do you have a favorite story of her you’d like to share? Anything you discovered when looking through the photos or the footage that surprised or thrilled you?

ML: In talking about how far-reaching her influence was, we know she appeared on several talk shows, television shows, and news shows. We have David Brinkley talking about her, David Frost introducing her … Tony Brown. We knew she was on “The Phil Donahue Show” because of personal letters she wrote to thank him. … I wrote to his wife, Marlo Thomas, to ask who had the masters of Mr. Donahue’s show. When I finally got the right department at Universal, they told me yes, they’d had the masters, but there’d been a fire over the weekend and the masters were destroyed.

I was devastated to hear that, but knowing that she was on shows like “The Phil Donahue Show” … it told me how important she was. She was among so many important people, and that spoke to me of the power of her influence. This little Mississippi sharecropper (who never forgot where she came from) was so highly regarded in some circles … that was really powerful for me to see.

We’ve worked so hard for so long for this moment … it’s been an uphill battle. To finally be at this point, it’s liberating. It’s exhilarating.

“Fannie Lou Hamer’s America” premieres Tuesday, February 22, at 9 p.m. EST on PBS. The documentary is produced by Hamer’s grandniece Monica Land as well as Selena Lauterer, and directed by Joy Davenport.

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