Fannie Lou Hamer’s America: a Primer

Born at the tail end of the Baby Boom, white Southern country boys of my generation were too young to recall the signing of the Voting Rights Act, but just old enough to have the Civil Rights Movement (the TV news version of it) etched in our brains. 

Every night, as we ate our supper, Walter Cronkite showed us images of riots in the cities and the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, over the backdrop of the Vietnam War, grinding into its second decade.

But we were blind to the historical context of all that conflict we saw every night on TV, because we were schooled in the old United Daughters of the Confederacy curriculum. Our teachers doggedly put red X’s on our papers if we dared choose “slavery” over “states’ rights” on a test about the reason for Civil War. The upheaval we saw over supper in the gray, cathode glow never penetrated our classroom discussions.

I was raised in the public schools of Georgia and educated at its flagship university, where I even took a couple of Civil War history classes. But no instructor ever asked me to read our state’s 1861 declaration of secession from the United States. Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing in the wake of Dylann Roof’s murderous 2015 spree in a Charleston church, did that for me. When I read the declaration, I learned why they didn’t show it to us when we were kids: A single paragraph yields the truth that the right of states they taught us about was the right of white humans to kidnap and enslave their African counterparts, to trade in people as if they were livestock.

My inferior education is why I was a year deep in The Bitter Southerner before I heard the name of Fannie Lou Hamer of Ruleville, Mississippi, who died 43 years ago this week. Her death certificate says “breast cancer,” but for the 13 years before her death she struggled with pain in her eyes, kidneys, and legs from a beating she took at the hands of Mississippi state troopers in 1963. Cancer was merely the final straw.

In late 2013, I was reporting a story about the upcoming opening of the National Center for Civil Rights in Atlanta. Doug Shipman, the Center’s founding CEO, used Hamer’s name in a top-of-his-head list of Movement figures whose stories the museum would tell. I had heard Hamer’s name several times in President Barack Obama’s speeches, but I was embarrassed I knew nothing of who she was. So when Shipman mentioned her name, I just nodded as if I knew her. Cowardly. But after the interview, I immediately turned to Google. 

Here are half a dozen things you can learn about Fannie Lou Hamer in a bit of internet research:

1. By 1962, when Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee workers arrived to register voters in Mississippi, Hamer was already 44 years old, living the sharecropper’s life on the W.D. Marlow plantation with her husband, Perry “Pap” Hamer. He drove a tractor. She was a timekeeper. Fannie Lou traveled to a SNCC meeting to get more information. It was the beginning of her transformation into an activist, and she saw it as a calling from God to fight for human rights and dignity.

2. Soon after, she led 17 people to register to vote at the courthouse in Indianola. Marlow, that same night, threatened Fannie Lou, and she left the plantation immediately. Pap asked Marlow if he could get their things and leave, too, but he told Pap he needed to stay to handle the season’s harvest before he could leave. Pap did as he was told, and after the harvest, when it was time to go, he found that their car and personal belongings had been stolen. Fannie Lou and Pap later settled in tiny Ruleville in Sunflower County, home of the notoriously racist U.S. Sen. John Eastland. 

3. A year later, she was a SNCC field secretary. Traveling home by bus from a Southern Christian Leadership Conference gathering in Charleston, Hamer and a group of activists stopped in Winona, Mississippi, for food and bathroom breaks. They were refused service at a café, and a Mississippi state trooper arrested several members. Hamer, who had stayed on the bus, stepped off, and he immediately arrested her, too. In the Montgomery County jail, he ordered two black inmates to beat Hamer with blackjacks while he and two other officers held her down. “One of the city policemens walked over and pulled my dress as high as he could,” she told a crowd in Indianola later in 1964. “Five mens in the room while I was one Negro woman, being beaten, and at no time did I attempt to do anything but scream and call on God.” At the officers’ trial (at which they were, of course, acquitted), she said, “After I got out of jail, half-dead, I found that Medgar Evers had been shot down in his own yard.”

4. In 1964, the Democratic Party of Mississippi refused to admit any Black delegates into its delegation for the party’s 1964 national convention. Although Hamer would suffer the rest of her life from the beating a year earlier, she responded by leading the creation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She and its members traveled to the Democratic National Convention in New Jersey to demand their party be seated instead of the state party’s delegation. They were offered only two seats, and they refused. But in 1968, Hamer was among the Democratic Party of Mississippi’s delegation. 

5. She died in 1977 when she was 59 years old, leaving behind three adopted daughters — Vergie, Lenora, and Jacqueline. Dorothy Jean Hamer, Fannie Lou’s fourth adopted daughter, died of internal bleeding at age 22 after she was refused medical treatment because of her mother’s activism. Fannie Lou could not have biological children because in 1961, one year before SNCC came to Mississippi, while she was in surgery to remove a uterine tumor, her doctor gave her a hysterectomy without her consent. This practice was so common among racist doctors in Mississippi it had a nickname: “the Mississippi appendectomy.”

6. Fannie Lou Hamer had a booming voice given both to song and to succinct truths like this one: “Righteousness exalts a nation. Hate just makes people miserable." 

Five minutes on Google is plenty to make you ask, why don’t we hear more about this mighty woman? Shouldn’t her name be as hallowed as Sister Rosa’s? 

But to hear those words in that booming voice of hers … I’ll tell you what … that’s a Whole Nother Thing.

I finally got a chance to hear this magnificent sound about a year ago, when producer Selena Lauterer asked me to watch the rough cut of a documentary she had decided to work on. It was called “Fannie Lou Hamer’s America.” The concept of the film belongs to Monica Land, who refers to Hamer as “Aunt Fannie Lou.” She is, to be precise, Hamer’s great niece. Land’s grandfather, John Hamer Jr., was the youngest brother of Perry Hamer. The film’s director is Joy Elaine Davenport, a Floridian whose mentor in graduate school was Florida State University’s “Fannie Lou Hamer Professor of Rhetorical Studies,” Davis Houck, who led the creation of the Emmett Till Memory Project.

The power of hearing Hamer’s words and seeing her speak them overcame me. “Fannie Lou Hamer’s America” is filled with Hamer’s frequent appearances on television news programs in the 1960s and ’70s. In one clip, from a 1969 episode of “The David Frost Show,” she strides onstage in a pastel green dress embellished with a bright pink button that says “Register, Sister.” She swaps stories of struggle with Adela Rogers St. John, a fierce California suffragette and journalist who became known in the 1920s as “the world’s greatest girl reporter.”

Land and Davenport also work magic with audio recordings of Hamer’s public addresses, laying them over contemporary footage of black life in rural Mississippi and beyond. The result is a film with no narrator except for Hamer herself — and a film that could raise her indomitable voice to the place of honor it deserves. 

When the film ended, I thought: The whole damn world should hear Fannie Lou Hamer. We need her — like, right now. 

And I wondered why the film wasn’t out in the world already: I’d been told Land and Davenport’s team had been working on it for years. But the answer was clear in the watermarks embedded across all Hamer’s TV appearances. In the mid-’60s and early ’70s, as Hamer threw her entire powerful being into the campaign for equality and voter registration, three big networks and the Hollywood studios produced all national TV programs. They owned that footage then, and — along with a few large stock-footage houses — they own it still. And they charge eye-popping sums for the right to use large sections of it. 

I also knew the team had won a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, intended to fund both the film’s final production and an effort to turn its footage into learning modules for public schools. The first-year pilots have already been used to teach Sunflower County students about their home’s greatest hero, but the film remains unfinished. With much of Kellogg’s grant of $272,000 devoted to the fine, immediately achievable goal of teaching kids, Monica Land’s dream of a film about her Aunt Fannie Lou still remains short of the princely licensing fees of big media.