Fannie Lou Hamer (October 6, 1917–March 14, 1977) was an American voting rights activist and civil rights leader. She was instrumental in organizing Mississippi's "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 the American Civil Rights Movement.
Early Life
She was born Fannie Lou Townsend in Ruleville, Mississippi, the youngest of twenty children in an impoverished household. Her parents, in common with most African-Americans in the Mississippi Delta, were sharecroppers on a cotton plantation. They attempted to establish a farm of their own at one point, but an unknown person poisoned the feed for their animals, forcing them to return to the plantation.
Because young Fannie Lou would help them in their work in the fields, she had little time for school, and never received more than a sixth-grade education. She married Perry "Pap" Hamer in 1942, and devoted herself to her family life and her job, which was also on a plantation as a "timekeeper".
Beginnings of Activism
On August 23, 1962, Rev. James Bevel , an organizer for SNCC and an associate of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a sermon in Ruleville 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, and physical beatings and lynchings; nonetheless, Mrs. Hamer was the first volunteer. She later said, "I guess if I'd had any sense, I'd have been 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 at a time since I could remember."
On August 31, she traveled on a rented bus with other attendees of Rev. 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 to bolster their resolve. The hymns also reflected Hamer's belief that the civil rights struggle was a deeply spiritual one. By the next day, she had been harassed by police, fired from her job, and received a death threat from the Ku Klux Klan.
Mrs. 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 to Charleston, South Carolina, with other activists for a SNCC conference. Stopping in Winona, Mississippi, for a meal, 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 was more than a month in recovery. 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 1964. 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 a second term; 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., Johnson panicked, calling an emergency press conference in an effort to divert press coverage away from Hamer's testimony; but many television networks ran the stunning speech unedited on their late news programs that night. The Credentials Committee received thousand 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 H. 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 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. 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 Mrs. 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 eventually 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 on March 14, 1977, in the Mound Bayou, Mississippi hospital after initially being refused entry to a "whites-only" hospital to treat her acute condition.
Quotes
"We didn't come all this way for no two seats."
"I am sick and tired of being sick and tired." (This quote was later employed as her epitaph.)
References
Marsh, Charles (1997). God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-02134-1
External links
Last updated: 10-21-2005 02:04:12
