Fannie Lou Hamer’s name is not as well known as some of our other great civil rights activists. She was a giant though folks. Fannie was born in Montgomery, (You Missed A Spot Boy..) County, Mississippi, in 1917, just two years before the Red Summer. The Red Summer was an all-out war declared on African Americans in 1919 which was mostly aimed at black soldiers returning home from WWI. Black American soldiers had gotten used to being treated as equals by white Europeans and for the most part by white soldiers in Europe. I mean white soldiers didn’t really have a choice. They weren’t trying to bring that Mississippi plantation mud to those dark trenches with black men in them sporting long rifles with sharp pointy bayonets on the ends. Fannie was the last born in a family of twenty children. Now twenty babies were a large family even by that era’s standards. Her father was a sharecropper and with that many children, you can sharecrop a whole bunch of stuff and get yo money on. So one of her earliest memories was one in which the family’s livestock was poisoned. “We knowed this white man had done it ….. That white man did it just because we were gettin’ somewhere. White people never like to see Negroes get a little success. All of this stuff is no secret in the state of Mississippi.” If that had been me… my next memory would have been of somebody’s house burning down with me standing in front of it with a gas can… and I guess that white man’s next memory would have been of someone swinging at the end of a long rope with a gas can tied around his neck in front of a burning house… yep….. they did the right thing and moved.. anywho… they landed in Sunflower (Ima Count To Three Nigra) County, Mississippi in 1919 and started sharecropping on a plantation owned by W.D Marlow. So as I was researching this article on Hamer and really on all period pieces I’ve done concerning black enslaved people, I noticed that they all worked on plantations… I got to thinking… why didn’t they just call them farms? Was it that the plantation sounded more sophisticated? ” My name is Massa Shoahmya Bulwep Ritenow and I am the proud owner of the S.R. Bulwep Plantation where our nigra’s smile when dey picks our cotton..!”… I guess it’s a little classier than… “My name is Massa Shoahmya Bulwep Ritenow and I own the S.R. Bulwep Cotton Farm where my nigra’s don’t have no teeth to smile with cuz I don’t allow dat..? ” anywho, they didn’t call it a farm because plantation means you are planting a cash crop and a farm back then was run for your own or your family’s support. So Fannie spent her years growing up on his plantation where when she turned 13 she was required to pick between 200 to 300 pounds of cotton daily. Eventually, she became the plantation’s time and record keeper. In 1944 she married Perry “Pap” Hamer, a tractor driver on the plantation, and they lived there for the next 18 years.
You’ll see me every 30 days..
So this was an evil time back then… Fannie and her husband wanted to start a family but she was subjected to a hysterectomy without her consent while undergoing surgery to remove a uterine tumor. They did that back then.. forced sterilization of poor black women, especially in Mississippi. They eventually adopted 4 children, one of which died after being denied admission to a local hospital for internal hemorrhaging because of her mother’s civil rights activities. Hamer had become interested in civil rights after hearing black leaders speak at the annual Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL) conferences in 1951. The conferences were held in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Mound Bayou, Mississippi is a city founded by freed African Americans in 1887. The funny thing is that it was originally started as a model slave community by none other than Joseph E. Davis… brother of Confederate President, Jefferson “Put That Watermelon Down Nigra..” Davis. Mound Bayou, Mississippi has a very interesting history and Hill1News will be featuring it in an upcoming article. So anyway, Fannie started getting interested in civil rights after hearing these men and women speak at the conference. Her activism at that time revolved around getting the vote out. Now anyone who knows anything about Mississippi knows that there are two things a 1950 Mississippi racist will not TOLERATE!! 1) A nigra with a white woman and 2) A nigra trying to vote! Either one of these violations could mean a countywide rope and bullet shortage. Yep, old Fannie jumped into the deep end with that activism. On August 31, 1962, she led a group of 17 African Americans to the registrar’s office to vote. Of course, they all failed the literacy test and were denied. Afterward, that job she had as the time and record keeper… gone… but her husband was required to stay there until the end of the harvest. Over the next several days Fannie moved from house to house for her safety. While at one of her friend’s homes, she was shot at 15 times in drive-bys. No one was hurt, but the next day she and their family moved a county over to Tallahatchie. In the scheme of things, they weren’t that much safer there with all things being said. Tallahatchie is about 20 minutes away from Money, Mississippi, where they killed Emmett Till. They stayed there for three months after the KKK swore if she came back there would be ten toes swinging and a bunch of old black folks standing behind a wagon singing hymns. That was in August of 1962. By December of 1962, Fanny returned! She went back to the registrar and failed again! She told him…”You’ll see me every 30 days till I pass!!” The registrar then came from behind the counter, took out a tape measure, and measured her height… … okay… no he didn’t… but later on, when asked about the episode she said, ” I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared—but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.”
All Of Them The Same
Finally on January 10, 1963, she passed. Fannie Lou Hamer was a registered voter in the state of Mississippi. So although Fannie was a registered voter, that didn’t mean she could vote. Besides being registered, African Americans were required to pay a poll tax in Mississippi. She later paid the tax and finally voted in 1963 after three years of attempts. Finally, after securing her right to vote, Hamer became involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. (SNCC) and in time became a field secretary for voter registration and welfare programs. One time while conducting an SNCC workshop, she along with other activists stopped in Winona, Mississippi for a lunch break. Some of them went into a restaurant where they were refused service and were ordered to leave. The waitress called the police on them when they acted like they wasn’t going anywhere. Barney Fife came in and showed them the billy… the billy club… Fife: “If ya’ll nigras dont leave out heh right now…. Im put mo whip appeal on it than Prince at a women’s only concert!!” Well, one of the activists then went outside and started writing down Fife’s tag number. When he did that he was arrested and the police chief and another patrolman went into the restaurant and arrested the others in the group. Meanwhile, Hamer who had stayed on the bus came out and asked the chief if they could continue their journey back to Greenwood. The chief arrested her as well. They took them down to the county jail and then they started beating them in the booking room because they wouldn’t address the officers by calling them “sir”. Hamer was singled out and taken to a cell where officers ordered two inmates to beat her with billy clubs:
“The police ensured I was held down during the almost fatal beating, and when I started to scream, they beat me further. I was also groped repeatedly by officers during the assault. When I attempted to resist, an officer, “walked over, took my dress, pulled it up over my shoulders, leaving my body exposed to five men”.
Another in her group was beaten until she was unable to talk, a third, a teenager, was beaten, stomped on, and stripped. The next day another representative from SNCC came to the police station to see if he could help. He was also beaten because he wouldn’t address them by the word “sir”. Our grandmothers and grandfathers and great-grandmothers and fathers were made from some stuff they don’t make anymore. A couple of hits from that billy on me… I would have been like… “YES SUHHH!! YOU NEED A SHINE SUH??!!! SIT DOWN RIGHT THERE SUH!!!” Pain is the enemy… Of course, when I would have gotten safely away, I would have written the police chief a letter and when he opened it, there would have just been just one word in all capital letters right in the middle..”BIATCH!! Anywho… three days later they were released. It took Fannie a month to recuperate from the beating and she never did fully recover, which left a blood clot over her left eye and a permanently damage kidney. It was an episode she would remember for the rest of her life. Still afterward she continued, returning to Mississippi to organize voter registration drives and other civil rights activities. Oh, I know you didn’t think she stayed in Mississippi after that lawless shat. Hamer was also a force in bringing in new and younger talent to the civil rights cause. She mentored people like Wendell Paris and Sammy Younge from Tuskegee University, who would become extremely effective activists under Hamer’s direction. Sammy Younge would later be murdered at a gas station in Macon, Alabama, for using a whites-only bathroom. He was 21 years old.
Tell It Like It Is
1964 was a banner year for civil rights. Congress had passed Public Law 88-352… the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Hamer and a group of delegates called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) which she co-founded, traveled to the 1964 Democratic National Convention to prevent the all white Mississippi delegation from demanding planks that would stifle minority participation in voting. MFDP demanded that they be recognized as an official delegation from Mississippi. Hamer gave a televised testimony that was seen all over the country. Of course, the all white delegation from Mississippi refused to recognize them. Hubert Humphrey proposed a compromise that would give the MFDP two seats in the delegation. The MFDP rejected the compromise, with Hamer saying, “We didn’t come all the way up here to compromise. We didn’t come all this way for no two seats when all of us is tired.” Afterward, the all white Mississippi delegation walked out. There was no Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. In 1968 the MFDP was finally seated after the Democratic Party adopted a clause that demanded equality of representation from their states’ delegations. As an aside Humphrey lost that election to Richard Nixon. Anyway, in 1972 Hamer was elected as national party delegate and traveled around speaking at various colleges, universities, and institutions. Ima tell you right now.. despite her natural leadership abilities, Hamer was not a real eloquent speaker. She was a short and stocky poor black woman with a deep southern accent that exposed her to ridicule. Not being formally educated, activists like Roy Wilkins said Hamer was “ignorant.” When Hamer was being considered to speak as a delegate at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Hubert Humphrey said, “The President will not allow that illiterate woman to speak from the floor of the convention.” Still, she had supporters like Bob Moses, leader of SNCC and organizer of the Freedom Summer Project, which registered thousands of blacks in Mississippi during 1964 in the successful effort to beat Barry (Nigra Didn’t You Hear Me!!) Goldwater, who was running against Lyndon Johnson that year. She was also supported by Malcolm X who believed in her story and in her ability to speak. As a matter of fact.. later that year in December… Malcolm and Fannie delivered speeches at the Williams Institutional Church in Harlem and it was there that Fannie delivered her famous speech, “Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired.” Yep we all heard that saying before… but it was Fannie who said it first. Although she had her naysayers, Fannie was well known for her “tell it like it is”, orator style and was warmly accepted by her audiences.
Sally’s Red Slipper
So one of Fannie’s main opponents was a man named Sen. James Eastland. To give you an idea of who he was, he is sometimes called the “Voice of the White South” or the “Godfather Of Mississippi Politics.” Yep old James (You Can Use My Rope) Eastland, despised everything Hamer stood for. His power over the agricultural industry disenfranchised African Americans as he sought to keep whites as the only powerful force in America. Hamer hit back at old “Golden Rope” by establishing the FFC, the Freedom Farm Cooperative. Now I know many of you have an aversion to the swine, but it was the old cob roller that helped pick us up after Eastland let the dogs loose. Hamer partnered with the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) to establish an interracial and interregional support program called The Pig Project to provide protein for people who previously could not afford meat. So what she did was start a small “pig bank” with donations from the NCNW of five boars and fifty sows. A sow is a female pig. Anyway, through the pig bank, a family could care for a pregnant sow until it bore its offspring, and then they would raise the piglets and use them for food and financial gain. In time they had thousands of pigs available for breeding. Getting additional donations, she was able to secure land from a black farmer for $8000. This land became the Freedom Farm and the rest is history. They were able to buy houses for struggling African Americans through FHA and offer financial services in addition to selling and breeding pigs. With her success, she was able to buy her own home and became an inspiration to thousands of poor black Mississippians. Unfortunately, the FFC had to disband in 1975 due to a lack of funding. Another important group she co-founded was the National Women’s Political Caucus. They aided in recruiting, training, and supporting women who sought elected and appointed offices at all levels of government. There is a Democratic Caucus and a Republican Caucus for the organization. I know Marjorie Green is just faqued up about getting assistance from an organization founded by a poor black woman from deep Mississippi without whose help, she would probably still be waitressing at the local Sally’s Red Slipper Bar & Lounge… anywho… Hamer was one of the first women activists who espoused the idea that women could hold power by acting as a voting majority in the country regardless of race or ethnicity. Yep if they put their heads together women could wield enormous power. Right now there are 5 million more women than men in the US and only 10 states which have larger male populations. Way back in 1971, over 50 years ago… Fannie Lou Hamer said;
“A white mother is no different from a black mother. The only thing is they haven’t had as many problems. But we cry the same tears.”
Well Done
The trials and tribulations of Fannie Lou Hamer’s life finally caught up with her. In 1972 she was released after an extended stay in a hospital for nervous exhaustion. Two years later in 1974, she would be back in the hospital after suffering a nervous breakdown. By the middle of 1974, Fannie was said to be in poor condition… and in 1976 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The following year she died from the disease on March 14, 1977, at the age of 59. Fannie Lou Hamer was buried in Ruleville, Mississippi. There were over one thousand people in attendance and Andrew Young, former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, spoke at the service saying;
“None of us would be where we are now had she not been there then”.
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