Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

-----

Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

AMERICAN DISSENTERS: FANNIE LOU HAMER



Fifty years ago, civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer spoke before the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City—and her speech became one of the most pivotal moments of the Civil Rights Movement.

Remembering Civil Rights Heroine Fannie Lou Hamer: ‘I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired’


Session 1. Empty Altars: Visionaries & Prophets
Streamed live on Feb 27, 2023

58:12 - Mother Ann Lee
1:14:58 - Fannie Lou Hamer

This is session one for "Empty Altars: American Saints in a Cynical Age" with Diana Butler Bass & Tripp Fuller. To join the open online Lenten class head over to www.EmptyAltars.com
 
Fannie Lou Hamer: Stand Up | MPB
Mississippi Public Broadcasting
Oct 5, 2017 
Civil rights legend Fannie Lou Hamer is remembered by those who worked side by side with her in the struggle for voting rights. An African-American sharecropper from the Mississippi Delta, Hamer’s difficulty registering to vote in 1962 led to her career as an outspoken activist, congressional candidate, and fierce fighter for the rights of all.

 

* * * * * * * *

Fannie Lou Hamer

FROM THE COLLECTION: WOMEN IN AMERICAN HISTORY


Fannie Lou Hamer was born in 1917, the 20th child of Lou Ella and James Lee Townsend, sharecroppers east of the Mississippi Delta. She first joined her family in the cotton fields at the age of six. Although she managed to complete several years of school, by adolescence she was picking hundreds of pounds of cotton a day. In the early 1940s she married Perry Hamer, known as Pap, and worked alongside him at W.D. Marlow’s plantation near Ruleville, in Sunflower County. Hamer’s ability to read and write earned her the job of timekeeper, a less physically demanding and more prestigious job within the sharecropping system.
Hamer_1_800.jpg
Hamer in her home, summer 1964. Credit: Corbis/Steve Schapiro

The Hamers adopted two daughters, girls whose own families were unable to care for them. (They later adopted their two grandchildren after the older daughter’s death.) Hamer’s own pregnancies had all failed, and she was sterilized without her knowledge or consent in 1961. She was given a hysterectomy while in the hospital for minor surgery, a procedure so common it was known as a “Mississippi appendectomy.” “[In] the North Sunflower County Hospital, I would say about six out of the 10 Negro women that go to the hospital are sterilized with the tubes tied,” she told a Washington, DC, audience three years later.

The forced sterilization was one of the moments that set Hamer on the path to the forefront of the Mississippi Civil Rights movement, but the incident that brought her into a leadership role came a year later. On August 31, 1962, not long after attending a voting rights meeting organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Hamer joined 17 of her neighbors on a bus to Indianola, the county seat. Officials blocked most of the group from even attempting to register; Hamer and one man were the only ones allowed to fill out the application and take the literacy test, which both failed.

On the drive back to Ruleville, the bus was stopped and the driver arrested -- the bus was too yellow, the police claimed. While the passengers were held on the bus, the deeply religious Hamer began to sing spirituals. Singing, in particular, “This Little Light of Mine” and “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” became one of the defining features of her activism.

When the passengers scraped together enough money to cover the driver’s fine, the bus was allowed to return to Ruleville. When Hamer got home, she found that plantation owner W.D.

Hamer_2_800.jpg
Sitting on a porch, summer 1964. Credit: USM

Marlow was already aware that she had tried to register to vote. He demanded that she withdraw her application. She refused, with an explanation that would become a familiar refrain in her Civil Rights speeches: “I didn’t go down there to register for you. I went down to register for myself.” Marlow ordered her off his land.

Hamer stayed with friends in Ruleville for a few days, but it was clear that there would be reprisals against the people who had gone to Indianola. Pap drove Hamer and their daughters to Tallahatchie County, where they stayed with rural relatives for some time before returning to Sunflower County, ready to take up the fight.

Her singing on the bus and her willingness to challenge the county registrar had been noticed by local organizers, and SNCC field secretary Bob Moses saw her as a potential leader. He sent Charles McLaurin, a young activist, to find Hamer and bring her to a SNCC conference at Fisk University in Nashville in the fall of 1962. The conference was a success, and Hamer left Nashville eager to take on her new role as a community organizer.

Pap Hamer had stayed at the Marlow plantation, working through the harvest to pay off the family’s sharecropping debt, but in the fall of 1962 he rejoined his wife and daughters. Marlow took possession of the Hamers’ car, as well as the contents of the house they had rented from him, so they started over in Ruleville. The family’s main source of income was Hamer’s $10 weekly stipend from SNCC.

Through 1962 and 1963, Hamer continued to work for desegregation and voter registration. She would also become involved in relief work, distributing donated food and clothes to the poorest Delta residents. Hamer had spent her entire life in poverty, and she understood that the fight for economic security was a crucial component of the Civil Rights movement. At the same time, she was willing to use the donations as leverage, and sometimes refused to hand over food until the recipients agreed to register to vote.

On June 9, 1963, Hamer and several fellow activists were returning from a citizenship training program in Charleston, South Carolina, when their bus stopped in Winona, Mississippi. In an act of protest, several members of the group sat at the bus station’s whites-only lunch counter. Before long the police removed them from the café, arresting six people.

FannieHamer_3_800.jpg
After being beaten in jail, June 1963. Credit: FBI

In jail, several of the activists were beaten by the police and by other African American inmates, whom the police forced to use blackjack weapons. The damage done to Hamer’s eyes, legs, and kidneys would affect her for the rest of her life.

When the activists did not check in with the SNCC office that afternoon, organizers knew they were in trouble. It took several days -- and the arrest and beating of Lawrence Guyot, another SNCC worker -- before they were finally released on June 12. After they left the jail, Hamer and her colleagues learned that Medgar Evers had been assassinated on the front steps of his Jackson, MS home the previous day. As the NAACP field secretary, Evers had been the driving force behind the admission of the first black student to the University of Mississippi.

Hamer_4_800.jpg
Representing the MFDP. Credit: Methodist Church Global Ministries/Kenneth Thompson

In the following months, Hamer increased her public profile, both through her SNCC work and as one of the founders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which challenged the dominant force in Mississippi politics, the pro-segregation Democratic Party. In early 1964, Hamer ran for Congress as the MFDP candidate. She challenged veteran Congressman Jamie Whitten in the Democratic primary. Though Whitten won with an overwhelming majority, Hamer’s run set a precedent by challenging the established Mississippi congressional delegation, and set the stage for the MFDP to have a national presence.

The work of MFDP was one part of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, or Freedom Summer, which brought hundreds of college students to the state to work for Civil Rights. Although some SNCC organizers were wary of bringing in a group of outsiders, mostly whites from the North, Hamer saw value in an integrated movement and convinced many to abandon their objections. “If we’re trying to break down this barrier of segregation, we can’t segregate ourselves,” she said in a SNCC meeting.

Hamer traveled to Oxford, Ohio, to train the volunteers who would be teaching classes and registering voters -- and to sing the spirituals and movement songs she was known for. Tracy Sugarman, who spent the summer in Mississippi as both a volunteer and a journalist, accompanied Hamer as she visited Delta churches to encourage parishioners to register to vote. “Mrs. Hamer rose majestically to her feet,” he wrote. “Her magnificent voice rolled through the chapel as she enlisted the Biblical ranks of martyrs and heroes to summon these folk to the Freedom banner. Her mounting, rolling battery of quotations and allusions from the Old and New Testaments stunned the audience with its thunder.”

While the student volunteers knocked on doors and taught classes, Hamer was busy with the MFDP. The party held its own conventions at the precinct, county, and state levels to select a group to send to Atlantic City in August, where they would challenge the seating of the all-white Mississippi delegates at the Democratic National Convention. Hamer was elected vice chair of the integrated delegation, which consisted of 64 black members and four white members.

The MFDP’s goal was to persuade the convention’s Credentials Committee to seat them as Mississippi representatives. President Lyndon Johnson, who needed Southern Democrats’ support in his bid for re-election, was determined to block them. Hamer was among those who testified before the Credentials Committee. During her powerful testimony, Johnson called a last-minute press conference, causing the networks to break with their convention coverage and broadcast from the White House instead.

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Testifying at the 1964 DNC. Credit: Library of Congress

But Johnson's ploy to keep Hamer off television did not work. Her testimony was compelling enough for many evening news programs to broadcast it, incidentally granting it a much larger audience. Hamer held the committee’s attention as she spoke from memory about her eviction from the Marlow plantation and her brutal beating in the Winona jail. After less than 10 minutes she concluded: “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?”

Nonetheless, under pressure from Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, members of the Credentials Committee dropped their support for the MFDP. As a conciliatory gesture, Democratic officials offered two at-large seats to MFDP representatives, though Humphrey made it clear Johnson would not stand for one of the seats going to Hamer, “The President has said he will not let that illiterate woman speak on the floor of the Democratic convention.” The MFDP rejected the offer, and Hamer’s voice was one of the loudest in opposition. “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats,” she said.

Hamer_6_800.jpg
Singing at a rally. Credit: Take Stock/Matt Herron

After the MFDP delegation returned to Mississippi, Hamer was in high demand as a speaker. Her appearances were good for fundraising, always a concern for civil rights organizations, and she spent the remainder of the 1960s balancing national activism with her work within Mississippi. Voting rights remained a priority, even after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and Hamer took the lead in lawsuits that led to the first elections in which large numbers of black residents of Sunflower County were registered and eligible to vote in 1967. She also organized plaintiffs for a school desegregation lawsuit, instituted livestock and agricultural co-ops to improve economic prospects in the Delta, and was involved in the introduction of Head Start programs for low-income children of all races. Hamer had mixed success, particularly as her worsening health -- a combination of a lifetime in poverty, her 1963 beating, and a 1976 cancer diagnosis -- limited her capacity for public speaking and made fundraising difficult.

Hamer died in 1977 from complications associated with heart disease and cancer. Hundreds of local residents turned out for her funeral, as did most of the leaders of the civil rights movement. Stokely Carmichael of SNCC, Ella Baker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women, and Delta Democrat-Times editor Hodding Carter all spoke in celebration of Hamer's contributions to her family, her community, and the fight for Civil Rights that was her driving passion.


* * * * * * * *


Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer
Fannie Lou Hamer.png
Hamer in 1971
Born
Fannie Lou Townsend

October 6, 1917
DiedMarch 14, 1977 (aged 59)
Burial placeRuleville, Mississippi, U.S.
Organization(s)National Women's Political Caucus
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
National Council of Negro Women
Known forCivil rights leader
TitleVice chairwoman of Freedom Democratic Party; Co-founder of National Women's Political Caucus
Political partyFreedom Democratic Party
MovementCivil rights movement
Women's rights
SpousePerry "Pap" Hamer
Children4
AwardsInductee of the National Women's Hall of Fame

Fannie Lou Hamer (/ˈhmər/née Townsend; October 6, 1917 – March 14, 1977) was an American voting and women's rights activist, community organizer, and a leader in the civil rights movement. She was the vice-chair of the Freedom Democratic Party, which she represented at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Hamer also organized Mississippi's Freedom Summer along with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She was also a co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus, an organization created to recruit, train, and support women of all races who wish to seek election to government office.[1]

Hamer began civil rights activism in 1962, continuing until her health declined nine years later. She was known for her use of spiritual hymns and quotes and her resilience in leading the civil rights movement for black women in Mississippi. She was extorted, threatened, harassed, shot at, and assaulted by racists, including members of the police, while trying to register for and exercise her right to vote. She later helped and encouraged thousands of African-Americans in Mississippi to become registered voters and helped hundreds of disenfranchised people in her area through her work in programs like the Freedom Farm Cooperative. She unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate in 1964, losing to John C. Stennis, and the Mississippi State Senate in 1971. In 1970, she led legal action against the government of Sunflower County, Mississippi for continued illegal segregation.

Hamer died on March 14, 1977, aged 59, in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Her memorial service was widely attended and her eulogy was delivered by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young.[2] She was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1993.

Early life, family, and education

Hamer was born as Fannie Lou Townsend on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi. She was the last of the 20 children of Ella and James Lee Townsend.[3]

In 1919, the Townsends moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi, to work as sharecroppers on W. D. Marlow's plantation.[4] From age six, Hamer picked cotton with her family. During the winters of 1924 through 1930, she attended the one-room school provided for the sharecroppers' children, open between picking seasons. Hamer loved reading and excelled in spelling bees and reciting poetry, but at age 12 she had to leave school to help support her aging parents.[5][6][7] By age 13, she would pick 200–300 pounds (90 to 140 kg) of cotton daily while living with polio.[8][9][10]

Hamer continued to develop her reading and interpretation skills in Bible study at her church;[5] in later years Lawrence Guyot admired her ability to connect "the biblical exhortations for liberation and [the struggle for civil rights] any time that she wanted to and move in and out to any frames of reference".[11] In 1944, after the plantation owner discovered her literacy, she was selected as its time and record keeper.[12] The following year she married Perry "Pap" Hamer, a tractor driver on the Marlow plantation, and they remained there for the next 18 years.[4]

We had a little money so we took care of her and raised her. She was sickly too when I got her; suffered from malnutrition. Then she got run over by a car and her leg was broken. So she's only in fourth grade now.

 — Fannie Lou Hamer[7]

Hamer and her husband wanted very much to start a family but in 1961, a white doctor subjected Hamer to a hysterectomy without her consent while she was undergoing surgery to remove a uterine tumor.[13] Forced sterilization was a common method of population control in Mississippi that targeted poor, African-American women. Members of the Black community called the procedure a "Mississippi appendectomy".[13] The Hamers later raised two girls they adopted, eventually adopting two more.[3][14] One, Dorothy Jean, died at age 22 of internal hemorrhaging after she was denied admission to the local hospital because of her mother's activism.[7][14]

Hamer became interested in the civil rights movement in the 1950s.[15] She heard leaders of the local movement speak at annual Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL) conferences, held in Mound Bayou, Mississippi.[15] The attendees of the yearly conferences discussed black voting rights and other civil rights issues black communities in the area faced.[12]

Civil rights activism

Registering to vote

On August 31, 1962, Hamer and 17 others attempted to vote but failed a literacy test, which meant they were denied this right. On December 4, just after returning to her hometown, she went to the courthouse in Indianola to take the test again, but failed and was turned away.[12] Hamer told the registrar, "You'll see me every 30 days till I pass".[7] On January 10, 1963, she took the test a third time.[12] She was successful and was informed that she was now a registered voter in Mississippi. But when she attempted to vote that fall, she discovered her registration gave her no actual power to vote as her county also required voters to have two poll tax receipts.[7] This requirement had emerged in some (mostly former Confederate) states after the right to vote was first given to all races by the 1870 ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.[16][17] These laws, along with the literacy tests and local government acts of coercion, were used against black people and Native Americans.[18][19] Hamer later paid for and acquired the requisite poll tax receipts.[7]

They talked about how it was our right, that we could register and vote. I had never heard, until 1962, that black people could register and vote.[1]

— Fannie Lou Hamer

Hamer began to become more involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee after these incidents.[7] She attended many Southern Christian Leadership Conferences (SCLC), where she sometimes taught classes, and various SNCC (pronounced "Snick") workshops. She traveled to gather signatures for petitions to attempt to be granted federal resources for impoverished black families across the South. In early 1963, she became a SNCC field secretary for voter registration and welfare programs. Many of these first attempts to register more black voters in Mississippi were met with the same problems Hamer had found in trying to register herself.[20]

We been waitin' all our lives, and still gettin' killed, still gettin' hung, still gettin' beat to death. Now we're tired waitin'![7]

— Fannie Lou Hamer

White racist attacks

They kicked me off the plantation, they set me free. It’s the best thing that could happen. Now I can work for my people.

—Fannie Lou Hamer[21]

After her attempt to vote, Hamer was fired by her boss, but her husband was required to stay on the land until the end of the harvest.[22][3][23] Hamer moved between homes over the next several days for protection. On September 10, while staying with friend Mary Tucker, Hamer was shot at 15 times in a drive-by shooting by racists.[12][24][25] No one was injured in the event.[9] The next day Hamer and her family evacuated to nearby Tallahatchie County[7] for three months, fearing retaliation by the Ku Klux Klan for her attempt to vote.[26][15][27]

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.

— Fannie Lou Hamer[28]

Police brutality

On June 9, 1963, Hamer was returning from a voter registration workshop by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Charleston, South Carolina.[3] Traveling by bus with co-activists, they stopped for a break in Winona, Mississippi.[7] Some of the activists went inside a local cafe, but were refused service by the waitress. Shortly after, a Mississippi State highway patrolman took out his billy club and intimidated the activists into leaving. One of the group decided to take down the officer's license plate number; while doing so the patrolman and a police chief entered the cafe and arrested the party. Hamer left the bus and inquired if they could continue their journey back to Greenwood, Mississippi.[3] At that point the officers arrested her as well.[7][22] Once in county jail, Hamer's colleagues were beaten by the police in the booking room (including 15-year-old June Johnson, for not addressing officers as "sir").[29][30] Hamer was then taken to a cell where two inmates were ordered, by the state trooper, to beat her using a baton.[7] The police ensured she was held down during the almost fatal beating, and when she started to scream, beat her further. Hamer was also groped repeatedly by officers during the assault. When she attempted to resist, she stated an officer, "walked over, took my dress, pulled it up over my shoulders, leaving my body exposed to five men".[31] Another in her group was beaten until she was unable to talk; a third, a teenager, was beaten, stomped on, and stripped.[32] An activist from SNCC came the next day to see if he could help but was beaten until his eyes were swollen shut when he did not address an officer in the expected deferential manner.[9][33]

Hamer was released on June 12, 1963. She needed more than a month to recuperate from the beatings and never fully recovered.[20] Though the incident left profound physical and psychological effects, including a blood clot over her left eye and permanent damage on one of her kidneys,[34] Hamer returned to Mississippi to organize voter registration drives, including the 1963 Freedom Ballot, a mock election, and the Freedom Summer initiative the following year. She was known to the volunteers of Freedom Summer as a motherly figure who believed that the civil rights effort should be multi-racial in nature. In addition to her "Northern" guests, Hamer played host to Tuskegee University student activists Sammy Younge Jr. and Wendell Paris.[35] Younge and Paris grew to become profound activists and organizers under Hamer's tutelage.[35] Younge was murdered in 1966 at a gas station in Macon County, Alabama, for using a "whites-only" restroom.[36]

Freedom Democratic Party and Congressional run

Hamer at the Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey, August 1964
External audio
audio icon Audio of Hamer's testimony

In 1964, Hamer helped co-found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), in an effort to prevent the regional all-white Democratic party's attempts to stifle African-American voices, and to ensure there was a party for all people that did not stand for any form of exploitation and discrimination (especially towards minorities).[37][7] Following the founding of the MFDP, Hamer and other activists traveled to the 1964 Democratic National Convention to stand as the official delegation from the state of Mississippi.[37] Hamer's televised testimony was interrupted because of a scheduled speech that President Lyndon B. Johnson gave to 30 governors in the White House East Room, but most major news networks broadcast her testimony later that evening to the nation, giving Hamer and the MFDP much exposure.[38]

All of this is on account we want to register, 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 are threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in America?

— Fannie Lou Hamer[3]

Senator Hubert Humphrey tried to propose a compromise on Johnson's behalf that would give the Freedom Democratic Party two seats.[39] He said this would lead to a reformed convention in 1968.[3] The MFDP rejected the compromise, with Hamer saying, "We didn't come all the way up here to compromise for no more than we'd gotten here. We didn't come all this way for no two seats when all of us is tired."[40][39] Afterward, all the white members from the Mississippi delegation walked out.[3]

In 1968, the MFDP was finally seated after the Democratic Party adopted a clause that demanded equality of representation from their states' delegations.[41] In 1972, Hamer was elected as a national party delegate.[39]

Rhetorical practices

Hamer traveled around the country speaking at various colleges, universities, and institutions.[42] She was not rich, as confirmed by her clothing and vernacular.[42] Moreover, Hamer was a short and stocky poor black woman with a deep southern accent, which gave rise to ridicule in the minds of many in her audiences.[43] Although she often gave speeches, she was often patronized by both black and white people because she was not formally educated. For instance, activists like Roy Wilkins said Hamer was "ignorant", and President Lyndon B. Johnson looked down on her. When Hamer was being considered to speak as a delegate at the 1964 Democratic National ConventionHubert Humphrey said, "The President will not allow that illiterate woman to speak from the floor of the convention."[42] In 1964, Hamer received an honorary degree from Tougaloo College, much to the dismay of a group of black intellectuals who thought she was undeserving of such an honor because she was "unlettered".[42] On the other hand, Hamer had supporters like Ella BakerBob MosesCharles McLaurin, and Malcolm X who believed in her story and in her ability to speak.[42] These supporters and others like them believed that despite Hamer's illiteracy, "People who have struggled to support themselves and large families, people who have survived in Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi, have learned some things we need to know."[42] Hamer was known to evoke strong emotions in listeners to her speeches indicative of her "telling it like it is" oratorical style.[42]

Hamer's style of speaking and connecting to audiences can be traced back to her upbringing and the black Baptist Church to which her family belonged, which many see as the source of her ability to compel audiences with words.[42] Woven into her speeches was a deep level of confidence, biblical knowledge, and even comedy in a way that many did not think possible for someone without a formal education or access to "institutionalized power".[42] Hamer witnessed her mother be brave enough to walk around with a concealed pistol to protect her children from white land owners who were known to beat sharecroppers' children.[42] Moreover, Hamer's mother instilled a sense of pride in being black when Hamer did not see it as a benefit as a child.[42] In addition, Hamer's father was a Baptist preacher who often entertained the family with jokes at the end of the day.[42] Although Hamer only made it to the sixth grade because she had to help the family work the fields, she excelled greatly at reading, spelling, and poetry, and even won spelling bees. Her family encouraged her to recite her poetry to the family and their guests.[42]

Hamer became a plantation timekeeper, a position that made her the point person who had to communicate with both the white land owners and the black sharecroppers, which helped her practice communicating to different kinds of people. After she got involved in the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s, Hamer's oratorical skills quickly became apparent; leading activists were amazed at how she did not write her speeches but delivered them from memory.[42] The Reverend Edwin King said of Hamer, "She was an extraordinarily good cook of down-home foods...she liked to mix, to make whatever she was feeding people at midnight after they would come home from jail or somewhere else, to fix the perfect spices or recipe for her guest,...after she became the orator, she began picking and choosing the spicy parts she’d put in her speeches. She was always doing the best she had with whatever she had. The food, or words, or voice or song—choosing among it what was needed to persuade or to comfort or to please."[42] When traveling to different speaking engagements, Hamer not only made speeches, but also sang, often with the Freedom Singers.[42] Charles Neblitt, one of its members, said of Hamer, "We'd let her sing all the songs we did that she knew. She put her whole self into her singing, adding a power to the group...When somebody puts their inner self into a song, it moves people. Her singing showed the kind of dedication that she had—the struggle and the pain, the frustration and the hope... Her life would be in that song."[43]

Hamer's "southern black vernacular", indicative of the denial of blacks', particularly black Southerners', access to standard American English captures the feelings and experiences of black Southerners despite of that lack of access.[42] According to Davis Houck and Maegan Parker Brooks in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, "the designation 'black' acknowledges aspects of Hamer’s racialized experience that influenced her speech. When describing Hamer’s discourse, moreover, we find the term 'vernacular' more precise than either 'dialect' or 'language' because the etymology of 'vernacular'—taken from the Latin vernaculus and verna—evokes a sense of being both 'native to a region' and 'subservient to something else.' In this respect, 'vernacular' echoes the particularity indicated by the regional distinction, as it simultaneously represents the relationship of power and domination that Hamer challenged through her words."

One of Hamer's most famous speeches was at Williams Institutional Church in Harlem on December 20, 1964, along with Malcolm X. In the speech, "Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired",[44] Hamer chronicled the violence and injustices she experienced while trying to register to vote. While highlighting the various acts of brutality she experienced in the South, she was careful to also tie in the fact that blacks in the North and all over the country were suffering the same oppression. The audience was one-third white and gave Hamer a warm reception.[43]

Freedom Farm Cooperative and later activism

In 1964, Hamer unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate.[3] She continued to work on other projects, including grassroots-level Head Start programs and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign. With the help of Julius Lester and Mary Varela, she published her autobiography in 1967.[45] She said she was "tired of all this beating" and "there's so much hate. Only God has kept the Negro sane".[7]

Hamer sought equality across all aspects of society.[46] In Hamer's view, African-Americans were not technically free if they were not afforded the same opportunities as whites, including those in the agricultural industrySharecropping was the most common form of post-slavery activity and income in the South.[47] The New Deal era expanded so that many blacks were physically and economically displaced due to the various projects appearing around the country. Hamer did not wish to have blacks be dependent on any group for any longer; so, she wanted to give them a voice through an agricultural movement.[48]

Hamer was a staunch opponent of abortion, calling it "legalized murder" in a 1969 speech at the White House and describing her position in terms of her Christian faith.[49] In Until I Am Free, historian Keisha N. Blain writes, "Hamer viewed birth control and abortion as social justice issues. She feared that both were simply white supremacist tools to regulate the lives of impoverished Black people and even prevent the growth of the Black population."[50]

James Eastland, a white senator, was among the groups of people who sought to keep African-Americans disenfranchised and segregated from society.[51] His influence on the overarching agricultural industry often suppressed minority groups to keep whites as the only power force in America.[48] Hamer objected to this, and consequently pioneered the Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC) in 1969, an attempt to redistribute economic power across groups and to solidify an economic standing amongst African-Americans.[46] In the same vein as the Freedom Farm Collective, 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.[52]

Hamer made it her mission to make land more accessible to African-Americans.[46] To do this, she started a small "pig bank" with a starting donation from the NCNW of five boars and fifty gilts.[53] Through the pig bank, a family could care for a pregnant female pig until it bore its offspring; subsequently, they would raise the piglets and use them for food and financial gain.[53][46] Within five years, thousands of pigs were available for breeding.[53] Hamer used the success of the bank to begin fundraising for the main farming corporation.[46][53] She was able to convince the then-editor of the Harvard CrimsonJames Fallows, to write an article that advocated for donations to the FFC.[48] Eventually, the FFC had raised around $8,000 which allowed Hamer to purchase 40 acres of land previously owned by a black farmer who could no longer afford to occupy the land.[54] This land became the Freedom Farm.[54] The farm had three main objectives.[46] These were to establish an agricultural organization that could supplement the nutritional needs of America's most disenfranchised people; to provide acceptable housing development; and to create an entrepreneurial business incubator that would provide resources for new companies and re-training for those with limited education but manual labor experience.[55]

Over time, the FFC offered various other services such as financial counseling, a scholarship fund and a housing agency.[53] The FFC aided in securing 35 Federal Housing Administration (FHA) subsidized houses for struggling black families.[54] Through her success, Hamer managed to acquire a new home, which served as inspiration for others to begin building themselves up.[46] The FFC ultimately disbanded in 1975 due to lack of funding.[55]

In 1971, Hamer co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus. She emphasized the power women could hold by acting as a voting majority in the country regardless of race or ethnicity, saying "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."[3]

Later life and death

While having surgery in 1961 to remove a tumor, 44-year-old Hamer was also given a hysterectomy without consent by a white doctor; this was a frequent occurrence under Mississippi's compulsory sterilization plan to reduce the number of poor blacks in the state.[56][57][58] Hamer is credited with coining the phrase "Mississippi appendectomy" as a euphemism for the involuntary or uninformed sterilization of black women, common in the South in the 1960s.[59] She came out of an extended period in hospital for nervous exhaustion in January 1972, and was hospitalized again in January 1974 for a nervous breakdown. By June 1974, Hamer was said to be in extremely poor health.[3] Two years later she was diagnosed with and had surgery for breast cancer.[3]

Hamer died of complications from hypertension and breast cancer on March 14, 1977, aged 59, at Taborian HospitalMound Bayou, Mississippi.[60] She was buried in her hometown of Ruleville, Mississippi. Her tombstone is engraved with one of her famous quotes, "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired."[61]

Her primary memorial service, held at a church, was completely full. An overflow service was held at Ruleville Central High School,[62] with over 1,500 people in attendance. Andrew YoungUnited States Ambassador to the United Nations, spoke at the RCHS service, saying "None of us would be where we are now had she not been there then".[63]

Honors and awards

A sign honoring Fannie Lou Hamer for her work in Ruleville, Mississippi

Hamer received many awards both in her lifetime and posthumously. She received a Doctor of Law from Shaw University,[64] and honorary degrees from Columbia College Chicago in 1970[65] and Howard University in 1972.[66] She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1993.[3]

Hamer also received the Paul Robeson Award from Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority,[67] the Mary Church Terrell Award from Delta Sigma Theta sorority, the National Sojourner Truth Meritorious Service Award.[68] She is an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta. A remembrance for her life was given in the US House of Representatives on the 100th anniversary of her birth, October 6, 2017, by Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee.[15]

Tributes

Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden in Ruleville, Mississippi

In 1970, Ruleville Central High School held a "Fannie Lou Hamer Day". Six years later, the City of Ruleville itself celebrated a "Fannie Lou Hamer Day".[69] In 1977, Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson wrote "95 South (All of the Places We've Been)", in Hamer's honor. Ta-Nehisi Coates described a 1994 live solo version of the song as "a haunting and somber ode".[70]

In 1994, the Ruleville post office was named the Fannie Lou Hamer Post Office by an act of Congress.[71] Additionally, The Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy was founded in 1997 as a summer seminar and K–12 workshop program.[72] In 2014 it was merged with the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) Civil Rights Education Complex on the campus of Jackson State UniversityJackson, to create the Fannie Lou Hamer Institute @ COFO: A Human and Civil Rights Interdisciplinary Education Center. The Hamer Institute @ COFO provides a research library and outreach programs.[72] There is also a Fannie Lou Hamer Public Library in Jackson.[73]

A 2012 collection of suites by trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith, who grew up in segregated Mississippi, Ten Freedom Summers includes "Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 1964" as one of its 19 suites.[74] A picture book about Hamer's life, Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement, was written by Carole Boston Weatherford; it won a Coretta Scott King Award.[75] Hamer is also one of 28 civil rights icons depicted on the Buffalo, New York Freedom Wall.[76] And a quote from Hamer's speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention is carved on one of the eleven granite columns at the Civil Rights Garden in Atlantic City, where the convention was held.[77]

Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School was formed in the Bronx, New York, with a focus on humanities and social justice.[78]

In 2017 the Fannie Lou Hamer Black Resource Center opened at the University of California at Berkeley.[79]

In 2018, the Mississippi Democratic Party's Jefferson-Jackson Dinner fundraiser was renamed the Hamer-Winter Dinner in honor of Hamer and former governor William Winter.[80]

The third annual Women's March, held in Atlantic City, New Jersey on January 19, 2019, was dedicated to Hamer's life and legacy. Several hundred people attended, representing many organizations. Several students from Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School attended despite a state of emergency declared by New Jersey Governor Murphy due to an impending snowstorm.

The gardener and podcaster Colah B. Tawkin cites Hamer as inspiration.[81]

Works

  • Fannie Lou Hamer, Julius Lester, and Mary Varela, Praise Our Bridges: An Autobiography, 1967[45]
  • Hamer, Smithsonian Folkways RecordingsSongs My Mother Taught Me (album), 2015[82]
  • Hamer (2011). The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 9781604738230. Cf.

See also

Citations

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  2. ^ Johnson, Thomas A. (March 21, 1977). "Young Eulogizes Fannie L. Hamer, Mississippi Civil Rights Champion"The New York TimesISSN 0362-4331Archived from the original on February 26, 2018. Retrieved February 24, 2018.
  3. Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i j k l m Mills, Kay (April 2007). "Fannie Lou Hamer: Civil Rights Activist"Mississippi History Now. Mississippi Historical Society. Archived from the original on March 11, 2015. Retrieved March 3, 2015.
  4. Jump up to:a b Badger 2002, p. 69.
  5. Jump up to:a b Lee 1999, pp. 5–7.
  6. ^ An Oral History with Fannie Lou Hamer (Transcript). April 14, 1972. Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage, University of Southern Mississippi.
  7. Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i j k l m n DeMuth, Jerry (April 2, 2009). "Fannie Lou Hamer: Tired of Being Sick and Tired"The NationArchived from the original on January 31, 2018.
  8. ^ Mills 1997, p. 225.
  9. Jump up to:a b c Zinn, Howard. ""Mississippi 11: Greenwood" from SNCC the New Abolitionists". p. 9.
  10. ^ Marsh 1997, p. 19.
  11. ^ Chappell 2004, p. 312.
  12. Jump up to:a b c d e Fannie Lou Hamer: Papers of a Civil Rights Activistist [sic], Political Activist, and Woman (PDF), Amistad Research Center, November 29, 2017, archived (PDF) from the original on January 31, 2018, retrieved January 30, 2018 – via Gale.com. From the Fannie Lou Hamer Papers, 1966–1978
  13. Jump up to:a b "Fannie Lou Hamer"National Women's History Museum. Retrieved February 22, 2020.
  14. Jump up to:a b Reece, Chuck (March 2020). "Fannie Lou Hamer's America: A Primer"The Bitter Southerner. Retrieved January 2, 2023.
  15. Jump up to:a b c d Jackson Lee, Sheila (October 6, 2017). "Remembering Fannie Lou Hamer, Courageous and Tireless Fighter for Voting Rights and Social Justice Who Spike Truth to Power and Touched the Conscience of the Nation". Congressional Record. Archived from the original on January 31, 2018.
  16. ^ United States Commission on Civil Rights 1965, p. 4.
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  22. Jump up to:a b Michals, Debra (2017). "Fannie Lou Hamer". National Women's History Museum.
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  25. ^ Beito & Beito 2009, pp. 199–200.
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  43. Jump up to:a b c McMillen, Neil R.; Mills, Kay (June 1994). "This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer"The Journal of American History81 (1): 350. doi:10.2307/2081149ISSN 0021-8723JSTOR 2081149.
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General references

Further reading

External video
video icon Booknotes interview with Kay Mills on This Little Light of Mine, February 28, 1993C-SPAN

External links