You’ve got to fight – Fannie Lou Hamer, faith hero
She started life picking cotton. She went on to pick fights with the powerful, the hateful and the oppressive. She became one of the greatest civil rights leaders, orators and pioneers of black and women’s empowerment in American history, motivated by her faith.
Words: Ben Molyneux-Hetherington
When Martin Luther King Jr. accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, he praised those “whose discipline, wise restraint, and majestic courage has led them down a nonviolent course in seeking to establish a reign of justice and a rule of love” and specifically named Fannie Lou Hamer as one of these “great people”. 1964 was a momentous year for Hamer. She spoke at the Democratic National Convention, shared a stage with Malcolm X, and even ran for congress. Most notably, she cast her first vote at the age of 45 – for herself!
To get to 1964, however, we must start with Hamer’s birth on October 6th, 1917, in Mississippi. Her parents were sharecroppers, and from age six, Hamer picked cotton. She showed great promise at school, but by the time she was 12 she had finished school and was working the fields full time. She was soon able to pick up to 300 pounds of cotton every day, despite still having a limp from an earlier battle with polio. She married in 1945 and lived with her husband on the same plantation for the next 18 years.
Hamer’s life was profoundly shaped by her Christianity. It was through her church’s Bible study that she continued to develop her literacy. According to David Chappell in A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, she was the “‘the biblical expert’ in the Mississippi movement… who drew the connections between ‘the biblical exaltations for liberation and what we were talking about now’.” She had the ability to ‘wrap’ the bible around the struggle, in a manner that prefigures what later became popularly known as liberation theology.
It was at a mass meeting at her church in 1962 that Hamer discovered for the first time that she was legally able to register to vote. Hamer was 44, and she had never been told before that black people were able to vote. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) arranged the event, and Hamer found “it just made enough sense to me that I wanted to try it.” So on 3 August 1962, Hamer attempted to register to vote for the first time. When she arrived at Indianola, she was made to take an intentionally abstruse literacy test around the constitution of Mississippi. When she inevitably failed, she was denied the right to register.
On their journey home the group was harassed by the police. When she arrived back at the plantation, the owner found out she had attempted to register and demanded she withdraw registration. When she refused, he threw her off the property but forced her husband to stay on until the end of the harvest. She went to stay with some friends, but her husband became worried for her safety and took her to stay with her niece instead. That night, the friends’ house she had just left was shot at, in a clear attempt to target her. Undeterred, she took up a job as a field organiser for the SNCC and went back to attempt to register again. This time she had been supported by SNCC to study the constitution, enabling her to pass the literacy test, and on 4 December 1962, Hamer registered to vote for the first time.
Despite further legal obstacles, she was eventually able to cast her first vote in 1964, voting for herself in the primary where she was running to be the Democratic candidate for Congress. She lost to the racist incumbent and then attempted to get on the ballot as a third-party candidate. Despite being unsuccessful, she compiled extensive evidence of the systematic disenfranchisement of black voters and challenged the result on the basis of this. Although the committee ruled against her, it was forced to confirm that in future, due to the Voting Rights Act, evidence of this nature would be enough to overturn an election, setting an important precedent.
By this point, Hamer’s health had been impacted by two horrific incidents. In 1961 she was given a non-consensual hysterectomy by a doctor who was meant to be removing a tumour. Hamer wanted children, but this kind of forced sterilisation of black women was a common practice across Mississippi at this time. She later adopted a number of children (one of whom died after being refused hospital treatment on account of Hamer’s activism). The second event to impact her health was her arrest in 1963 along with a group of other activists after returning home from a voter registration workshop. The group was subjected to viscous beatings by the police, and Hamer was singled out for particular ill-treatment. Two other prisoners were forced to attack her with a baton, and she was sexually assaulted by multiple police officers. She was held for three days and her health was permanently impaired.
Her response to the misogyny and racism she faced was to double down on her campaigning work. She founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which campaigned to be the Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention instead of the whites-only local Democratic Party. She made a powerful speech that was played in full on multiple national stations that evening – remarkable for a black woman with no formal education and a strong Mississippi accent. Hamer showed her strength of character and independent spirit when the MFDP were offered the measly compromise of two seats at the convention. Despite being encouraged by many luminaries of the civil rights movement, including MLK, to accept, Hamer refused. The MFDP were seated fully at the 1968 convention, and in 1972 Hamer became a delegate. Recalling the refusal of compromise years later, Hamer explained: “We felt that we had a right…to make our own decisions. Not them! They couldn’t understand it when we rebelled…We refused, you know, because if we got two votes-at-large we didn’t have nothing.”
Despite being seen as uneducated by some in the movement, she was a powerful orator who was able to connect directly to her audiences using a shared vernacular. A deeply religious and powerful speaker (Hamer’s oratory was clearly influenced by her Baptist roots), Hamer habitually spoke of the Bible and God to make her point. A speech at a church in 1964 includes her memorable analysis of the situation: “America is divided against itself, and without their considering us human beings, one day America will crumble. Because God is not pleased at all the murdering, and all of the brutality, and all the killings for no reason at all.” Words that sadly continue to be relevant today.
There isn’t space here to do justice to the full scope of Hamer’s life and work. She continued her political activism beyond 1964, travelled to Guinea to link the civil rights movement to the international struggle, and worked on a farming project designed to give black people control over land. She passed away from cancer on 14 March 1977.
Late in her life, an interviewer asked Hamer if she had faith the system would one day work. In the midst of all the horrors happening in the world today, her reply is still salient. “We have to make it work. Ain’t nothing going to be handed to you on a silver platter, nothing… You’ve got to fight. Every step of the way, you’ve got to fight.”
Ben Molyneux-Hetherington is one of the hosts of Bread and Rosaries, a UK-based leftist Christian podcast, which can be found at breadandrosaries.com