Delta Woman echoes on International Women’s Day

Edited excerpt for Today’s Insight News by Carolyn Bennett

Fannie Lou Hamer was a hardworking American. Hers was the kind of backbreaking work Americans born after the great Depression will likely never experience. As a civil rights leader, Fannie Lou Hamer spoke boldly to us about us: to Americans about their treatment of one another, their divisiveness from one another that, ultimately, will cause America’s breakdown.

“I work for the liberation of all people because when I liberate myself I’m liberating other people,” Hamer said. “Sometimes I really feel sorrier for the White woman than I feel for ourselves, because she [has] been caught up in this thing ─ … caught up in this thing because you worked my grandmother and after that you worked my mother and then, finally, you got a hold on me.”

Coming out of the poorest state in the nation, from one of the poorest classes, Mrs. Hamer was harsh and frank about the way some college-educated Black women had difficulty embracing her as their sister:

“A few years ago throughout the country the middle class Black women ─ I used to say not really Black women but the middle class colored women ─ didn’t respect the kind of work that I was doing.

“In this struggle, some people say, ‘well, she don’t talk too good.’ The type of education that we get here ─ years to come, you won’t talk too good. The kind of education we get in the state of Mississippi will make our minds so narrow it won’t coordinate with our big bodies. We know we have a long fight, because our leaders like the preachers and the teachers are failing to stand up today. But we know some of the reasons for that ─ this brainwashed education the teachers have got.

“You see now, baby, whether you have a Ph.D., D.D.., or No D., we’re in this bag together. Whether you are from Morehouse or Nohouse, we’re still in this bag together. Not to fight to liberate ourselves from the men … but to work with them; then we have a better chance to just act as human beings and be treated as human beings in our sick society.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand. America is divided against itself and without considering us [today ‘us’ stretches to women, migrants, Muslims, minorities] as human beings, one day America will crumble!”

Fannie Lou Hamer was a woman of the Delta. She was born in 1918 on a plantation in the Mississippi hill country. Her parents were sharecroppers. She was the youngest of twenty children. When she was two years old, she and her parents moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi. In the time of her youth, the school term was only four months of a year; work took precedence over education. Fannie Lou Hamer loved to read and learned to read while in school though economic circumstances precluded her receiving more than six years of formal education.

Mrs. Hamer married and continued farming until the 1960s. She learned about voting in 1962 and later reflected, “That sounded interesting enough to me that I wanted to try it.”

When the civil rights movement began in Mississippi, Fannie Lou Hamer became a participant, first; then a leader. She joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] as a fieldworker in voter registration drives. Her work for civil rights led her to becoming a leading figure in organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. As a member of MFDP, she attended the 1964 National Democratic Convention to challenge the seating of Mississippi’s Regular Democratic Party. During a credentials committee hearing at this convention, she made a famous television appearance describing the struggle and violence encountered when trying to vote in Mississippi.

“The first vote I cast, I cast . . . for myself,” she said ─ “because I was running for Congress.”

Fannie Lou Hamer opposed the incumbent Representative Jamie Whitten from her congressional district.

On behalf of the civil rights movement, Fannie Lou Hamer traveled widely making speeches in major U.S. cities and colleges. She helped form the farming cooperative, Freedom Farms, in Sunflower County, Mississippi. She ran in 1971 for a seat in the Mississippi Senate.

Fannie Lou Hamer lived and died (March 14, 1977) in the Delta. Eulogized in Ruleville, Fannie Lou Hamer is buried at Freedom Farms Cooperative in Mississippi.


Sources and notes
Hamer should be pronounced as in “name-r” but with an H instead of an n

Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-1965, edited by Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, Barbara Woods (Indiana University Press, 1993), pp 212-214
Biographical notes Oral Historian, a cooperative project of USM Libraries and USM’s Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage prepared and maintained by the Special Collections Digital Lab, a division of USM Libraries at the University of Southern Mississippi. http://www.lib.usm.edu/~spcol/crda/oh/hamer.htm