Positive News: Worth Reading: BHM100*: Remembering Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi Plantation Worker Jailed and Beaten for Trying to Vote; She Fought Back as a Civil Rights Activist, Organizer and Powerful Speaker

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Quick summary: This story highlights recent developments related to politics, showing how constructive action can lead to meaningful results.

Photo for the article BHM100*: Remembering Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi Plantation Worker Jailed and Beaten for Trying to Vote; She Fought Back as a Civil Rights Activist, Organizer and Powerful Speaker

[*This year marks the 100th anniversary since Carter G. Woodson, the “Father of Black History” founded Negro History Week in February 1926. Fifty years after that, President Gerald Ford officially recognized Black History Month. In 1986, Congress passed a law officially designating February as Black History Month.]

“Sick and tired of being sick and tired” in the 1960s, Mississippi plantation worker Fannie Lou Hamer was fired, threatened by white supremacists, and beaten in police custody when she tried to vote and register others to do the same.

But Hamer would not be silenced. She worked with other activists in her church and volunteers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to travel county to county to register other Black people to vote.

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Hamer then formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and demanded to represent her state at the 1964 Democratic Convention. Hamer fought for voting rights, education rights, and economic rights (she formed the Freedom Farm Collective to fight for redistribution of wealth from usurious sharecropping) and even ran for Senate.

Although she wasn’t rich, traditionally educated or well-connected, Hamer was a grassroots leader who got involved – and stayed involved – because she believed to her core “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”

Hamer passed in 1977 after years of dealing with serious health issues, but her legacy as an outspoken and effective champion for equal rights will never be forgotten.

The documentary Fannie Lou Hamer’s America debuted on PBS in 2022 and can now be seen in full via WORLD Channel on YouTube.

To learn more about Fannie Lou Hamer, you can read her autobiography on snccdigital.org, read 2013’s The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like it Is, check out 2021’s Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America by Keisha N. Blain, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kay Mills or Walk With Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson.

Photo for the article BHM100*: Remembering Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi Plantation Worker Jailed and Beaten for Trying to Vote; She Fought Back as a Civil Rights Activist, Organizer and Powerful Speaker

You can also watch clips of Hamer’s speeches on YouTube.

Sources:

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/fannie-lou-hamer
How The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Started (by Unstripped Voice)
Fannie Lou Hamer: Stand Up (Mississippi Public Broadcasting)
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/freedomsummer-hamer/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fannie-lou-hamers-dauntless-fight-for-black-americans-right-vote-180975610/
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/hamer-fannie-lou
https://goodblacknews.org/2021/02/28/bhm-good-black-news-celebrates-fannie-lou-hamer-sharecropper-senate-candidate-voting-and-civil-rights-activist/