CHAPTER ONE

LET YOUR LIGHT SHINE

“A city that’s set on a hill cannot be hid.” And I don’t mind my light shining. I don’t hide that I’m fighting for freedom.

—FANNIE LOU Hamer1

On August 27, 1962, Fannie Lou Hamer found her calling. That evening, the forty-four-year-old Black sharecropper attended a mass meeting arranged by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an interracial civil rights group that played a central role in organizing and encouraging Black residents in the South to register to vote.² Held at the William Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in Ruleville, the SNCC meeting brought together activists and local residents interested in learning more about the group’s voting registration efforts in the community.³ The meeting transformed Hamer, who learned for the first time that she had a right to vote as a citizen of the United States: “I didn’t know anything about voting; I didn’t know anything about registering to vote.”⁴

“They were talking about [how] we could vote out people that we didn’t want in office,” she later recalled. “That sounded interesting enough to me that I wanted to try it.”⁵ Hamer realized in that moment that she had the ability to transform American society—access to the ballot gave her the power to shape local, state, and national politics. The 1962 mass meeting in Mississippi marked the beginning of Hamer’s entry into civil rights activism. From that day forward, she chose to devote her life to expanding Black political rights—emboldened by the belief that Black people, through the formal political process, held the power to overturn centuries of unjust laws.

It was especially fitting that Hamer came to realize her life’s purpose while sitting in the pews of a local church. A woman of faith, Hamer was grounded by the teachings of the Bible. She believed that God had ordained her calling—to passionately advocate for Black people and other marginalized groups. It was a spiritual calling as much as a political one. Hamer herself captured this dual purpose and vision during a 1963 speech at the Freedom Vote rally in Greenwood, Mississippi. Citing the mission of Jesus, as recounted in Luke 4:18, Hamer emphasized the importance of knowing one’s calling. She cautioned attendees not to focus on the challenges ahead or on those who schemed against Black people: “Pits have been dug for us for ages. But they didn’t know, when they was digging pits for us, they had some pits dug for themselves.”6 Emboldened by her belief that God was on the side of all those seeking freedom and justice, Hamer told those in attendance to embrace their life’s purpose.

Accepting one’s life’s calling, Hamer argued, was akin to shining a light into a world of darkness. “That’s why I love the song ‘This Little Light of Mine,’” she explained. “From the fifth chapter of Matthew, [Jesus] said, ‘A city that’s set on a hill cannot be hid.’ And I don’t mind my light shining,” Hamer continued. “I don’t hide that I’m fighting for freedom because Christ died to set us free.”⁷ For Hamer, her calling was made clear in August 1962 when she learned of the power of the vote. She set out to live a life deeply devoted to the cause of freedom. This was not the life she could have imagined only a few years prior, but it was the path she firmly believed God had placed before her. The experiences in her past had empowered her to recognize this moment.

“LIFE WAS VERY HARD.”

Hamer, the granddaughter of enslaved African Americans, was born Fannie Alma Louise Du Bois Townsend on October 6, 1917, into a family of sharecroppers in Webster County, Mississippi.⁸ Both her parents, James Lee and Lou Ella Townsend, were natives of Mississippi, and she was the youngest of their twenty children.⁹ While James and Lou Ella worked as sharecroppers on a local plantation, they also held various positions on the side. According to Hamer, her father was a Baptist preacher and her mother was a domestic. At the age of two, Hamer and her family relocated to Sunflower County, Mississippi, where she would spend the rest of her life.10 Their move coincided with the first wave of the Great Migration. While millions of Black Southerners relocated to Northern and Western Cities, some Black families, like Hamer’s, remained in the region but moved to other towns in search of better job opportunities. The Townsend family found work on the plantation of E. W. Brandon, a white landowner near the town of Ruleville.¹¹ Like most Black people living in Mississippi, the Townsend family worked the cotton crops—clearing, planting, chopping, and picking. Since the late eighteenth century, the United States relied heavily on the growing institution of slavery to maintain the production of cotton—the first mass consumer commodity. During the nineteenth century, cotton was the primary American export, which fundamentally shaped the American economy.¹² In the aftermath of the Civil War, cotton continued to play a central role in the United States, especially in Southern states. White landowners in the South relied on cotton production—and the exploited labor of Black people—to maintain their economic power.

Hamer’s family joined countless other Black families in the region, where oppressive plantation work shaped everyday life. reflecting on her life many years later, Hamer emphasized the challenges her family endured as Black people living in the Jim Crow South during the early twentieth century. “Life was very hard,” Hamer explained. “We never hardly had enough to eat; we didn’t have clothes to wear. We had to work real hard,” she continued “because I started working when I was about six years old.”¹³ Despite long days of backbreaking work, the Townsend family did not have enough resources to meet the family’s needs. “So many times for dinner we would have greens with no seasonin’ . . . and flour gravy,” Hamer recalled. “My mother would mix flour with a little grease and try to make gravy out of it.”¹⁴

Like so many other Black children growing up in the South during this period, few educational opportunities existed for Hamer and her siblings. Following the end of slavery with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, white Southerners worked to keep Black people from having access to formal education.¹⁵ Black Southerners devised a range of strategies after the Civil War to resist white supremacist policies and practices. The rise of Black educational spaces, including church schools and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), aimed to counter local resistance to Black education. Yet the few schools that did exist in the Mississippi Delta had limited resources and financial support. The vast disparities in quality between white and Black schools in the South, fueled by white supremacist tactics and ideology, created a difficult atmosphere for Black parents in Mississippi and across the South.

The dire financial need of Southern Black families further compounded these challenges. In the aftermath of slavery, sharecropping emerged as the primary means by which Southern Black farmers could earn a living. This system—designed by white landowners—created a cycle of unending dependency, debt, and debt peonage for Black Americans, with little prospect for landownership or the accumulation of wealth.16 In a typical family of sharecroppers, each member was expected to contribute to the cultivation of crops, and children were no exception. Each hour devoted to educational instruction was one hour removed from work on the plantation. Black parents struggled to support the educational development of their children while confronting the painful reality that their livelihood depended on their children as a labor force. In an effort to respond to this dual concern, Black schools in the Mississippi Delta largely operated around the production season. On local plantations, therefore, schools were open for sharecropping children when the workload was light.¹⁷ In Hamer’s case, she generally attended school only after the harvest was complete.¹⁸

The truncated school calendar allowed greater flexibility for Black sharecropping families, but it also meant that Black children had far less instruction—and were therefore less formally educated—than their white counterparts. Hamer attended school when she could, on and off, for a period of six years. As she explained, “I didn’t have a chance to go to school too much, because school would only last about four months at the time when I was a kid going to school. Most of the time we didn’t have clothes to wear to that [school],” she continued, “and then if any work would come up that we would have to do, the parents would take us out of the school to cut stalks and burn stalks or work in dead lands or things like that. It was just really tough as a kid.”19

Despite the challenges she endured as a child, Hamer deeply valued the limited formal education she received. “I loved reading when I was in school,” she later recalled. In addition to reading the Bible, Hamer read an array of children’s books—often filled with stories that reinforced ideas of white superiority and Black inferiority.²⁰ While she did not always grasp the covert messages in what appeared to be lighthearted children’s books, Hamer took advantage of every opportunity to learn as much as she could. “I learned to read real well when I was going to school,” she explained. “I never had a chance to go to school too long—about six years—but I believe I can compete today with a kid now that’s twelfth grade at least.”²¹

Hamer was only six years old when she began working in the cotton fields. Like the majority of white landowners in Mississippi whose success depended on the deliberate inequity of the sharecropping system, E. W. Brandon exploited the labor of Black tenants to grow cotton. Brandon had no qualms about manipulating Black children if it meant he would be able to bolster his wealth, a position he made clear when he approached a young Hamer to trick her into picking cotton on the plantation. In a 1965 interview with Freedomways, Hamer recounted the moment Brandon prematurely lured her into a life of sharecropping:

I would like to talk about some of the things that happened that made me know that there was something wrong in the South from a child. My parents moved to Sunflower County when I was two years old. I remember, and I will never forget, one day—I was six years old and I was playing beside the road and this plantation owner drove up to me and stopped and asked me “could I pick some cotton.” I told him I didn’t know and he said, “Yes, you can. I will give you things that you want from the commissary store,” and he named things like crackerjacks and sardines—and it was a huge list that he called off. So I picked the 30 pounds of cotton that week, but I found out what actually happened was he was trapping me into beginning the work I was to keep doing. And I never did get out of his debt again.²²

The incident, forever etched in Hamer’s mind, illuminates the lengths to which white landowners went to maintain their wealth and preserve white supremacy. Indeed, the expansion of landownership and wealth for white people—at the expense of Black people— helped to keep white supremacy firmly in place. It was a lesson Hamer learned at a tender age and one she would carry for the rest of her life.

The lack of access to quality health care and other social resources further exacerbated the harsh conditions of cotton production in Mississippi. With a lack of access to medical care, African Americans in the South had to devise their own strategies to address ailments and illnesses as best they could.23 No home remedy, however, could curb the devastating effects of the polio epidemic that swept the nation during the early twentieth century. Polio—a diagnosis that led to permanent disability and, in many cases, death—hit African American communities especially hard, though the cases of polio in the Black South generally went underreported.²⁴ Like many African Americans in the region, Hamer contracted the virus as a child, leaving her with a persistent limp.²⁵

Despite everything “wrong in the South,” as Hamer put it, her parents tried to create a supportive atmosphere at home. Her father, James, worked diligently on the farm and did whatever he could— even bootlegging—to help make ends meet.²⁶ A sharecropper by day, James was also a Baptist minister who raised his children surrounded by the teachings of the Bible.²⁷ Hamer’s experiences in her father’s services—which drew a small group of faithful parishioners who met in the cramped Townsend home—were transformative. A young Hamer drew strength from the teachings of the Bible, listening carefully to the verses her father shared week after week. In this setting, among close friends and family, Hamer began to use her voice to sing the church songs she had come to learn on the farm.²⁸

As a child, Hamer attended a Baptist church called Stranger’s Home, a small gathering of believers with few material resources but an abundance of faith. “Stranger’s Home, it was called, and that’s just what it was,” Hamer later remarked.²⁹ At the age of twelve, she was baptized in the Quiver River—a rite of passage that marked her public entry into the faith.³⁰ Hamer’s exposure to Christian teachings at a young age left a lasting mark on her life.³¹ In the years to follow, she became a practical theologian, living out her faith and beliefs through concrete steps and actions.32 She proposed real-life practical solutions to the challenges in her community and across the nation. Her faith propelled her to find ways to transform those around her, and she creatively used the lessons from the Bible to guide her civic and political engagement.³³ Although Hamer said very little about her father, the few recollections from her siblings revealed that James could be a strict parent—especially so with Fannie. As the youngest child in the family, Hamer often delved into mischief on the plantation, wreaking havoc for her older siblings. In one instance, later described by her sister, Laura Ratliff, a young Hamer made a mess in the kitchen and quickly ran away when her father arrived to witness the scene.³⁴ “Papa would want to whip Fannie Lou because she was just too bad, but Mama wouldn’t let anyone touch her,” Ratliff recalled.³⁵

The revelations from Ratliff exemplify the close relationship Hamer had with her mother, Lou Ella. According to Hamer, Lou Ella taught her how to live a life of courage and dignity.³⁶ Hamer’s recounting of her mother’s decision to gift her with a Black doll exemplifies Lou Ella’s commitment to instilling a sense of race pride in her children and empowering them in an environment that tried to strip them of their personhood. “I was the only Black child with a Black doll,” Hamer recalled. “This gift came when I asked my mother one day why I wasn’t white. She was a woman who believed deeply that black was beautiful and not a shade less than beautiful,” she said firmly.³⁷ Hamer elaborated on this point years later, emphasizing that her mother worked to cultivate Black pride in her children. “So my mother told me,” Hamer recalled, “number one, she wanted me to remember to respect myself as a black child and as I got older she told me to respect myself as a black woman. And she said, ‘Maybe you don’t understand what I am talking about now, but one day if you respect yourself other people will have to respect you.’”³⁸ Lou Ella’s prophetic words would form the core of Hamer’s philosophy. Though she could not have known it then, Hamer would revisit her mother’s advice time and time again as she navigated the difficulties of life in the Mississippi Delta, where racism and white supremacy shaped every aspect of Black life. Hamer would come to understand racism’s powerful hold as she came of age working on the Brandon plantation.

Once Hamer stopped attending school, she devoted the majority of her time to chopping and picking cotton with her parents and siblings.39 The work was grueling, and it yielded little in result. “We’d make fifty and sixty bales and wouldn’t clear enough money to live on in the winter months,” Hamer explained.⁴⁰ It took several years before her parents managed to earn enough money in the harvesting season one year to get by during the winter. With the money they earned that year, James purchased “some wagons and cultivators, plow tools and mules in the hopes that he could rent the next year.”⁴¹ His hopes were quickly dashed, however, when a white neighbor poisoned the recently purchased livestock. The white man’s vindictive actions served a greater purpose in the community. Similar to the act of lynching, the poisoning kept an aspiring Black family “in their place” by crippling their finances, thereby reinforcing the broader system of white supremacy that defined the Jim Crow South.

The act permanently damaged the Townsend family’s finances. “That poisoning knocked us right back down flat. We never did get back up again,” Hamer admitted.⁴² “White people never like to see Negroes get a little success. All of this stuff is no secret in the state of Mississippi.”⁴³ In the aftermath of the devastating poisoning, Hamer’s father drew strength from the book of Psalms, reminding his faithful parishioners that “evildoers . . . shall be cut down like the green grass and wither away as the green herb.”⁴⁴ At the conclusion of the sermon, Hamer’s father encouraged her to sing her favorite song. In this moment of darkness, as the family was reeling from an act of vandalism and violence, Hamer’s rendition of “This Little Light of Mine” no doubt soothed hearts and minds: “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine / This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine / Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.”⁴⁵ Those words became a guiding mantra in Hamer’s life and came to embody her life’s mission long before she entered the national spotlight.

Despite their best efforts, the family’s circumstances only became more difficult with time.⁴⁶ Already elderly by the time of the poisoning, James Lee and Lou Ella struggled to keep up the grueling hours of sharecropping and, even with their children’s help on the plantation, found themselves in a never-ending cycle of poverty. During the winter months, Lou Ella devised a range of creative strategies to ensure that her family would have something to eat—no matter how small. Hamer would later reflect on her mother’s efforts to keep the family afloat during the direst of circumstances:

My parents were getting up in age and weren’t young when I was born. I used to watch my mother try and keep her family going after we didn’t get enough money out of the cotton crop. To feed us during the winter months mama would go ’round from plantation to plantation and would ask landowners if she could have the cotton that had been left, which was called scrappin’ cotton. When they would tell her that we could have that cotton, we would walk for miles and miles in the run of the week. We wouldn’t have on shoes or anything because we didn’t have them. She would always tie our feet up with rags because the ground would be froze real hard. We would walk from field to field until we had scrapped a bale of cotton. Then she’d take that bale of cotton and sell it and that would give us some of the food that we would need.47

Hamer’s description captured the strength and determination of her mother, who tried to improve the circumstances for her children as best as she could. As Hamer later emphasized, her mother was as resourceful as she was fiercely protective of her children.⁴⁸ When a white supervisor on the plantation raised his fist to strike one of Hamer’s brothers, Lou Ella quickly moved into action and grabbed the overseer’s arm.⁴⁹ Her defiant warning let the overseer know that no one could touch her children—a bold act of defiance, one that could have easily cost Lou Ella her life. Yet Lou Ella stood steadfast to defend her children and showed her willingness to place her life on the line to protect those she loved. No doubt Lou Ella was guided by the same instinct when she chose to carry a 9-millimeter pistol, carefully tucked away in her cast-iron pot, as she worked on the plantation.⁵⁰

Through her example, Lou Ella taught Hamer the importance of Black pride and self-respect—and a commitment to defending one’s principles at any cost. Still, as Hamer came to understand, Black people living in the Jim Crow South could never escape a life of pain and hardship. Hamer watched on helplessly as her parents’ health deteriorated as they worked from “sunup to sundown” on the farm. In 1930, while “clearing new ground” on the plantation, Hamer’s mother was struck in the eye with a splinter as she chopped wood. With no means of seeking medical care, Lou Ella’s eyesight deminished over time and eventually led to permanent blindness.51 The tragic accident would be one of many catastrophic experiences Fannie endured during this period. In 1939, her father, James, passed away shortly after having a stroke.⁵² His passing dealt another significant blow to Hamer, who had developed her Christian faith under his teaching and spiritual mentoring. The gradual dismantling of her close-knit family further intensified the pain of losing her father. In only a matter of years, Hamer watched on in disappointment as each of her nineteen siblings left the Brandon plantation to pursue new opportunities.⁵³

Sometime around 1944, Hamer followed suit. After working on the Brandon plantation since the age of six, Hamer left around the age of twenty-seven to begin working for W. D. Marlow, a white landowner in Ruleville.⁵⁴ Her departure coincided with her growing relationship with Perry “Pap” Hamer, a local sharecropper who was already employed on the Marlow plantation. The circumstances surrounding Hamer’s relationship with Pap are shrouded in mystery— perhaps because Hamer was already married when the two fell in love. Though Hamer never discussed her love life during these years or later, extant court records reveal that at the age of twenty, Hamer married a man by the name of Charlie Gray, a farm laborer from ruleville.⁵⁵ If Gray’s petition for divorce from Fannie Lou tells the full story of their union, then it appears that Hamer abandoned her marriage to begin a life with Pap.⁵⁶ In Hamer’s close-knit Christian community, the mere accusation of adultery—let alone the act—would have certainly raised some eyebrows. During an era in which ideas of “respectable” behavior informed Black life and culture, charges of adultery would have tainted Hamer’s public image.⁵⁷ Perhaps this is why she carefully concealed this information from others. Those who were aware of the circumstances refused to publicly discuss it—likely for the same reasons Hamer kept the details to herself.⁵⁸

What was recorded publicly—and celebrated widely—was the union that took place between Fannie Lou and Perry “Pap” Hamer in July 1944.⁵⁹ A farmer and skilled tractor driver, Pap was five years older than Fannie Lou and was originally from the small town of Kilmichael, Mississippi.60 He made the trek to Ruleville, Mississippi— perhaps in search of new job opportunities—sometime around 1932 and began working on the Marlow plantation. It’s unclear when he and Fannie Lou first crossed paths, but there is no doubt that the two fell madly in love. The affection and admiration between the two were undeniable, and this love sustained Hamer during difficult moments of her life. “I love all 225 pounds of him,” Hamer once noted. “I just like to look at him, do things for him.”⁶¹ Together, Fannie Lou and Pap started their new life, working as sharecroppers on the Marlow plantation in Ruleville during the 1940s and ’50s. In the early 1950s, Lou Ella—then in her eighties—moved in with Hamer and her husband. Pap, who had lost his mother at a young age, embraced Lou Ella as his own mother, and the two maintained a close relationship until her passing in 1961.⁶²

Even in death, Lou Ella’s words and experiences loomed large in Hamer’s life. “My life has been almost like my mother’s was, because I married a man who sharecropped,” Hamer explained in her autobiography.⁶³ While she had some access to resources Lou Ella did not have during her life—such as a more modern home with running water—Hamer spent her days much as her mother did, toiling on the farm from dawn to dusk.⁶⁴ When the plantation owner caught wind of the fact that Hamer could read and write, he expanded her responsibilities on the farm—promoting her to the position of timekeeper and relying on her to keep a record of the cotton production.⁶⁵ These new duties gave her a window into the extent to which white landowners were exploiting Black sharecroppers. Hamer later described some of these tactics and her efforts to resist:

So, as I was in charge with keeping up with the cotton weights on this plantation, this landowner not only would rob us economically through the cotton, but I would have to weigh the cotton and keep up with the weight and this man had to have a “p” [a device used to weigh the cotton lower. So I would always carry my p to the field and I would use my unloaded p until I would see him coming. And when I would see him coming at us, I’d switch p’s and use his loaded p, but it would always, you know, give us a few pounds.⁶⁶

Hamer’s descriptions underscore how white landowners worked to ensure that Black sharecroppers remained in a constant state of need—even as they worked tirelessly on the plantation. While she could do little to overturn the system of exploitation, Hamer used her position as timeand recordkeeper to resist, rigging the scale in an effort to help others in need. It was a dangerous act—one that could have easily led to her dismissal or worse. Yet the act of defiance illuminated Hamer’s willingness to take personal risks if they would benefit others.

Despite the pivotal role she played as timeand recordkeeper on the plantation, Hamer still encountered the same disregard as other Black farmers. Recounting her experiences, she pointed to how the white landowner relied on her help to keep track of his cotton production and yet would remind her that she was not allowed to sit at his table. Deeply troubled by her treatment on the plantation, Hamer covertly resisted—skillfully finding ways to assert her authority in a space that stifled Black freedom and autonomy. In response to being told that she could not eat at the table, Hamer defied the order by eating at the family’s table when they were away, intentionally using the dishes, silverware, and other items they deemed too sacred to be shared with Black people:

Now one thing that would really bug me was when they would tell me that I couldn’t eat at the table with them; I would have to wait for all them [to be] finished. So, what I would do was eat first. I would just eat and have myself a time. And maybe some of the things I’d done wasn’t right because I would eat out all of the spoons and watch them eat behind me. And then whenever they would leave home, I would get in that bathtub, because I didn’t have one. I would get in that bathtub and I would take me a bubble bath. And I would put some of everything on me that they had been using because—one thing about it, you know, just like a man who drinks whiskey: if you drink, you can’t smell mine because you already got some in you. So I had to wash the clothes; I had to iron the clothes—I wore them clothes, too. I would wear them clothes, you know, if they was having a party in ten miles I would show off one of them dresses because I had them at my house. I would wear it and I would look at them, you know, the next day wearing something that I had been wearing. And you just don’t know. And that’s why it’s so, it’s so funny to see people today saying what we can’t do, when we’ve already done it.67

Hamer’s descriptions were reminiscent of the diverse ways Black women resisted slavery.⁶⁸ Similar to enslaved Black women during the nineteenth century, Hamer recognized the power of her individual acts of resistance to slowly chip away at systems of oppression. By wearing the white women’s clothing, using their personal items, and inhabiting their private spaces, Hamer expressed her own autonomy and defiance to rules and regulations meant to uphold racism and white supremacy. In the years to follow, she would continue in this path of resistance, viewing her fight for Black rights and freedom as expressions of her divine calling to be a light in a dark world.

“HANDS THAT PICK COTTON NOW PICK PUBLIC OFFICIALS.”

During the summer of 1962, Fannie Lou Hamer’s life changed forever. That summer, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) arrived in Ruleville, Mississippi. Originally established in April 1960 at Shaw University, an HBCU in North Carolina, SNCC— led by young activists—emerged as one of the more radical groups of the civil rights movement. Unlike Martin Luther King Jr.’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), SNCC adopted a model of group-centered leadership. Under the mentorship of activist Ella Baker, SNCC activists resisted the top-down, charismatic leadership model on which SCLC and many other organizations were based.⁶⁹ During the early 1960s, SNCC drew hundreds of activists of diverse races and backgrounds, who worked to coordinate nonviolent, direct-action campaigns against segregation and racism. They played an integral role in organizing sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and voter education projects.⁷⁰ Their work around voter registration in Mississippi brought them to Ruleville, along with a coalition of civil rights groups under the banner of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). On Saturday, August 26, 1962, Hamer’s pastor, Rev. J. D. Story, had announced plans for a mass meeting to be held at the church the next day.71 Although Hamer was at first reluctant to attend, the prodding of her close friend Mary Tucker convinced Hamer to reconsider her decision to skip the meeting.⁷²

That decision proved to be a transformative one. The activists at William Chapel Missionary Baptist Church that evening, including SNCC executive secretary James Forman, delivered a series of speeches aimed at convincing local residents to register to vote. Forman and the others underscored the power of the vote for ordinary Black people in the United States. “I’d never heard that,” Hamer recalled. Emphasizing the remote nature of Ruleville, Mississippi, as well as how the demands of sharecropping left little time for broader concerns, Hamer explained why she had not previously heard of voting rights: “We hadn’t heard anything about registering to vote, because when you see this flat land in here, when the people would get out of the fields if they had a radio, they’d be too tired to play it. So we didn’t know what was going on in the rest of the state, even, much less in other places.”⁷³

Notwithstanding the challenges that Hamer identified in her interview, her emphasis on having no knowledge of voting rights alludes to the lengths to which white supremacists went to keep Black people shut out of the formal political process. The exclusion of Black Americans from the ballot was a decades-long process. Despite the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments during the nineteenth century, only 5 percent of Mississippi’s 450,000 Black residents were registered voters during the 1960s.⁷⁴ In order to ensure that Black Americans did not uproot decades of restrictive and unconstitutional laws and practices, white Southerners diligently worked to block African Americans from the vote. Those who dared to defy them met the barrel of a gun. The violent force that white Americans used to prevent the Black vote only served to underscore its immense power. As Hamer later acknowledged, “America is divided against itself because they don’t want us [Black people] to have even the ballot here in Mississippi. If we had been treated right all these years, they wouldn’t be afraid for us to get the ballot.”⁷⁵

Hamer immediately grasped the power of the vote when she became aware of her constitutional rights in August 1962. Despite humble beginnings and her limited access to formal education, the right to vote meant that she would be empowered as a citizen of the United States. To have the ability to shape local, state, and national politics was no small matter. reflecting on the service that evening, Hamer narrowed in on James Forman’s speech, which had a particular appeal above all the others:

James Bevel preached that night from the twelfth chapter of St. Luke, and the fifty-fourth verse: “Discerning the Signs of Time.” And after he preached this sermon, he talked about how a man could look at a cloud and predict the rain and it would become so. And today men cannot discern this time; it was a beautiful sermon. After James Bevel had preached, Mr. Moore, Dave Dennis and some of the others talked, and then Jim Forman from SNCC got up and talked about how it was our constitutional right, that we have a right to register and vote. And he talked about, you know, what we could do if we had the power of the vote. And during the time Jim Forman was talking about how it was our right and how they’d passed the Fifteenth Amendment that I’d never heard of, I was one of the persons that made up my mind that this was something important to me. And it seemed like it was something that I wanted to take a chance on.76

Hamer’s recollection captured the powerful fusion of the sacred and the secular that evening—the call to action from activist James Forman following the biblical pronouncements of Rev. James Bevel. As Hamer listened to the speakers at the mass meeting that evening, she could see the possibilities before her. Through voting rights, ordinary citizens like Hamer could transform American society. Perhaps Hamer caught a glimpse of what she later articulated during a 1971 speech: “Hands that pick cotton now pick public officials.”⁷⁷ It was a message that captured the transformative power of voting rights— to empower Black Americans and others operating at the margins of society.

In the weeks following the mass meeting, Hamer embarked on a lifelong mission to help Black Americans secure voting rights. For Hamer, this was a divine mission. The words of her favorite song, therefore, took on a new meaning: “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine / This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine / Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.” At the age of forty-four, Hamer set out to let her light shine when she became a member of SNCC, working alongside many of the activists who had played such a pivotal role in her entrance into the civil rights movement. Within a year, she became a field secretary for SNCC, the oldest in the organization’s history.78 It was a position that opened up an opportunity for Hamer to speak about the significance of voting rights and to help register Black Americans to vote. Her work with SNCC allowed her to shine a light into the darkness of racism and white supremacy.⁷⁹

During the 1960s, Hamer set out to inform Black residents in Mississippi and beyond about the transformative power of the vote. Building on the rich legacy of Black women suffragists, including women like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Hamer worked to help others understand how the act of voting could not only change their lives but could also improve the lives of every Black American.⁸⁰ This calling involved filling in the knowledge gaps many Black people had about their rights in the United States as well as eradicating the deliberate misinformation spread by white Southerners. Through the voting education classes Hamer taught for SNCC, she emphasized the “duties of citizenship under a constitutional form of government.”⁸¹

The US Constitution was Hamer’s focal point. Perhaps guided by her own experiences—and her prior lack of knowledge on the topic— Hamer spoke at length about the legal protections the US Constitution provided for American citizens and how the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments reaffirmed that those rights could not be denied to Black people. This was certainly a recurring theme that ran throughout history. For decades, Black activists and intellectuals in the United States invoked the Constitution to make demands of the state and all Americans. During the early twentieth century, for example, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett invoked the US Constitution to make a case for why African Americans should be protected from acts of violence and intimidation.⁸² In a 1910 essay titled “How Enfranchisement Stops Lynchings,” she decried states’ refusal to enforce laws meant to protect all citizens of the United States: “Although the Constitution specifically says, no state shall do so, they do deprive persons of life, liberty and property without due process of law, and do deny equal protection of the laws to persons of Negro descent.”83 Like Wells-Barnett, Hamer took hold of the US Constitution—its significance, its stated values, and, above all, its symbolism—to lay out a vision of freedom for Black people.⁸⁴ Addressing a packed audience of African Americans in Indianola, Mississippi, in 1964, for example, Hamer asked a pointed question, alluding to the significance of the US Constitution in shaping American politics: “We want ours and we want ours now. I question sometime, actually, has any of these people that hate so—which is the white [American]—read anything about the Constitution? Eighteen hundred and seventy, the Fifteenth Amendment was added on to the Constitution of the United States that gave every man a chance to vote for what he think to be the right way,” she further explained. “And now this is ’64 and they still trying to keep us away from the ballot.”⁸⁵

Hamer’s repeated emphasis on the US Constitution and its guarantees served a dual rhetorical purpose. On the one hand, she attempted to empower Black people by suggesting that federal law was on their side. Although local laws and policies attempted to curtail the Black vote, Hamer aimed to shine a light on how the power of the US Constitution superseded all local and state laws. On the other hand, Hamer was not oblivious to its limitations. She also evoked the Constitution to underscore the gravity—and even the absurdity—of the circumstances. Black Americans during the 1960s were fighting to obtain rights already promised to them during the era of Reconstruction. “My mind goes back to the problems that we have had in the past,” she noted. “And I think about the Constitution of the United States that says, ‘With the people, for the people, and by the people.’ And every time I hear it now I just double over laughing because it’s not true; it hasn’t been true.”⁸⁶ In another instance, during a 1964 speech Hamer boldly questioned if the “Constitution is really going to be of any help in this American society. . . . We want to see is democracy real?” she asked.⁸⁷ “We want to see this because the challenge is based upon the violation of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, which hadn’t done anything for us yet.”⁸⁸ A sober reality grounded her skepticism; she knew from personal experience the difficulties of Black life in the South and across the nation. And she knew that what was written on paper had little effect on the day-to-day lives of Black Americans.

Still, Hamer adopted an optimistic posture that was informed by the belief that Black people held the power to change society in their hands. The limitations of the Constitution notwithstanding, Hamer emphasized the power of the vote—the basic right of citizenship in the United States. “We’re tired of being mistreated. We are tired of dying for nothing. And God wants us to take a stand,” Hamer argued. “And the only way that we can change the system in the State of Mississippi is by going to the courthouse, registering to vote, but you got to stand up. Freedom is not something that’s put in your lap. You will have to go to the courthouse and say I want to register. This is a protest to show them that I am not satisfied.”89 Indeed, she implored audiences that even if the United States failed to live up to the promises of freedom and democracy, Black people could move the nation forward through the transformative act of voting. “We are going to make [democracy] true,” she insisted, “with a handful, for a handful, by a handful.”⁹⁰

Hamer’s speeches during the 1960s aimed to remind her audiences of the ideals of American democracy—an inclusive vision that embraced, in theory, all Americans, regardless of their race and socioeconomic background. White Southerners’ actions revealed that they had long abandoned those ideals. However, Hamer was determined to shed light on the principles of American democracy and insist that Americans attempt to live up to these ideals. “We have a grave problem that’s facing us today in the country,” she argued, “and if we’re going to make democracy a reality, we better start working now.”⁹¹ She would, at times, criticize the national anthem, pointing to its inherent hypocrisy:

I cannot stand when people stand to sing the national anthem, “O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hail . . .” I ask myself the question, “What do we have to hail?” When actually, “the land of the free and the home of the brave” means “the land of the tree and the home of the grave” in Mississippi. It’s time for us to wake, and if we going to make democracy a reality, we have to work to eliminate some of the problems with not only blacks but the poor whites as well.92

For Hamer, the national anthem held little meaning for Black Americans who lived under the constant threat of violence and terror—in the “land of the tree and the home of the grave.” Hamer’s question—“What do we have to hail?”—originated from a place of pain as she reflected on the daily mistreatment of Black people in the South. For Black people, deemed second-class citizens in the United States, Hamer posited that there was not much to celebrate.

At the very moment she uttered those words, Black people were facing rampant acts of white supremacist violence and terror. From the period of 1882 to 1968, an estimated 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States, with Black people accounting for more than 70 percent of the victims.⁹³ Most of these crimes occurred in the South. And as Hamer emphasized, Mississippi had a long history of white supremacist violence, earning her designation of the state as “the land of the tree and the home of the grave.”⁹⁴ The 1955 lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, the most infamous lynching of the twentieth century, took place in or near Sunflower County.⁹⁵ Born to Mamie and Louis Till in Chicago, Illinois, in 1941, Emmett had traveled to Money, Mississippi, in August 1955 to visit the family of his great-aunt and great-uncle, Elizabeth and Moses Wright. During his visit, Emmett joined several teenagers on a trip to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market to purchase candy. While in the store, Emmett had a brief exchange with Carolyn Bryant, one of the store’s owners, who falsely accused the fourteen-year-old boy of making a sexual remark toward her.⁹⁶ On August 28, 1955, in the wee hours of the morning, Roy Bryant, Carolyn’s husband, and his half-brother J. W. Milam, with the help of several others, kidnapped Emmett from his great-uncle’s home. Three days later, Emmett’s decomposed body was pulled from Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River. Despite the overwhelming evidence of the defendants’ guilt and widespread pleas for justice, an all-white jury later acquitted Milam and Bryant of murdering Emmett.⁹⁷ In 1973, eighteen years after the lynching, Bryant and his family found refuge in Hamer’s hometown of Ruleville after living for several years in Louisiana and Texas.⁹⁸

Hamer therefore understood the danger associated with simply living as a Black person in the US South. And she was well aware of the violence Black Southerners endured simply because they desired to exercise their constitutional rights. “All we want is a chance to participate in the government of Mississippi, and all of the violence, all of the bombings, all of the people that have been murdered in Mississippi because they wanted to vote. . . . This is the price we pay in the state of Mississippi,” Hamer said, “for just wanting to have a chance, as American citizens, to exercise our constitutional right that we were insured by the Fifteenth Amendment.”99 By shedding light on the conditions of Black life in the South, Hamer underscored the source of her ambivalence with the national anthem and the ideals it upheld.

Yet Hamer never lost sight of the need to keep fighting to realize the ideals of American democracy. “Now, we’ve got to make some changes in this country,” she argued. “The changes we have to have in this country are going to be for the liberation of all people—because nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”¹⁰⁰ In Hamer’s vision, it was the onus of all Americans committed to social justice to address the unfinished work of democracy. “We need people to work for freedom, now! Not freedom tomorrow, but we want freedom now,” she declared.¹⁰¹ And in Hamer’s view, the work of freedom was a righteous cause. Speaking in the prophetic tradition, Hamer issued an urgent warning to all Americans during a 1964 speech in Indianola, Mississippi. Drawing inspiration from the Bible—and also alluding to Abraham Lincoln’s famous 1858 speech—Hamer argued, “A house divided against itself cannot stand; America is divided against itself and without their considering us [African Americans] human beings, one day America will crumble. Because God is not pleased,” she continued.¹⁰² “God is not pleased at all the murdering, and all of the brutality, and all the killings for no reason at all. God is not pleased at the Negro children in the state of Mississippi suffering from malnutrition. God is not pleased because we have to go raggedy each day. God is not pleased because we have to go to the field and work from ten to eleven hours for three lousy dollars.”¹⁰³

Embracing her divine calling as a freedom fighter, Hamer set out to bring light into a world of darkness. Though she firmly believed that God would use her life—and her powerful voice—to bring moral clarity to America, she could not have imagined the widespread impact she would have in her lifetime. The light Hamer began to shine when she walked out of the mass meeting on August 27, 1962, illuminated the way for millions of people, from all walks of life, in the decades to follow.