CHAPTER TWO

TELL IT LIKE IT IS

I’m going to tell you just like it is. . . . There’s so much hypocrisy in this society and if we want America to be a free society, we have to stop telling lies.

—FANNIE LOU HAMER1

On July 10, 2015, Sandra Bland, a twenty-eight-year-old Black woman from Illinois, was driving alone in Prairie View, Texas. She was on her way to Prairie View A&M University, where she had recently secured a new position. According to Brian Encinia, the white Texas state trooper who stopped her that afternoon, Bland failed to signal as she moved from one lane to the next. What began as a routine traffic stop quickly escalated when Encinia asked Bland to extinguish her cigarette and immediately exit her car. ² In only a matter of minutes, Encinia tried to force Bland from the car as he called for backup. He then drew a Taser and pointed it directly at Bland. “I will light you up! Get out—now!” As Bland exited the car, tensions continued to escalate. Within an hour of driving down a quiet street in Prairie View, Bland was stopped, arrested, and later taken to a jail in Waller County, Texas. When she was found hanging in her cell three days later, the encounter, which had been recorded on the officer’s dashcam, circulated widely across the nation. ³ Thousands decried the circumstances that led to Bland’s tragic death, questioning the stop, the detainment, and the officer’s repeated threats. Although Bland’s death was officially ruled a suicide, many rejected the pronouncement—and rightfully so. In addition to the many questions that still remain unanswered concerning Bland’s short time in a Waller County jail cell, there is no denying that Encinia played a role in her death. Encinia’s racial profiling, which motivated his decision to stop Bland in the first place, and his failure to de-escalate what should have been a routine traffic stop led to an unlawful arrest and created the environment that led to Bland’s untimely death. 4

Sandra Bland’s life and the circumstances of her death cast a spotlight on one of the social issues that has dominated public discourse during the twenty-first century: state-sanctioned violence. Bland’s encounter with Encinia was recorded and as a result garnered nationwide attention. Yet thousands of Black people in the United States have had similar experiences—tense exchanges with police officers that often amount to a death sentence. In a 2019 Los Angeles Times article, a group of researchers identified police violence as one of the leading causes of death for Black American men. ⁵ While their research emphasized the experiences of Black men and boys, it also revealed that state-sanctioned violence imperiled Black women and girls to a greater degree than white women. ⁶ In the years before Bland’s confrontation with law enforcement, countless Black women died in police custody, with many of their stories going unnoticed. For example, in December 2002, Nizah Morris, a Black transgender woman, sustained a fatal head injury while being transported by three Philadelphia police officers. Although local activists worked to shed light on the tragic events of that evening, Morris’s case, like so many cases of police violence against Black transgender people, failed to garner much national attention. ⁷ In July 2015, the same month of Bland’s death, several other Black women died in police custody, including Raynette Turner of Mount Vernon, New York, and eighteen-year-old Kindra Chapman of Homewood, Alabama. ⁸ Weeks later, officers killed Mya Hall, a young Black transgender woman in Baltimore, after she made a wrong turn while driving on a parkway in Fort Meade. ⁹ These are just a few of the recent cases of Black women whose lives were cut short by the police in the United States. ¹⁰

The threat of violence Black Americans face each time they encounter a police officer today is no different from the fear of lynching Black people felt during each confrontation with a white officer during the Jim Crow era. And this violence was—and is—not limited to encounters with the police. Black Americans today also face violence at the hands of other agents of the state, including white medical professionals who continue to treat their Black patients differently from patients of other racial groups. 11 Fannie Lou Hamer lived with this fear of everyday public and private acts of violence while navigating the South. During the early 1960s, she used her growing visibility and national platform to share those experiences and denounce the actions of the police as well as the white doctors who committed acts of violence against Black women through forced sterilizations. For Hamer, one of the strategies for addressing the persistent problem of state-sanctioned violence was the use of public testimony as a mode of resistance and revelation. In this way, the act was driven by both personal and political motivations. A source of empowerment and healing, public testimony also provided a vehicle for Hamer to make her audience “co-owners of trauma.” ¹² Those who listened to Hamer’s testimony bore witness to the pain and violence and were therefore transformed by the experience.

If the violence Black women endured from the state at the hands of police officers, white physicians, and others was designed to silence them, Hamer refused to capitulate. As Hamer recognized in her day-to-day organizing in the US South, acts of police violence and white mob violence often occurred in secret, behind closed doors and far from the gaze of others. For every public and documented act of racist violence, dozens more had taken place in secret, never to be counted or documented. In Hamer’s view, those who managed to survive these brazen acts of violence needed to serve as public witnesses—speaking truthfully and openly about their personal experiences in an effort to bear witness to the pain and suffering of racial and sexual violence; bringing greater awareness to others; and initiating radical changes. “I’m going to tell it like it is,” Hamer often warned before her public speeches, as a way to boldly alert listeners to the eye-opening accounts that would follow. The mantra “tell it like it is” is a political strategy that Hamer employed in her lifetime and one that remains a powerful feature of African American culture today.

“THEY BEAT ME TILL MY BODY WAS HARD.”

Fannie Lou Hamer’s perspective on policing and state-sanctioned violence emerged from painful personal experiences.13 According to Hamer, her first recollection of state-endorsed racist violence took place in the Mississippi Delta around 1923, when she was only six years old.¹⁴ Like the vast majority of Black people living in the Delta during the early twentieth century, Hamer’s parents were sharecroppers, working tirelessly on a local plantation to be able to provide for their children. Another sharecropper in the community named Joe Pullum was violently murdered by local whites following a dispute involving $150.¹⁵ In all likelihood, Hamer did not witness the actual lynching, but her knowledge of the story—which had circulated widely in the Mississippi Delta—had a lasting effect. The lynching became part of Hamer’s memory about growing up in the Jim Crow South. Throughout her lifetime, she repeatedly told the story of Pullum’s death to underscore the circumstances of Black life in Mississippi.¹⁶

In an interview with Black communist Jack O’Dell, then an editor of Freedomways, Hamer reflected on Pullum’s life, the circumstances leading up to his death, and the challenges he faced as a Black man living in Mississippi at the time:

There was a man named Joe [Pullum]. He was a great Christian man; but one time, he was living with a white family and this white family robbed him of what he earned. They didn’t pay him anything. This white man gave him $150 to go to the hill . . . to get another Negro family. Joe knew what this white man had been doing to him so he kept the $150 and didn’t go. This white man talked with him, then shot him in the shoulder and Joe went back into the house and got a Winchester and killed this white man. The other white fellow that was with him he “outrun the word of God” back to town. That gave this Negro a chance to go down on the bayou that was called Powers Bayou and he got in a hollowed-out stump where there was enough room for a person. He got in there and he stayed and was tracked there, but they couldn’t see him and every time a white man would peep out, he busted him. He killed 13 white men and wounded 26 and Mississippi was a quiet place for a long time.¹⁷

Hamer’s account of Pullum’s life offers a glimpse into how the sharecropping system exploited Black Americans, creating a cycle of dependency and debt.18 Like countless other Black Southerners at the time, Pullum’s fate was directly tied to the whims of his white boss, who in 1923 decided to withhold money from Pullum even after he had completed the necessary work. With no available recourse or protection from the state, Pullum decided to take matters into his own hands. But as Hamer’s account reveals, Pullum had already lost the fight long before his death—not for lack of trying but because of a rigged system that empowered whites and marginalized Black people. The Jim Crow laws and culture of the US South worked to maintain white supremacy, leaving African Americans completely unprotected.

Pullum’s attempts to resist the racist Jim Crow system and insist on his right to receive wages for his work resulted in his death. Similar to countless other Black people in the US South and other parts of the nation, Pullum was lynched by a white mob. From 1889 to 1945, an estimated 476 people were lynched in the state of Mississippi, representing 13 percent of the lynchings taking place nationally.¹⁹ Even as lynchings began to gradually decline in other states during the postwar era, Mississippi witnessed a significant increase.²⁰ For a Black person, living in Mississippi during the early twentieth century meant enduring a constant state of fear. Hamer came to this realization at a very young age, and Pullum’s tragic death provided one of her earliest memories of state-sanctioned violence. Although local white residents killed Pullum, the tacit support of the state government ensured they could commit the violent act and get away with it.

As Ida B. Wells-Barnett, anti-lynching crusader and cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), revealed in her writings and speeches decades earlier, the role of police forces in protecting white perpetrators was directly tied to the rise of lynchings.²¹ Born in 1862, Wells worked as a journalist and teacher in Memphis during the late nineteenth century. In 1892, white supremacists lynched her three friends—local business owners Calvin McDowell, Thomas Moss, and William “Henry” Stewart— representing a pattern of white mob violence that targeted Black people across the South. In 1895, Wells-Barnett released her landmark study The Red Record, which denounced lynching and urged readers to call for a federal investigation into white mob violence.22 The findings of Wells-Barnett’s study, as well as her subsequent writings and speeches, underscored how law enforcement often failed to use their “great power to protect the victim” from white mob violence.²³

The aftermath of Pullum’s murder revealed the complicity of law enforcement in Hamer’s hometown. In a painful scene that has played out in Black communities over and over again, white vigilantes paraded Pullum’s body—tied to the back of a truck—for all to see. And when they were done, they cut off Pullum’s ear, which they proudly displayed in the window of a local store.²⁴ It was an act of intimidation and a clear message meant to terrorize Black people—all in the public eye and certainly with the full knowledge and support of law enforcement. It was, without question, state-sanctioned violence.

Hamer’s early experiences left a lasting imprint on her life. As she admitted in the 1965 interview with O’Dell, “I remember that [lynching] until this day and I won’t forget it.”²⁵ Throughout her lifetime, Hamer witnessed similar acts of violence against Black people in Mississippi. “All of those things, when they would happen,” Hamer explained, “would make me sick in the pit of my stomach and year after year, every time something would happen it would make me more and more aware of what would have to be done in the state of Mississippi.”²⁶ Hamer spoke often about how white supremacist violence shaped Black life in the state. From the everyday acts of violence at the hands of individual citizens to the coordinated lynch mobs and campaigns of terror led by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), Black Southerners lived in a state of constant fear. They could not escape the unrelenting violence aimed at keeping them in subordinate positions and preventing them from exercising their citizenship rights. “We’re tired of all this beatin,’ we’re tired of takin’ this,” Hamer explained. “It’s been a hundred years and we’re still being beaten and shot at, crosses are still being burned, because we want to vote.”²⁷ Despite the violence meant to curb Black political rights, Hamer determinedly pushed forward. “I’m goin’ to stay in Mississippi and if they shoot me down, I’ll be buried here,” she boldly declared.²⁸

As she traveled across the state to help organize local residents and encourage them to register to vote, Hamer would put those words to the test. Her first known encounter with the police was in August 1962—not long after she had joined the civil rights movement. She was among a group of eighteen Black residents from Sunflower County, Mississippi, who had volunteered to register to vote.29 The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organized the group as part of its grassroots effort to help enfranchise Black Mississippians.³⁰ On Friday, August 31, 1962, Hamer boarded the bus with this group of activists on their way to Indianola, approximately twenty-six miles away from Ruleville.³¹ Their journey was a historic one, marked with their determination to register Black people to vote in a state that had disenfranchised its Black citizens through an array of legal and extralegal measures, including poll taxes and violence.

Given these realities, Hamer and the other activists who boarded the bus to Indianola anticipated encountering roadblocks on their trip. Hamer later recalled the worry that crossed her mind as she prepared for the trip: “I just had a feeling because the morning I left home to go down to register I carried some extra shoes and a bag because I said, ‘If I’m arrested or anything, I’ll have some extra shoes to put on.’ So I had a feeling something might happen; I just didn’t know. I didn’t know it was going to be as much involved as it finally was.”³²

The first challenge Hamer and her associates faced was at the front doors of the courthouse in Indianola, where armed guards greeted them as they attempted to enter. Describing the scene, Hamer later noted, “I saw more policemens with guns than I’d ever seen in my life at one time. They were standing around and I will never forget that day.”³³ After making it through the door of the courthouse, poll workers informed the activists that they would be required to take literacy tests in order to register to vote. These discriminatory literacy tests were yet another strategy employed by white supremacists in an effort to disenfranchise Black people. With limited formal education, Hamer did the best she could, later recalling that she struggled with parts of the test on the function of de facto laws and the state constitution.³⁴ “The registrar brought out a huge black book and he pointed out a section to me with the sixteenth section of the constitution of Mississippi and he told me to copy that section, and it was dealing with de facto laws,” Hamer explained.³⁵ “And I knowed about as much about a de facto law as a horse knows about New Year’s,” she remarked with honesty and humor. “He told me to tell the meanings of the section that I had just copied. Quite naturally, I flunked the test.”36

As Hamer and her associates prepared to leave, they saw that police officers had surrounded the old school bus in which they had traveled to the courthouse. Hamer later described the scene in vivid detail: “By the time the eighteen of us going in two by two had finished taking the literacy test—now there’s people, mind you, there that day with guns, dogs, and rifles. Some of them looking exactly like Jed Clampett with the Beverly Hillbillies, only they wasn’t kidding.”³⁷ The group of activists managed to leave the courthouse without incident. However, on the journey back home, police stopped them, and an officer ordered them off the bus. While the activists were not surprised to be stopped by the police, they were certainly bewildered when the officer fined them for driving a bus of the “wrong color.”³⁸

In a startling scene that underscores the absurdity of white supremacist practices, the police officer charged the driver for driving a bus that was “too yellow.” The officer’s “reasoning” was that the bus was deceptive—too closely resembling a school bus. In reality, the stop had nothing to do with the color of the bus. Given the visibility of Hamer and her colleagues—the notoriety associated with their attempts to register to vote—the police officer knew why the activists were traveling from Indianola. Hamer later pointed out that she had seen the officer earlier in the day while attempting to register.³⁹ Yet he used his power as an agent of the state to remind the activists they were living in the Jim Crow South, with all of its insulting indignities that could quickly escalate to state-sanctioned violence. After forcing Hamer and her colleagues to return to the courthouse in Indianola, the officer arrested the driver, civil rights activist Lawrence Guyot, and initially charged him a fine of $100—close to $850 in today’s currency.⁴⁰ Hamer and the other passengers convinced the officer to reduce the fine since there was no way they could pay it. The fee was ultimately reduced to $30 and paid by the group, who pooled their resources together.

The 1962 incident in Indianola was a frightening one for Hamer and her associates. Yet they were grateful to return home unscathed and were further united in their efforts to combat voter suppression. Hamer recounted this story in her speeches on a number of occasions, illuminating some of the challenges Black people encountered while trying to exercise their constitutional rights. She also told the story to shed light on the function of state-sanctioned violence in the South during the 1960s: to intimidate and terrorize Black people. The white intimidation Hamer experienced in Indianola only continued when she returned home later that evening and would follow her for the rest of her life. Although she was unsuccessful in her first attempt to register to vote in Indianola, Hamer took great pride in the fact that she had tried. As she once noted, “If we think about the things that have happened to us in the past, if we think about the lynchings, the mobbings, and all of the things that have happened throughout the state of Mississippi, and we don’t have enough dignity to walk up and vote for our own people, there’s something wrong with us.”41 As Hamer emphasized, voting and registering to vote were acts of defiance to the system of white supremacy that shaped Black life in Mississippi and across the nation.

Hamer’s defiance came at a cost. That evening, when she returned to the plantation where she worked, Hamer was forced to leave. The owner, who was displeased that Hamer had traveled to Indianola to register, gave her an ultimatum: “If you don’t go down and withdraw your registration, you will have to leave. . . . We’re not ready for that in Mississippi.”⁴² Hamer left the plantation that evening and never returned. She had no choice but to leave her husband, Perry “Pap” Hamer, behind to continue working on the plantation so they would not lose their one remaining source of income. It was a painful personal sacrifice but one she would have to make time and time again for the sake of her family’s safety and security. Despite losing her job that evening, Hamer praised the development for opening up new avenues for her to advance the cause of social justice. “[When] they kicked me off the plantation,” Hamer reportedly told a fellow worker, “they set me free.” She added, “It’s the best thing that could happen. Now I can work for my people.”⁴³

Several days after Hamer was forced off the plantation, white supremacists sprayed sixteen bullets into the home where she had been staying with her friends Mr. and Mrs. Robert Tucker.⁴⁴ They also shot up several surrounding homes. Hamer knew the bullets, which resulted in the injury of two young girls, had been meant for her, yet she was undeterred. “The only thing they could do to me was to kill me,” she later said in an interview, “and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.”45 To add insult to injury, W. D. Marlow, the owner of the plantation on which Hamer had worked, refused to fully compensate the Hamer family for their labor. Within weeks of Hamer’s ejection from the plantation, Marlow fired Pap and took the couple’s car, leaving them without a place to stay or a means of transportation.⁴⁶

Hamer’s confrontation with the police in 1962 paled in comparison with the Winona incident that took place a year later. In June 1963, Hamer was traveling with a group of other activists on the way to Mississippi after attending a voters’ workshop in South Carolina. Several of them got off a bus in Winona, Mississippi, to grab a bite to eat.⁴⁷ To their dismay, but not to their surprise, Hamer’s colleagues encountered resistance from the owners of Staley’s Café, who made it clear that Black people were not welcomed. Hamer initially remained on the bus but decided to exit when she noticed police officers shoving her friends into police cars. She later admitted that she had abandoned all reason when she saw her friends in distress. At the moment, all she wanted to do was help.⁴⁸ When a white officer grabbed her and started kicking her, fear rose within her—knowing full well that this encounter would not end well.⁴⁹ In her televised speech before the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Hamer spoke candidly about her violent interaction with the police. She explained how the Winona beating left her with kidney damage, a blood clot in her eye, and a worsened physical limp from childhood she would carry for the rest of her life. According to Hamer, “They beat me till my body was hard, till I couldn’t bend my fingers or get up when they told me to. That’s how I got this blood clot in my left eye—the sight’s nearly gone now. And my kidney was injured from the blows they gave me in the back.”⁵⁰

Unlike so many others, Hamer lived to tell her story. And she certainly told that story—over and over again to anyone who would listen. For Hamer, directly confronting racial and gendered inequalities was a key strategy to eradicate them. As she carefully explained in her 1965 Freedomways interview, exposing injustice was the only way to begin to dismantle systems of oppression:

The only thing I really feel is necessary is that the black people, not only in Mississippi, will have to actually upset this apple-cart. What I mean by that is, so many things are under the covers that will have to be swept out and shown to this whole world, not just to America. There is so much hypocrisy in America. This thing they say of “the land of the free and the home of the brave” is all on paper. It doesn’t mean anything to us. The only way we can make this thing a reality in America is to do all we can to destroy this system and bring this thing out to the light that has been under the cover all these years. That’s why I believe in Christianity because the Scriptures said: “The things that have been done in the dark will be known on the house tops.”51

Hamer’s remarks emphasized the power of public testimony in the context of confronting state-sanctioned violence.⁵² Oftentimes these acts of violence, especially when directed at Black women and girls, are hidden “under the covers”—a phrase that implies the act of secrecy but may also allude to sexual assault.

Hamer’s account and experiences capture the interconnection between racial and sexual violence. Although she did not often address it publicly, Hamer later recalled the sexual nature of the assault she experienced in the Winona jailhouse.⁵³ In 1970, seven years after the Winona incident, Hamer disclosed that she was sexually assaulted in the jailhouse—a fact that she had not previously shared in public settings. Though she had alluded to it, Hamer waited for several years before she would reveal the details of the sexual assault that took place on June 9, 1963.⁵⁴ Speaking before a packed audience at Chicago’s Loop College on May 27, 1970, Hamer recounted the police officers’ sexual assaults as they unleashed the brutal beating. “I had taken my hands and smoothed my clothes down,” she told the audience, “because I had never been exposed to five mens in one room in my life . . . [D]uring the time [of the beating], my dress worked up and I smoothed my dress down, one of the white men walked over and pulled my dress up.”⁵⁵ As the beating continued, Hamer explained that another officer in the room tried “to feel under my clothes.”56 The assaults Hamer endured during the Winona jailhouse beating reflected the long history of racial and sexual violence that victimized Black women’s lives.⁵⁷ Sexualized violence, much like lynchings and police intimidation, helped to maintain white supremacy in the Jim Crow South.

In another incident, shortly after Hamer had registered to vote, police officers barged into her home in the wee hours of the morning in February 1963. Hamer later recalled the officers’ complete disregard for her privacy as they searched through the home with flashlights, questioning Hamer, who was in her nightgown. “I was in the bed,” she later recalled, “[and] they didn’t know how they would find me as a woman, in my house. . . . They flashed their lights around, and they had the guns in their hand, and then they backed out . . . like, you know, we were some kind of criminals.”⁵⁸ The experience exemplified the persistent police harassment Hamer and her family endured. Yet it remained etched in her mind not only because of the personal intrusion but also because of the actors involved. In several speeches, including the one at Loop College in Chicago in 1970, Hamer disclosed that one of the officers present that morning was S. L. Milam, the brother of one of the men who lynched fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955.⁵⁹ His presence at her home that morning was meant to terrify Hamer, sending a warning that her efforts to expand voting rights in the state could result in the same fate. The intrusion served as a reminder that violence and the threat of violence were at the heart of white supremacy.

In Hamer’s view, public testimony was one powerful response to challenge this system. She believed that those who had the ability to tell their stories should tell them. Hamer’s frequent recounting of the painful Winona incident was an effort to shine light on the pervasive daily acts of racist violence Black people endured in the Jim Crow South. In telling the story about how the state sanctioned such violence, Hamer was able to raise public awareness and help others understand that Black women were not protected from physical assault on account of their gender.⁶⁰ Hamer’s narration of the painful and horrific experience with the police in Winona represented her attempt to sweep out some of the dirt that was hidden “under the covers” and show it to the world. By telling her story, repeatedly, Hamer hoped to empower others and to send the message that silence when confronting everyday degradation and violence was simply not an option.

“WHY HAD HE DONE THAT TO ME?”

Hamer’s refusal to be silent in the face of injustice extended to every aspect of her life, including another form of state-sanctioned violence she endured at the hands of white doctors in Mississippi. Similar to police officers, many white doctors functioned as agents of the state—maintaining white supremacy and utilizing violence to control Black people’s lives. Hamer’s painful experiences in 1961 offer a glimpse of the kinds of challenges impoverished Black women faced. Despite the financial struggles she and Pap underwent while living in the Jim Crow South, Hamer was determined to have a child. After two failed pregnancies during her forties, Hamer was hospitalized in 1961 to remove a noncancerous “small uterine tumor.”61 Without Hamer’s knowledge or consent, the white doctor conducting what was supposed to be a minor procedure decided to remove Hamer’s uterus, rendering the activist infertile. This physical act of violence had lasting emotional and physiological effects too. Hamer “lost not only her capacity to reproduce, but everything that it symbolized for women, especially Black women living in a desperately poor, rural environment and possessing nothing that was truly theirs, save faith and their own bodies.”⁶²

To add insult to injury, Hamer learned about the violent act through gossip on the plantation on which she worked. The wife of the plantation owner, Vera Marlow, was a relative of the doctor who had completed the procedure. When Hamer returned home to rest, she heard the rumblings of others on the plantation, suggesting that she had been sterilized while unconscious. In an act of spite, Marlow had begun circulating the story to the cook, who relayed the sensitive information to other workers. Hamer would therefore be one of the last people to learn about this act of shocking violence committed on her body.⁶³ Though she was angry to find out what had been done to her, Hamer had little recourse as a Black woman in the Jim Crow South. She managed to confront the doctor, asking him to explain his reasoning for doing the procedure and not informing her. “Why? Why had he done that to me? He didn’t have to say nothing—and he didn’t,” Hamer later explained.64

The doctor’s silence when confronted with Hamer’s anger spoke volumes. As a white doctor whose actions the state supported and protected, he owed Hamer no explanation—and he knew there was nothing she could do about it. As Hamer herself painfully admitted, she could not even seek out legal actions against the doctor if she hoped to live to see another day: “I would have been taking my hands and screwing tacks into my own casket.” Moreover, she pointed to the rigged legal system, which made it impossible for white lawyers and prosecutors to convict white people for their crimes: “Getting a white lawyer to go against a white doctor?”⁶⁵ As a resident of Mississippi, Hamer had witnessed high-profiles cases like Emmett Till’s in 1955 and watched in horror, along with the rest of the nation, as Till’s killers walked free and later confessed to the crime in Look magazine.⁶⁶ The Emmett Till case, along with countless others, provided the evidence Hamer needed to know: she would have to find some other way to challenge the forced sterilization. In the aftermath of the forced hysterectomy, Hamer and Pap adopted two local Black girls— first Dorothy Jean, then ten years later Vergie Ree, who had sustained serious burn injuries as a baby.⁶⁷ The Hamers showered both girls with love and affection, grateful that they were able to expand their family through adoption despite the painful experience Hamer had endured years earlier.

If she could not obtain justice for the act of medical violence, Hamer decided she would use her voice to shine light on the practice, which was all too common in Mississippi and beyond. Indeed, the act of medical abuse of power and the violence against Hamer’s body was something many poor Black women suffered through in the Jim Crow South. With few material resources, impoverished Black women and other women of color were most vulnerable to the exploitations of state agencies that worked to uphold racism and white supremacy.⁶⁸ The birth control movement of the late twentieth century was deeply tied to the work of white eugenicists who justified the sterilization of Black women. White eugenicists presumed that the “multiplication of the unfit posed a threat to the political stability of the nation.”⁶⁹ This practice took place across the South during the twentieth century. For example, between 1929 and 1974 in North Carolina, doctors sterilized 7,600 people. Out of those sterilized, 85 percent were women and girls and 40 percent were women of color—most of whom were African American.70 During the Jim Crow era, impoverished Black women in the Deep South were frequently subjected to hysterectomies or tubal ligations against their will and without their knowledge.⁷¹ In Sunflower County, where Hamer had been sterilized, at least 60 percent of the Black women experienced forced sterilizations following pregnancy.⁷² Deemed “unfit” to reproduce by white physicians and other state officials, Black women who entered hospitals for routine procedures ran the risk of being sterilized—and with little recourse to challenge the act.

Hamer was therefore one of many Black women who experienced the medical violence and violation of forced sterilization during this period.⁷³ Although few publicly discussed this deeply private and intimate trauma, Hamer was the first civil rights activist during the 1960s to openly address it.⁷⁴ In 1964, only three years after the painful incident, Hamer called attention to the racist and violent practice of forced sterilization at a conference on racism organized by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition of civil rights groups organizing in Mississippi at the time. Established in 1961, COFO was an umbrella organization that brought together activists in various statewide and national groups, including the SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).⁷⁵

Members of COFO had organized a hearing to address the social climate of Mississippi as part of an effort to prepare Northern activists planning to travel to the state during Freedom Summer. Held in Washington, DC, on June 8, 1964, the hearing brought together twenty-four speakers who delivered testimonies before a group of distinguished panelists, including Congressman William Fitts Ryan of New York; Harold Taylor, former president of Sarah Lawrence College; and Harvard professor and psychiatrist Robert Coles. After Hamer briefly recounted an exchange with a long-distance telephone operator—who confirmed that her phone calls were being monitored—Coles raised doubts about her account, noting that “no telephone operator ever talked to me like this.” “Well, it was the first time for me,” Hamer responded, “but it did happen.”76

Perhaps contemplating Coles’s background in the medical field, Hamer quickly pointed out that Black women’s experiences with forced sterilizations in Mississippi hospitals were yet another example of something that might seem unbelievable but that were in fact common practice. In a brief but poignant account, Hamer used the opportunity to illuminate the medical abuses and acts of violence Black women endured in local hospitals that were supposed to be spaces of healing and care:

One of the other things that happened in Sunflower County, the North Sunflower County Hospital, I would say about six out of the ten Negro women that go to the hospital are sterilized with the tubes tied. They are getting up a law that said if a woman has an illegitimate baby and then a second one, they could draw time for six months or a five-hundred-dollar fine. What they didn’t tell is that they are already doing these things, not only to single women but to married women.⁷⁷

Reminiscent of earlier Black women activists and intellectuals who harnessed the power of their voices to condemn racism and white supremacy, Hamer used the opportunity to call attention to the practice of forced sterilizations. She decried the local attempts in Mississippi to pass HB 180, a law that would limit women’s reproductive rights— and would almost certainly be used disproportionately against Black women. And drawing on her own observations, she centered the frequency of the practice, which had devastated the lives of countless Black women in the South. In 1965 alone, an estimated sixty Black women were forcefully sterilized at the hospital in Sunflower County immediately after giving birth.⁷⁸

What is also striking about Hamer’s recollection is how it exposed the hypocrisy of white doctors and revealed the limits of respectability politics.⁷⁹ By narrowing in on the fact that forced sterilizations were happening to married women and not solely single women, Hamer made it clear that even when Black women in the South operated within the bounds of white heteronormativity—in this case, becoming pregnant while married—they could not escape the pain and trauma of forced sterilizations. In the end, regardless of a Black woman’s marriage status or the specific circumstances surrounding her pregnancy, they were vulnerable to state-sanctioned violence at the hands of racist white doctors and complicit hospital workers who deemed impoverished Black women “unfit” for reproduction.

Those who supported forced sterilization devalued Black life, but they also hoped to profit from Black women’s suffering in whatever form it took. White medical professionals and staff stood to financially profit when completing forced sterilizations. By one estimate, Fannie Lou Hamer’s initial procedure to remove a small tumor would have grossed the hospital $200.80 Yet they could bill an estimated $800 for completing a forced sterilization. The financial incentive, combined with the racist beliefs that Black women were unsuitable for motherhood, fueled the unconscionable practice in the Mississippi Delta.⁸¹ And while the act of forced sterilizations was pervasive in the US South, it was not limited to the region. During the 1960s, Black women were subjected to the violence of forced sterilizations in hospitals across the nation, with cases being reported in cities such as Boston, New York, and San Francisco.⁸²

For Hamer, the issue of involuntary sterilization was as urgent as that of police brutality and other manifestations of state-sanctioned violence. All were acts of violence meted out on the bodies of Black people—and in this case, she called specific attention to the vulnerability of Black women. From Hamer’s perspective, these acts of violence needed to be directly confronted if Black people ever hoped their circumstances would change. This perspective led the activist to boldly address medical violence—despite the private and intimate nature of the issue. And her courage left a lasting mark. Indeed, Hamer’s work to bring attention to the problem of forced sterilization played a central role in dismantling Mississippi’s HB 180. The Mississippi Senate eventually dropped the bill, motivated in part by the public outcry fueled by Hamer’s testimony at the 1964 COFO hearing. Hamer’s remarks would be one of the first documented occasions when an activist addressed the topic publicly, and it would certainly not be the last. In 1969, for example, Hamer discussed the practice before members of a feminist committee discussing abortion in Seattle, Washington.⁸³ She shared her own painful personal experiences and denounced the common practice of forced sterilizations, which she and others often referred to as a “Mississippi appendectomy.”84

Holding fast to her mantra—“tell it like it is”—Hamer refused to sugarcoat the problems impoverished Black women were facing throughout the United States. She publicly foregrounded the physical, psychological, and emotional abuse Black women endured at the hands of white doctors and police officers. She also highlighted how the state fully endorsed and protected these violent acts. In bringing these issues to the center of civil rights concerns, Hamer sent a powerful message to activists—then and now—about the enduring power of public testimony to transform American society. Much like earlier activists Frederick Douglass, who boldly confronted the sin of slavery, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who risked her life to confront and condemn lynchings, Fannie Lou Hamer used her voice to shed light on the injustices Black people endured.⁸⁵ Through her courageous words, she revealed how exposing the acts of violence that often happen in the dark or outside the purview of those who choose not to see is a crucial part of the struggle to dismantle racism and gendered violence. “The wrongs and the sickness of this country have been swept under the rug,” she told audience members at Harvard University in 1968, “but I’ve come out from under the rug, and I’m going to tell it like it is.”⁸⁶