NOTES
INTRODUCTION: A LONG FIGHT A HEAD
1. Fannie Lou Hamer, “‘The Only Thing We Can Do Is Work Together,’ Speech Delivered at a Chapter Meeting of the National Council of Negro Women in Mississippi, 1967,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is, ed. Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 73.
2. SNCC Legacy Project, “Our Mrs. Hamer,” Civil Rights Movement, Archive, Remembrances of Mrs. Hamer on Her 100th Birthday, October 2017, https://www.crmvet.org/mem/hamer.htm.
3. Annette Samuels, “Fannie Lou Hamer,” New York Amsterdam News, February 12, 1977.
4. John Egerton, A Mind to Stay Here: Profiles from the South (London: MacMillan, 1970), 98.
5. Samuels, “Fannie Lou Hamer.”
6. Jerry DeMuth, “Fannie Lou Hamer: Tired of Being Sick and Tired,” The Nation, June 1, 1964, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/fannie-lou-hamer-tired-being-sick-and-tired.
7. Lynne Olson, Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 255.
8. Olson, Freedom’s Daughters, 255.
9. Fannie Lou Hamer, “‘I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired,’ Speech Delivered with Malcolm X at the Williams Institutional CME Church, Harlem, New York, December 20, 1964,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 62.
10. Keisha N. Blain, “‘God Is Not Going to Put It in Your Lap.’ What Made Fannie Lou Hamer’s Message on Civil Rights So Radical—And So Enduring,” Time, October 4, 2019, https://time.com/5692775/fannie-lou-hamer.
11. Heather Booth, “As Remembered by Heather Booth,” Civil Rights Movement, Archive, Remembrances of Mrs. Hamer on Her 100th Birthday, 2017, https://www.crmvet.org/mem/hamer.htm.
12. Keisha N. Blain, “Fannie Lou Hamer’s Dauntless Fight for Black Americans’ Right to Vote,” Smithsonian Magazine, August 20, 2020, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fannie-lou-hamers-dauntless-fight-for-black-americans-right-vote-180975610.
13. Fannie Lou Hamer, “‘Is It Too Late?,’ Speech Delivered at Tougaloo College, Tougaloo, Mississippi, Summer, 1971,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 133.
14. “Ruleville, Mississippi (MS) Poverty Rate Data: Information about Poor and Low-Income Residents,” see City Data, Poverty Rate Data (2019), City-Data.com, http://www.city-data.com/poverty/poverty-Ruleville-Mississippi.html, accessed December 18, 2020.
15. John A. Tures and Seth Golden, “No African American Has Won Statewide office in Mississippi in 129 Years—Here’s Why,” The Conversation, June 17, 2019, https://theconversation.com/no-african-american-has-won-statewide-office-in-mississippi-in-129-years-heres-why-118319.
16. Hamer, “‘The Only Thing We Can Do Is Work Together,’” 73.
17. Fannie Lou Hamer, “‘Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either,’ Speech Delivered at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, January 1971,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 121.
18. Key works on Hamer include Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Earnest N. Bracey, Fannie Lou Hamer: The Life of a Civil Rights Icon (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011); Maegan Parker Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir an Army: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rhetoric of the Black Freedom Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014); Kay Wright Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, 2nd ed. (1993; reprint, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007); Monica M. White, Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Maegan Parker Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer: America’s Freedom Fighting Woman (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020); Karen D. Crozier, Fannie Lou Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology: Racial and Environmental Justice Concerns (Boston: Brill, 2020); Kate Clifford Larson, Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
CHAPTER ONE: LET YOUR LIGHT SHINE
1. Fannie Lou Hamer, “‘I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,’ Speech Delivered at a Freedom Vote Rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, Fall 1963,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 6.
2. Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner, eds., Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
3. Crozier, Fannie Lou Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology, 22.
4. Fannie Lou Hamer, interview by Neil McMillen, Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage, University of Southern Mississippi, April 14, 1972, and January 25, 1973, transcript, 4.
5. Hamer, interview by McMillen, 4.
6. Hamer, “‘I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,’” 5.
7. Hamer, “‘I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,’” 6.
8. Fannie Lou Hamer, “It’s in Your Hands,” in Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, ed. Gerda Lerner (1972; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 609. It is significant to note that there is some discrepancy in the county of Hamer’s birth. Though she often indicated she was born in Montgomery County, she was actually born in Tomnolen, Mississippi, which is located in Webster County.
9. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 12; Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 1.
10. Fannie Lou Hamer, “Autobiography of Fannie Lou Hamer,” July 1976, 1–6, Box 1, Folder 1, Biographical Information, Fannie Lou Hamer Collection, Department of Archives and Special Collections, J. D. Williams Library, University of Mississippi.
11. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 12.
12. Eugene Dattel, Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power (Lanham, MD: Ivan R. Dee, 2009); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Penguin Books, 2014); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
13. Hamer, interview by McMillen, 3.
14. DeMuth, “Fannie Lou Hamer: Tired of Being Sick and Tired.”
15. James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
16. Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979).
17. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 21.
18. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 5.
19. Hamer, interview by McMillen, 3.
20. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 20; Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 13.
21. Hamer, interview by McMillen, 3.
22. Jack O’Dell, “Life in Mississippi: An Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer,” Freedomways 5, no. 2 (Spring 1965): 231–32.
23. Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 47–50.
24. Rae-Ellen W. Kavey and Allison B. Kavey, Viral Pandemics: From Smallpox to Ebola and COVID-19 (New York: Routledge, 2020).
25. Although Hamer generally referred to her bout with polio as the source of her limp, it is also likely that the limp was the result of a childhood accident in which her brother dropped her in the bathtub. See Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 27; Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 10.
26. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 2.
27. Hamer, “Appendix: Interview with Vergie Hamer Faulkner by Maegan Parker Brooks, July 14 and July 17, 2009,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 202.
28. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 24–25.
29. Egerton, A Mind to Stay Here, 96.
30. Egerton, A Mind to Stay Here, 96.
31. Charles Marsh, God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 10–48.
32. Crozier, Fannie Lou Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology, 4.
33. Crozier, Fannie Lou Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology, 5.
34. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 14; Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 7.
35. Laura Ratliff, interview by Chana Kai Lee, December 21, 1985, Ruleville, Mississippi, in Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 7.
36. Cathy Aldridge, “What Makes Fannie Lou Hamer Run?,” New York Amsterdam News, September 13, 1969; Fannie Lou Hamer, “On Being a Sharecropper,” Songs My Mother Taught Me, recorded 1963, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 2015, CD and MP3.
37. Aldridge, “What Makes Fannie Lou Hamer Run?”
38. Hamer, “‘Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either,’” 123.
39. Hamer, “Autobiography of Fannie Lou Hamer,” 1–6.
40. Fannie Lou Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges: An Autobiography (Jackson, Mississippi: KIPCO, 1967), 6.
41. Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges, 6.
42. Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges, 6.
43. Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges, 6.
44. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 25.
45. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 25.
46. Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges, 9.
47. Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges, 9.
48. June Jordan, Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1972). Jordan based the book on interviews she conducted with Hamer during the early 1970s.
49. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 17; Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 11.
50. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 17.
51. Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges, 11.
52. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 17.
53. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 26.
54. Author unknown, “Biography: Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer,” Box 3, Folder 4, “Biographical Information,” Fannie Lou Hamer Papers, Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, New Orleans.
55. Fannie Lou Hamer’s grandniece Monica Land was the first to discover this information in local records. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 26. Census records appear to support Land’s findings. US Census Bureau, “Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Sunflower County, Mississippi,” Enumeration District: 67–52, Census Place: Sunflower, Mississippi; Roll: m-t0627–02067; Page: 10A; “Enumeration District: 67–52,” Ancestry.com; National Archives in St. Louis, Missouri, “WWII Draft Registration Cards for Mississippi, October 16, 1940– March 31, 1947,” St. Louis, Records of the Selective Service System, 147, Box 200, Ancestry.com.
56. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 26.
57. Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Victoria Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2001); and Cheryl Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
58. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 26.
59. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 26.
60. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 26; Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 18.
61. Paule Marshall, “Fannie Lou Hamer: Hunger Has No Color Line,” Vogue, June 1, 1970, 192.
62. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 20.
63. Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges, 11. It is significant to note that Hamer delivered her autobiography orally in a series of recordings made by Julius Lester and Maria Verela. For more context on the process of producing the autobiography, see the SNCC Digital Gateway: https://snccdigital.org/our-voices/learning-from-experience/part-5.
64. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 29.
65. Hamer, “Autobiography of Fannie Lou Hamer,” 1–6.
66. Fannie Lou Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’ Speech Delivered at Loop College, Chicago, Illinois, May 27, 1970,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 105.
67. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 106.
68. Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 4–5.
69. Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement.
70. Carson, In Struggle.
71. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 33.
72. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 36.
73. Hamer, interview by McMillen, 4.
74. Thomas E. Patterson, The Vanishing Voter: Public Involvement in an Age of Uncertainty (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2002), 5.
75. Fannie Lou Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’ Speech Delivered at a Mass Meeting in Indianola, Mississippi, September 1964,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 50.
76. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 107.
77. Megan Landauer and Jonathan Wolman, “Fannie Lou Hamer . . . Forcing a New Political Reality,” Daily Cardinal, October 8, 1971, Box 3, Folder 13, “News Clippings,” Fannie Lou Hamer Papers, Amistad Research Center.
78. SNCC Legacy Project, “Our Mrs. Hamer.”
79. Bracey, Fannie Lou Hamer, 159.
80. Martha S. Jones, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (New York: Basic Books, 2020).
81. Fannie Lou Hamer, “Federal Trial Testimony, Oxford, Mississippi, December 2, 1963,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 9.
82. Christopher J. Lebron, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2017), 27–28.
83. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “How Enfranchisement Stops Lynchings,” Original Rights Magazine 1, no. 4 (June 1910): 42–53.
84. Lebron, The Making of Black Lives Matter, 28.
85. Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 55.
86. Fannie Lou Hamer, “‘Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free,’ Speech Delivered at the Founding of the National Women’s Political Caucus, Washington, D.C., July 10, 1971,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 136.
87. Hamer, “‘I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired,’” 62.
88. Hamer, “‘I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired,’” 63.
89. The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer: Never Turn Back, dir. Bill Buckley (1983; Rediscovery Productions, 2011).
90. Hamer, “‘Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free,’” 136.
91. Fannie Lou Hamer, “‘What Have We to Hail?,’ Speech Delivered in Kentucky, Summer 1968,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 82.
92. Hamer, “‘What Have We to Hail?,’” 82.
93. Michael J. Pfeifer, ed., Global Lynching and Collective Violence: Volume 2: The Americas and Europe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017).
94. Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 229–30.
95. The specific location of Till’s murder is unknown. However, it is likely that it took place in Sunflower County. Devery Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder that Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), 94; and Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 64, 123–24.
96. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till, 5–7.
97. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till, 51–55.
98. Anderson, Emmett Till, 276–77; Chris Myers Asch, The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: New Press, 2008), 167; “What Happened to the Key Figures in the Emmett Till Case?,” Clarion Ledger, September 13, 2018, https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2018/09/13/what-happened-key-figures-emmett-till-case/1275626002.
99. Fannie Lou Hamer, “Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Elections of the Committee on House Administration, House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., September 13, 1965,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 68.
100. Hamer, “‘Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free,’” 136.
101. The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer: Never Turn Back, dir. Bill Buckley.
102. Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 52.
103. Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 52.
CHAPTER TWO: TELL IT LIKE IT IS
1. Hamer, “‘I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired,’” 62.
2. Ryan Grim, “The Transcript of Sandra Bland’s Arrest Is as Revealing as the Video,” Huffington Post, July 22, 2015, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sandra-bland-arrest-transcript_n_55b03a88e4b0a9b94853b1f1.
3. Abby Ohlheiser and Abby Phillip, “‘I Will Light You Up!’ Texas officer Threatened Sandra Bland with Taser During Traffic Stop,” Washington Post, July 22, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/07/21/much-too-early-to-call-jail-cell-hanging-death-of-sandra-bland-suicide-da-says. In addition to the officer’s dashcam video, the encounter was recorded on Bland’s cell phone. However, it would take several years for the Waller County police to release the cell phone recording of Bland’s arrest. At the time of the incident, the public was only made aware of the recording on the officer’s dashcam.
4. Cristina Maza, “Did Bland Commit Suicide? ‘Too Many Questions,’ Texas officials Say,” Christian Science Monitor, July 21, 2015, https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2015/0721/Did-Sandr a-Bland-commit-suicide-Too-many-questions-Texas-officials-say. Also, see the documentary Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland, dir. Kate Davis and David Heilbroner (HBO Documentary Films, 2018).
5. Amina Khan, “Getting Killed by Police Is a Leading Cause of Death for Young Black Men in America,” Los Angeles Times, August 15, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2019–08–15/police-shootings-are-a-leading-cause-of-death-for-black-men.
6. Andrea J. Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017). The #SayHerName movement, launched in 2015, sheds light on Black women’s vulnerability to state-sanctioned violence.
7. Mari Haywood, “Philadelphia LGBT Community Asks What—Or Who—Killed Transgender Woman Nizah Morris 10 Years Ago,” GLAAD, April 23, 2013, https://www.glaad.org/blog/philadelphia-lgbt-community-asks-what-or-who-killed-transgender-woman-nizah-morris-10-years-ago.
8. Matthew Speiser, “An 18-Year-Old Woman Was Found Dead in Her Jail Cell Last Week,” Business Insider, July 22, 2015, https://www.businessinsider.com/kindra-chapman-died-in-police-custody-2015–7.
9. Aja Romano, “A Transgender Woman Was Shot in Baltimore and No One Is Talking About It,” Daily Dot, March 1, 2020, https://www.dailydot.com/irl/transgender-sex-worker-mya-hall-death-nsa.
10. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Andrea Ritchie, et al., Say Her Name Report: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women (African American Policy Forum, Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, July 2015), https://aapf.org/sayhernamereport.
11. Aaron E. Carroll, “Doctors and Racial Bias: Still a Long Way to Go,” New York Times, February 25, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/upshot/doctors-and-racial-bias-still-a-long-way-to-go.html.
12. Kidada Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 6.
13. On Hamer’s early life, see Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 1–22.
14. Hamer’s recollection of this event is filled with some inaccuracies. Although she notes that Pullum was lynched in 1925, he was actually lynched two years prior—on December 14, 1923. Hamer biographer Maegan Parker Brooks also points out that Hamer was most likely not a witness to this lynching but would have become aware of this story later in life. The story of Pullum’s lynching circulated widely in the region. See Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 18–19.
15. Hamer incorrectly recalled Joe’s last name as “Pulliam” in oral histories.
16. O’Dell, “Life in Mississippi: An Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer,” 233. On O’Dell, see Jack O’Dell and Nikhil Pal Singh, Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
17. O’Dell, “Life in Mississippi: An Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer,” 233.
18. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long.
19. McMillen, Dark Journey, 229. Of this number, twenty-three of the victims were white men and one was a white woman.
20. McMillen, Dark Journey, 229.
21. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (Chicago: Donohue & Henneberry Printers, 1895).
22. Paula Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions; Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Amistad, 2008); Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010); and Michelle Duster, Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells (Miami: Atria/One Signal, 2021).
23. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda Duster, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 267; and Kristina DuRocher, Ida B. Wells: Social Activist and Reformer (New York: Routledge, 2016), 279.
24. Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir an Army, 19.
25. O’Dell, “Life in Mississippi: An Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer,” 233.
26. O’Dell, “Life in Mississippi: An Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer,” 234.
27. DeMuth, “Fannie Lou Hamer: Tired of Being Sick and Tired.”
28. DeMuth, “Fannie Lou Hamer: Tired of Being Sick and Tired.”
29. Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir an Army, 36–37.
30. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom.
31. Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir an Army, 37.
32. Hamer, interview by McMillen, 6.
33. Fannie Lou Hamer, “‘We’re on Our Way,’ Speech Delivered at a Mass Meeting in Indianola, Mississippi, September 1964,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 47.
34. Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir an Army, 38.
35. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 108.
36. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 108.
37. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 108.
38. Hamer, “‘I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired,’” 59.
39. Hamer, “‘I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired,’” 59.
40. Hamer, interview by McMillen, 5.
41. Fannie Lou Hamer, “‘To Tell It Like It Is,’ Speech Delivered at the Holmes County, Mississippi, Freedom Democratic Party Municipal Elections Rally in Lexington, Mississippi, May 8, 1969,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 90–91.
42. Bridgett A. King, Voting Rights in America: Primary Documents in Context (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2019), 137.
43. “Fannie Lou Was ‘Tired’ of Racial Discrimination,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 26, 1977.
44. Fannie Lou Hamer, “Testimony Before a Select Panel on Mississippi and Civil Rights, Washington, D.C., June 8, 1964,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 37.
45. Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges, 12.
46. Egerton, A Mind to Stay Here, 98.
47. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 49–52.
48. Bracey, Fannie Lou Hamer, 85.
49. Bracey, Fannie Lou Hamer, 85.
50. Phyl Garland, “Builders of a New South: Negro Heroines of Dixie Play Major Role in Challenging Racist Traditions,” Ebony, August 1966, 30.
51. O’Dell, “Life in Mississippi: An Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer,” 234.
52. Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010); Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me.
53. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 58–59. For an in-depth examination of Hamer’s public accounts of the Winona beating, see Davis W. Houck, “Fannie Lou Hamer on Winona: Memory, Trauma, and Recovery,” in Richard J. Jensen, ed., Social Controversy and Public Address in the 1960s and Early 1970s: A Rhetorical History of the United States, Vol. IX (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 2017), 1–38.
54. Houck, “Fannie Lou Hamer on Winona: Memory, Trauma, and Recovery,” 27.
55. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 113.
56. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 113.
57. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street.
58. Fannie Lou Hamer, interview by Robert Wright, August 9, 1968, Oral History Collection, Civil Rights Documentation Project, Moorland–Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC, quoted in Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 40.
59. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 111.
60. Bracey, Fannie Lou Hamer, 88.
61. Bracey, Fannie Lou Hamer, 41.
62. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 81.
63. Washington, Medical Apartheid, 189.
64. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 30.
65. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 30.
66. William Bradford Huie, “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” Look, January 24, 1956. For an examination of this confession, its impact, and an investigation into the facts of Till’s lynching, see Anderson, Emmett Till; Dave Tell, “Confession and Race: Civil Rights, Segregation, and the Murder of Emmett Till,” in Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2015), 63–90.
67. Bracey, Fannie Lou Hamer, 42; Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 27.
68. Thomas W. Volscho, “Sterilization Racism and Pan-Ethnic Disparities of the Past Decade: The Continued Encroachment on Reproductive Rights,” Wicazo Sa Review 25 (Spring 2010): 17–31.
69. Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1998), 72–73.
70. Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 8; Kim Severson, “Thousands Sterilized, A State Weighs Restitution,” New York Times, December 9, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/us/redress-weighed-for-forced-sterilizations-in-north-carolina.html.
71. Roberts, Killing the Black Body; Jennifer Nelson, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2003); McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street. On medical activism in the Black community, see Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
72. Washington, Medical Apartheid, 205.
73. Kelly Fulkerson Dikuua, “[Un]informed Consent: Eugenics, Forced Sterilization and Medical Violence in the Jim Crow United States and Apartheid Southern Africa” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2019).
74. Rebecca M. Kluchin, Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950–1980 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 177.
75. John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 118–19.
76. Hamer, “Testimony Before a Select Panel on Mississippi and Civil Rights,” 41.
77. Hamer, “Testimony Before a Select Panel on Mississippi and Civil Rights,” 41.
78. Anne Overbeck, At the Heart of It All?: Discourses on the Reproductive Rights of African American Women in the 20th Century (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019), 157.
79. Brooks-Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent.
80. Overbeck, At the Heart of It All?, 157.
81. Overbeck, At the Heart of It All?, 157.
82. Overbeck, At the Heart of It All?, 157.
83. Laura Woliver, The Political Geographies of Pregnancy (Chicago: University of Illinois, 2002), 86.
84. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 192.
85. Lebron, The Making of Black Lives Matter, 1–34.
86. “Fannie Lou ‘Tells It Like It Is,’” Harvard Crimson, November 23, 1968.
CHAPTER THREE: WE WANT LEADERS
1. Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 54.
2. Keisha N. Blain, “A Short History of Black Women and Police Violence,” The Conversation, June 12, 2020, https://theconversation.com/a-short-history-of-black-women-and-police-violence-139937.
3. Errin Haines, “Family Seeks Answers in Fatal Police Shooting of Louisville Woman in Her Apartment,” Washington Post, May 11, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/11/family-seeks-answers-fatal-police-shooting-louisville-woman-her-apartment.
4. Taryn Finley, “#BirthdayForBreonna Initiative Marks What Would’ve Been Breonna Taylor’s 27th Birthday,” Huffington Post, June 5, 2020, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/breonna-taylor-birthday-remembrance_n_5ed953cfc5b67abc999475ff.
5. Alisha Haridasaani Gupta, “Birthday for Breonna: A Campaign to Mourn and Honor,” New York Times, June 6, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/birthday-breonna-taylor-black-lives-matter.html.
6. Mary Retta, “Cate Young on Breonna Taylor’s Birthday Memorial and the Fight For Justice for Black Women,” Teen Vouge, June 5, 2020, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/cate-young-breonna-taylors-birthday-memorial.
7. Finley, “#BirthdayForBreonna Initiative Marks What Would’ve Been Breonna Taylor’s 27th Birthday.”
8. Gupta, “Birthday for Breonna: A Campaign to Mourn and Honor.”
9. Gupta, “Birthday for Breonna: A Campaign to Mourn and Honor.”
10. Gupta, “Birthday for Breonna: A Campaign to Mourn and Honor”; Bianca Austin, “Justice for Breonna Taylor (official) (#BREEWAYY),” GoFundMe, August 4, 2020, https://www.gofundme.com/f/9v4q2-justice-for-breonna-taylor.
11. Bianca Austin, “Justice for Breonna Taylor (official) (#BREEWAYY).”
12. Jason Slotkin, “Louisville’s Police Department Fires an officer Involved in Breonna Taylor’s Death,” NPR, June 19, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/19/880864286/ louisvilles-police-department-fires-an-officer-involved-in-breonna-taylor-s-deat. In January 2021, the department terminated the two other officers involved in the shooting. See Dylan Lovan, “2 Detectives Involved in Breonna Taylor’s Death Are Fired,” Associated Press, January 6, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/breonna-taylor-cops-fired-910c87438ebc09e74eac8a4f4678fb63; Marisa Iati, “Louisville Police Move to Fire Two More officers Involved in Raid That Killed Breonna Taylor,” Washington Post, December 29, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/12/29/breonna-taylor-officers-fire.
13. Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 55.
14. As a participant in the Highlander Folk School, an interracial leadership training school in Monteagle, Tennessee, Hamer was part of a network of dynamic Black women leaders in the civil rights movement, including Diane Nash, Septima Clark, and Rosa Parks. On Highlander, see David P. Levine, “The Birth of the Citizenship Schools: Entwining the Struggles for Literacy and Freedom,” History of Education Quarterly 44, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 388–414.
15. Hamer, interview by McMillen, 30.
16. Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Struggle.
17. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom.
18. Wesley Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); and Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964; Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2017).
19. Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, 245.
20. Ella Baker, “Bigger than a Hamburger,” Southern Patriot 18 (June 1960).
21. Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, 6, 239.
22. Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, 300.
23. Jacqueline A. Rouse, “Examination of Black Female Grass Roots Leaders in Mississippi During the 1960s: Annie Devine, Fannie Lou Hamer and Annie Rankin,” Negro History Bulletin 63, no. ¼ (January– December 2000): 23–30; Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
24. Fannie Lou Hamer, interview by Anne and Howard Romaine, Anne Romaine Interviews, 1966–1967, November 1966, Ruleville, Mississippi, transcript, 2, Archives Main Stacks, SC 1069, Folder 1, WIHVR2050-A, Freedom Summer Digital Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll2/id/13726.
25. Hamer, interview by Anne and Howard Romaine, 2.
26. SNCC Legacy Project, “Our Mrs. Hamer.”
27. Hamer, interview by Anne and Howard Romaine, 1–2.
28. Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, 304; Dittmer, Local People, 108.
29. Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart, 196.
30. Hamer, interview by Anne and Howard Romaine, 9.
31. Hamer, interview by Anne and Howard Romaine, 9.
32. Fannie Lou Hamer, “Testimony Before the Democratic Reform Committee, Jackson, Mississippi, May 22, 1969,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 97.
33. Hamer, “‘I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired,’” 62.
34. “Fannie Hamer Mourned,” Los Angeles Sentinel, March 24, 1977.
35. Fannie Lou Hamer, “‘The Only Thing We Can Do Is to Work Together,’ Speech Delivered at a Chapter Meeting of the National Council of Negro Women in Mississippi, 1967,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 73.
36. Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 54.
37. Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 49.
38. Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 55.
39. Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 56.
40. Hamer, “‘To Tell It Like It Is,’” 93.
41. Hamer, “It’s in Your Hands,” 613.
42. Aldridge, “What Makes Fannie Lou Hamer Run?”
43. Aldridge, “What Makes Fannie Lou Hamer Run?” Hamer discusses the incident with Wilkins in her 1966 interview with Anne and Howard Romaine. See Hamer, interview by Anne and Howard Romaine, 5.
44. On Parks, see Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013), 234; on Richardson, see Joseph Fitzgerald, The Struggle Is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2019); on Baker, see Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement.
45. Fannie Lou Hamer, “‘If the Name of the Game Is Survive, Survive,’ Speech Delivered in Ruleville, Mississippi, September 27, 1971,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 143.
46. Hamer, “‘What Have We to Hail?,’” 83.
47. Howard Allen, “Prep for ‘Long Hot Summer’: 300 College Students Train for ‘Operation Mississippi,’” Call and Post (Cleveland), June 27, 1964.
48. Hamer, “‘We Haven’t Arrived Yet,’ Presentation and Responses to Questions at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, January 29, 1976,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 184.
49. Hamer, “‘If the Name of the Game Is Survive, Survive,’” 142.
50. Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 3.
51. Hamer, “‘If the Name of the Game Is Survive, Survive,’” 143.
52. Hamer, “‘If the Name of the Game Is Survive, Survive,’” 143. Emphasis in the original.
53. Hamer, interview by Anne and Howard Romaine, 2.
54. Brooks and Houck, eds., The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 3.
55. William H. Lawson, No Small Thing: The 1963 Mississippi Freedom Vote (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018).
56. Vicki Crawford, “African American Women in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party,” in Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement, eds. Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 123.
57. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 105; Crawford, “African American Women in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party,” 121–38.
58. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 105.
59. “The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; Considerations Underlying the Development of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party,” Baker—Ella Baker Papers, 1959–1965, Archives Main Stacks, SC 628, WIHVB490-A, Freedom Summer Digital Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll2/id/18091.
60. “The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; Considerations Underlying the Development of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party,” Ella Baker Papers, 1959–1965, 2.
61. Hamer, “‘What Have We to Hail?,’” 77.
62. Hamer, “‘To Tell It Like It Is,’” 89.
63. Hamer, interview by Anne and Howard Romaine, 5.
64. Lisa Anderson Todd, For a Voice and the Vote: My Journey with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 241.
65. Hamer, “‘What Have We to Hail?,’” 77.
66. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 121–22, 127–30. It is significant to note that they wanted the two seats to be occupied by Aaron Henry, an African American activist, and Rev. Ed King, a white minister, to show an “integrated” compromise.
67. Hamer, interview by McMillen, 15.
68. “CORE Says: ‘Fight Fire with Fire . . . ’: New Era In: Non-Violent Tactics . . .,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, July 9, 1966.
69. Morgan Ginther, “The Mississippi Delegation Debate at the 1964 Democratic National Convention: An Interview with Former Vice President Walter Mondale,” Southern Cultures 20, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 108.
70. Hamer, interview by Anne and Howard Romaine, 23.
71. Hamer, “‘What Have We to Hail?,’” 78.
72. Hamer, interview by Anne and Howard Romaine, 8.
73. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 87–90; Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 128–129.
74. Hamer, interview by Anne and Howard Romaine, 10.
75. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 125.
76. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 91–92.
77. Fannie Lou Hamer, interview by Robert Wright, August 9, 1968, Oral History Collection, Civil Rights Documentation Project, Moorland–Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC, quoted in Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 98.
78. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 84.
79. Hamer, interview by Anne and Howard Romaine, 11.
80. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 92.
81. Hamer, interview by Anne and Howard Romaine, 7–8.
82. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 129–30.
83. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 32.
84. Hamer, interview by Anne and Howard Romaine, 12.
85. Ginther, “The Mississippi Delegation Debate at the 1964 Democratic National Convention,” 111.
86. Jackie Robinson, “Tribute to Mississippi Negroes,” Jackie Robinson Says, Tri-State Defender, September 12, 1964.
87. Aram Goudsouzian, Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015); James Meredith, Three Years in Mississippi (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019).
88. “Mississippi Story: The Word Is Fear Pressures in the Movement Laws and Rights,” New York Times, June 12, 1966, https://www.nytimes.com/1966/06/12/archives/mississippi-story-the-word-is-fear-pressures-in-the-movement-laws.html.
89. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 113.
90. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 177.
91. The 1966 Civil Rights Bill was ultimately defeated in the US Senate.
92. Goudsouzian, Down to the Crossroads, 24.
93. Akinyele Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2014); and Charles E. Cobb Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
94. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 115.
95. Peniel E. Joseph, Stokely: A Life (New York: Basic Civitas, 2014), 99, 114–15.
96. Hamer, “‘If the Name of the Game Is Survive, Survive,’” 142.
97. Carlotta Washington, “Freedom Fighter Still Seeking Human Right,” Call and Post, February 28, 1970.
98. Robert Moses, interview by Blackside, Inc., Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954–1965), May 19, 1986, Henry Hampton Collection, Film and Media Archive, Washington University Libraries, St. Louis, http://repository.wustl.edu/concern/file_sets/j3860870r.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE SPECIAL PLIGHT OF BLACK WOMEN
1. Hamer, “It’s in Your Hands,” 613.
2. Megan Thee Stallion, “Why I Speak Up for Black Women,” New York Times, October 13, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/opinion/megan-thee-stallion-black-women.html.
3. Bethonie Butler, “Megan Thee Stallion Was Mocked After Being Shot. As She Reclaims the Narrative, Black Women Recognize Her Pain,” Washington Post, July 31, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/07/31/megan-thee-stallion.
4. Julia Craven, “Violence Against Black Women Is Not a Meme,” Slate, July 30, 2020, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/memes-of-megan-thee-stallion-shooting.html.
5. Stallion, “Why I Speak Up for Black Women.”
6. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, ed., Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New York: New Press, 1995); Patricia Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000); Stephen Ward, “Third World Women’s Alliance: Black Feminist Radicalism and Black Power Politics,” in The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era, ed. Peniel E. Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006), 119–44.
7. Stallion, “Why I Speak Up for Black Women.”
8. Ashley D. Farmer, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 71.
9. Toni Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Lib,” New York Times, August 22, 1971.
10. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 273.
11. Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 24.
12. Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 55.
13. Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 55.
14. Hamer, “Testimony Before the Democratic Reform Committee, Jackson, Mississippi, May 22, 1969,” 96.
15. Kali Nicole Gross, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
16. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 232–33.
17. Wes Watkins, interview by Kay Wright Mills, Washington, DC, December 26, 1989, quoted in This Little Light of Mine, 233.
18. For information on Claudia Jones and Louise Thompson Patterson, see McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom.
19. Hamer, “It’s in Your Hands,” 613.
20. Martha S. Jones, The Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (New York: Basic Books, 2020).
21. Franklynn Peterson, “Fannie Lou Hamer: Mother of ‘Black Women’s Lib,’” Sepia 21 (December 1972): 16.
22. Bonnie J. Morris and D-M Withers, The Feminist Revolution: The Struggle for Women’s Liberation (London: Virago, 2018); Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, eds., Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Kathleen C. Berkeley, The Women’s Liberation Movement in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999); and Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire.
23. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963). Also see bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984).
24. Hamer, “‘Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free,’” 136.
25. Hamer, “It’s in Your Hands,” 612.
26. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 107.
27. Aldridge, “What Makes Fannie Lou Hamer Run?”
28. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 270; Bracey, Fannie Lou Hamer, 149–52.
29. On Victorian ideals, see Martha Vicinus, ed., Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972); Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Women’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); Glenna Matthews, Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in American Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1987).
30. Annette Samuels, “Fannie Lou Hamer,” People Profiled, New York Amsterdam News, February 12, 1977. The article quotes from an earlier interview Hamer gave to the newspaper in the summer of 1976.
31. Samuels, “Fannie Lou Hamer.”
32. Hamer, “‘Is It Too Late?,’” 133.
33. Hamer, “‘Is It Too Late?,’” 133.
34. Blain, Set the World on Fire, 85.
35. Shirley Chisholm, telephone interview by Kay Wright Mills, Williamsville, NY, January 19, 1990, quoted in Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 277.
36. Fannie Lou Hamer, “Fannie Lou Hamer Speaks Out,” Essence 2, no. 6 (October 1971): 75.
37. Hamer, “Fannie Lou Hamer Speaks Out,” 75.
38. Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, 226.
39. “Nixon Intervenes: Senseless Killing Stirs Anger of Mississippi Blacks,” Call and Post, June 5, 1971.
40. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 282–84.
41. “Same Old Thing, Same Old Place; Murdered Girl Buried in Miss.,” Jet, June 17, 1971, 12.
42. “Another Miss. Killing Brings Blacks Together,” New York Amsterdam News, June 5, 1971.
43. “3 Arrested in Slaying of Black Girl,” Bay State Banner (Boston), June 3, 1971.
44. “Nixon Intervenes: Senseless Killing Stirs Anger of Mississippi Blacks.”
45. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 169–70.
46. Hamer, “‘Is It Too Late?,’” 133.
47. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 282–83.
48. “Same Old Thing, Same Old Place; Murdered Girl Buried in Miss.,” 14; Jo Etha Collier Building Fund to Bank of Ruleville, September 13, 1971, Box 1, Folder 2, “Correspondence, 1968, 1971 October,” Fannie Lou Hamer Papers, Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, New Orleans.
49. “Same Old Thing, Same Old Place; Murdered Girl Buried in Miss.,” 14.
50. Jo Etha Collier Building Fund to Bank of Ruleville, September 13, 1971, Box 1, Folder 2; David Bond to Hamer, September 3, 1971, Box 1, Folder 2, “Correspondence, 1968, 1971 October”; Lotta A. Hempel to Hamer, July 13, 1971, Box 10, Folder 3, “Correspondence, 1971”; Hamer to Robert S. Brown, August 23, 1971, Box 10, Folder 3, “Correspondence, 1971,” Fannie Lou Hamer Papers, Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, New Orleans.
51. Check Made Out to Gussie Mae Love, November 1, 1972, Box 14, Folder 14, “Cancelled Checks, 1972”; Farm Operation Account, Freedom Farm Corporation (see “other expense” for Gussie Mae Love, Box 11, Folder 3, “Expense Statements”); David Bond to Hamer, September 3, 1971, Box 1, Folder 2, “Correspondence, 1968, 1971 October”; Lotta A. Hempel to Hamer, July 13, 1971, Box 10, Folder 3, “Correspondence, 1971,” Fannie Lou Hamer Papers, Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, New Orleans.
52. Hamer, “‘Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free,’” 136.
53. Hamer, “‘Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free,’” 136.
54. “White Convicted in Slaying of Girl: Gets 20 Years in Shooting of Negro in Mississippi,” New York Times, October 30, 1971.
55. Jason Berry, Amazing Grace: With Charles Evers in Mississippi (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1978), 292, quoted in Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 287.
56. Fitzgerald, The Struggle Is Eternal, 132.
57. Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America, rev. ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002) 160–62.
58. Sherie Randolph, Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 169.
59. Randolph, Florynce “Flo” Kennedy, 169.
60. Hamer, “‘Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free,’” 122.
61. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 21–22, 172.
62. Samuel Yette, “Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer Was Tough Fighter,” Baltimore Afro-American, April 2, 1977.
63. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 274. Also see Pamela Bridgewater, Lynn Roberts, Whitney Peoples, Erika Derkas, and Loretta Ross, eds., Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundation, Theory, Practice, Critique (New York: First Feminist Press, 2017).
64. Ethel L. Payne, “So This Is Washington,” Chicago Defender (Daily Edition), December 18, 1969.
65. Payne, “So This Is Washington.”
66. Hamer, “‘Is It Too Late?,’” 133.
67. Simone M. Caron, “Birth Control and the Black Community in the 1960s: Genocide or Power Politics,” Journal of Social History 31, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 545–69.
68. Hamer, “‘Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free,’” 122.
69. Caron, “Birth Control and the Black Community in the 1960s,” 547–49; Nelson, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement, 106–7.
70. Combahee River Collective, The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties, Freedom Organizing Series (Albany, NY: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1986). See also Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017).
71. Margaret Tarter, “150 Picket in Support of Abortion Funding,” Bay State Banner, August 18, 1977, 1. On the Combahee River Collective, see Taylor, How We Get Free.
72. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 273.
73. Hamer, “It’s in Your Hands,” 609.
74. Hamer, “It’s in Your Hands,” 610.
75. Hamer, “It’s in Your Hands,” 610.
76. Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).
77. Hamer, “It’s in Your Hands,” 610.
78. Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Rebecca Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
79. Hamer, “It’s in Your Hands,” 610.
80. Keisha N. Blain, “What Americans Still Owe Fannie Lou Hamer,” CNN Opinion, August 26, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/26/opinions/fannie-lou-hamer-legacy-voting-rights-blain/index.html. For more information on the founding of the NWPC, see “Early History,” National Women’s Political Caucus, https://www.nwpc.org/about.
81. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 275.
82. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 170.
83. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 275; Ethel L. Payne, “Women Gird for Action,” Chicago Defender (Daily Edition), July 15, 1971.
84. Peterson, “Fannie Lou Hamer: Mother of ‘Black Women’s Lib,’” 16.
85. Hamer, “‘Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free,’” 135.
86. Hamer, “‘Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free,’” 137.
87. Hamer, “‘Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free,’” 135.
88. Hamer, “‘Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free,’” 136.
89. On Combahee, see Taylor, How We Get Free. For an overview of the history of the Third World Women’s Alliance, see Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). It is significant to note that the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA) originally began as the Black Women’s Liberation Committee (as part of SNCC) in December 1968. They adopted the name TWWA in 1970.
90. Hamer, “‘Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free,’” 136.
91. Payne, “Women Gird for Action.”
92. For an overview on Chisholm’s approach to politics in this era, see Anastasia Curwood, “Black Feminism on Capitol Hill: Shirley Chisholm and Movement Politics, 1968–1984,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 13, no. 1 (2015).
93. Curwood, “Black Feminism on Capitol Hill,” 205.
94. Chisholm, interview by Mills, quoted in Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 277.
95. Chisholm, interview by Mills, quoted in Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 277.
96. Chisholm, interview by Mills, quoted in Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 277.
97. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 170.
98. Ellen DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978).
99. Eileen Shanahan, “Caucus to Seek Equal Number of Women Convention Delegates,” New York Times, November 10, 1971.
100. “Cleveland NCNW Chapter to Host Regional,” Call and Post, March 29, 1969.
101. Washington, “Freedom Fighter Still Seeking Human Right.”
102. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 172–73.
103. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 286.
104. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 285–86.
105. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 287.
106. Fannie Lou Hamer, “Seconding Speech for the Nomination of Frances Farenthold,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 146.
107. Toni Anthony, “Black Women Map New Plans for Action,” Chicago Defender (Daily Edition), January 11, 1972; Toni Anthony, “National Women’s Confab in Chicago,” Chicago Defender (Big Weekend Edition), January 8, 1972.
108. John H. Britton Jr., “Black Women in Politics: Do We Have a Future?” Essence 5, no. 11 (March 1975): 80–81, 90.
109. Britton, “Black Women in Politics,” 80.
110. Britton, “Black Women in Politics,” 81. Other reports cite 336 women. See, for example, Ethel Payne, “Women in Politics,” Call and Post, November 3, 1973.
CHAPTER FIVE: an EXPANSIVE VISION OF FREEDOM
1. Egerton, A Mind to Stay Here, 101.
2. Errol Nazareth, “Jermaine Carby Inquest Jury Makes 14 Recommendations Following 2014 Shooting Death,” CBC News, May 26, 2016, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/jermaine-carby-inquest-1.3601734.
3. Keisha N. Blain, “On ‘Transpacific Antiracism’: An Interview with Yuichiro Onishi,” Black Perspectives, African American Intellectual History Society, February 26, 2015, https://www.aaihs.org/on-transpacific-racism-an-interview-with-yuichiro-onishi-2.
4. Amien Essif, “How Black Lives Matter Has Spread into a Global Movement to End Racist Policing,” In These Times, June 29, 2015, http://inthesetimes.com/article/18042/black-lives-matter-in-europe-too.
5. Judith Ohikuare, “Meet the Women Who Created #BlackLivesMatter,” Cosmopolitan, October 17, 2015, https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/a47842/the-women-behind-blacklivesmatter.
6. Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza, “Black Lives Matter Founders Describe ‘Paradigm Shift’ in the Movement,” interview by Ari Shapiro, All Things Considered, NPR, July 14, 2016, https://www.wvpublic.org/post/we-still-have-jim-crow-hate-black-lives-matter-founders-reflect-3-years#stream/0.
7. Lilly Workneh, “Black Lives Matter Calls for Global Change at United Nations Assembly,” Black Voices, Huffington Post, July 21, 2016, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/black-lives-matter-calls-for-global-change-at-united-nations-assembly_n_57911e16e4b00c9876ce96df.
8. Rhiannon Walker, “What We Know About the Alton Sterling Shooting,” The Undefeated, July 6, 2016, https://theundefeated.com/features/what-we-know-about-the-alton-sterling-shooting/; German Lopez, “Philando Castile Minnesota Police Shooting: officer Cleared of Manslaughter Charge,” Vox, June 16, 2017, https://www.vox.com/2016/7/7/12116288/minnesota-police-shooting-philando-castile-falcon-heights-video?__c=1.
9. “UN Experts Urge US to Address Legacies of the Past, Police Impunity and ‘Crisis of Racial Injustice,’” UN News, January 29, 2016, https://news.un.org/en/story/2016/0⅕21182-un-experts-urge-us-address-legacies-past-police-impunity-and-crisis-racial.
10. “UN Experts Urge US to Address Legacies of the Past, Police Impunity and ‘Crisis of Racial Injustice.’”
11. Gerald Horne, Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Carol Anderson, Eyes Off The Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
12. Workneh, “Black Lives Matter Calls For Global Change.”
13. Opal Tometi, “Address at the United Nations General Assembly—July 12, 2016,” Archives of Women’s Political Communication, Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics, Iowa State University, Ames, July 12, 2016, https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2018/09/17/address-at-the-united-nations-general-assembly-july-12-2016.
14. Tometi, “Address at the United Nations General Assembly.”
15. Workneh, “Black Lives Matter Calls For Global Change.”
16. On an expansive political agenda, see Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, 245.
17. Workneh, “Black Lives Matter Calls For Global Change.”
18. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Color Line Belts the World,” in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Holt, 1995), 42; on Du Bois and this vision of Black internationalism, see Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950,” Journal of American History 86 (1999): 1045–77. For a broader history of Black internationalism, see Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins, eds., From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International Since the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
19. On the Black intellectual tradition, see Keisha N. Blain, Christopher Cameron, and Ashley D. Farmer, eds., New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018); Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, and Barbara D. Savage, eds., Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Brian D. Behnken, Gregory D. Smithers, and Simon Wendt, eds., Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America: A Historical Perspective (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017).
20. Hamer, “Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free,” 136.
21. Hamer, “‘Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free,’” 73.
22. Julia Erin Wood, “‘What That Meant to Me’: SNCC Women, the 1964 Guinea Trip, and Black Internationalism,” in To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism, eds. Keisha N. Blain and Tiffany M. Gill (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019).
23. Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
24. Carson, In Struggle, 134.
25. Harry Belafonte, “Postscript: ‘A Trip to Africa,’” in Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s, eds. Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 204–6.
26. Elizabeth Schmidt, Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946– 1958 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007).
27. Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
28. Joseph, Stokely, 217–18.
29. Joseph, Stokely, 277–318.
30. Wood, “‘What That Meant to Me,’” 219.
31. John Lewis with Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 293.
32. Wood, “‘What That Meant to Me,’” 221.
33. Hamer, interview by McMillen, 11.
34. Hamer, interview by McMillen, 12.
35. Hamer, interview by McMillen, 12.
36. Wood, “‘What That Meant to Me,’” 223.
37. Hamer, interview by McMillen, 12.
38. Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges, 21.
39. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 30.
40. Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges, 21.
41. Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges, 24.
42. Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges, 23.
43. Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges, 23.
44. Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges, 23.
45. Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges, 24.
46. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “Brief Report on Guinea,” September 23, 1964, 3, Mss 577, Box 47, Folder 4, WIHVS3310-A, Social Action Vertical File-Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Freedom Summer Digital Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15932coll2/id/64892.
47. Mohamed Saliou Camara, Thomas O’Toole, and Janice E. Baker, Historical Dictionary of Guinea, 5th ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), 110.
48. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “Brief Report on Guinea,” 7.
49. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “Brief Report on Guinea,” 3.
50. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “Brief Report on Guinea,” 4.
51. For a discussion of how much the US State Department attempted to manage the image of the Jim Crow South during this period, see Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize; Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
52. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “Brief Report on Guinea,” 3.
53. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “Brief Report on Guinea,” 6.
54. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “Brief Report on Guinea,” 5.
55. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “Brief Report on Guinea,” 11.
56. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “Brief Report on Guinea,” 11.
57. Belafonte, “Postscript: ‘A Trip to Africa,’” 205.
58. Wood, “‘What That Meant to Me,’” 229.
59. Wood, “‘What That Meant to Me,’” 223–24.
60. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 103.
61. Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir an Army, 130.
62. Wood, “‘What That Meant to Me,’” 226.
63. Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011); and Les Payne and Tamara Payne, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (New York: Liveright, 2020).
64. Malcolm X, “Malcolm X’s Speech at the Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity,” June 28, 1964, BlackPast, October 15, 2007, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/speeches-african-american-history/1964-malcolm-x-s-speech-founding-rally-organization-afro-american-unity.
65. Carson, In Struggle, 135.
66. Brooks and Houck, eds., The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 57.
67. William W. Sales Jr., From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (Boston: South End Press, 1994), 171.
68. Brooks and Houck, eds., The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 57.
69. Peniel Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2013), 148.
70. Brooks and Houck, eds., The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 57.
71. Brooks and Houck, eds., The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 57.
72. Fannie Lou Hamer, “Oral History Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer, African-American, Woman, FDP: Member of Ex Com., 0491, Ruleville, Mississippi. 0491,” interview by KZSU Project South Interviews, 1965, transcript, 6, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, https://exhibits.stanford.edu/oral-history/catalog/zb317wv2717.
73. Hamer, “Oral History Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer . . .,” 6.
74. Hamer, “‘I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired,’” 62.
75. William Pickens, “The American Congo: Burning of Henry Lowry,” The Nation, March 23, 1921.
76. Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
77. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); and Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History (London and New York: Zed Books, 2002).
78. Brenda Gayle Plummer, In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 89–91.
79. Stephen R. Weissman, American Foreign Policy in the Congo, 1960– 1964 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974); Lise Namikas, Battleground Africa: Cold War in the Congo, 1960–1965 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).
80. Piero Gleijeses, “Flee! The White Giants Are Coming: The United States, Mercenaries, and the Congo, 1964–1965,” in Empire and Revolution: The United States and the Third World Since 1945, eds. Peter L. Hahn and Mary Ann Heiss (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001).
81. Hamer, “‘I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired,’” 62.
82. Hamer, “‘What Have We to Hail?,’” 80.
83. Hamer, “‘What Have We to Hail?,’” 80.
84. Hamer, “‘What Have We to Hail?,’” 80.
85. Hamer, “‘What Have We to Hail?,’” 80.
86. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 117–18.
87. Hamer, “‘We Haven’t Arrived Yet,’” 183.
88. Hamer, interview by McMillen, 12–13.
89. Hamer, “‘We Haven’t Arrived Yet,’” 186.
90. Hamer, “‘We Haven’t Arrived Yet,’” 186.
91. Hamer, “‘We Haven’t Arrived Yet,’” 183.
92. Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
93. Dennis Merrill, Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Twentieth Century Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); and Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).
94. Albert J. Raboteau, American Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals and Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 190.
95. Raboteau, American Prophets, 190
96. John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Free Press, 2003), 445–46.
97. Fannie Lou Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’ Speech Delivered at the Vietnam War Moratorium Rally, Berkeley, California, October 15, 1969,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 98.
98. Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’” 98, 100.
99. Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’” 101.
100. George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness,” in White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism, ed. Paula S. Rothenberg with Soniya Munshi, 5th ed. (New York: World Publishers, 2016), 71.
101. Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness,” 71.
102. Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness,” 71.
103. Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness,” 71.
104. O’Dell, “Life in Mississippi: An Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer,” 242.
105. O’Dell, “Life in Mississippi: An Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer,” 242.
106. O’Dell, “Life in Mississippi: An Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer,” 233.
107. Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’” 102.
108. Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’” 100.
109. Hamer, “‘To Tell It Like It Is,’” 90.
110. Sheryl Fitzgerald, “Black Leaders Urge Gulf Oil Boycott,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, August 25, 1973.
111. Randall Robinson, Chris Nteta, and Brenda Robinson, Letter to Supporters of the Pan-African Liberation Committee, Fall 1973, Brookline Village, MA, Private Collection of David Wiley and Christine Root, African Activist Archive, East Lansing, MI, https://africanactivist.msu.edu/document_metadata.php?objectid=210-808-402. On the PALC and the broader support for African liberation movements during this period, see Plummer, In Search of Power, 277.
112. Robinson, Nteta, and Robinson, Letter to Supporters of the Pan-African Liberation Committee.
113. Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’” 103.
CHAPTER SIX: TRY TO DO SOMETHING
1. Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 53.
2. Sylvie Laurent, King and the Other America: The Poor People’s Campaign and the Quest for Economic Equality (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018).
3. Laurent, King and the Other America, 191.
4. “About the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival,” Poor People’s Campaign, https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/about, accessed October 15, 2020.
5. Rev. Dr. William Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, “Introducing The Poor People’s Moral Budget: Everybody’s Got the Right to Live,” in Poor People’s Moral Budget: Everybody Has the Right to Live, eds. Shailly Gupta Barnes, Lindsay Koshgarian, and Ashik Siddique (Poor People’s Campaign/Institute for Policy Studies, June 2019), https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/PPC-Moral-Budget-2019-report-FULL-FINAL-July.pdf; Katrina vanden Heuvel, “A New Poor People’s Campaign Wants to Change How Society Defines Morality,” Washington Post, December 5, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-new-poor-peoples-campaign-wants-to-change-how-society-defines-morality/2017/12/05/d4524b68-d90d-11e7-b1a8–62589434a581_story.html.
6. “Current US Poverty Statistics,” Kairos: The Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, March 2018, https://kairoscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Poverty-Fact-sheet-March-2018.pdf.
7. “Current US Poverty Statistics,” Kairos: The Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, January 2017, https://kairoscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Poverty-Fact-sheet-Jan-2017.pdf.
8. Barber and Theoharis, “Introducing The Poor People’s Moral Budget,” 7.
9. Barber and Theoharis, “Introducing The Poor People’s Moral Budget,” 7.
10. Rev. Dr. William J. Barber and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, “Introduction,” in The Souls of Poor Folk: Auditing America 50 Years After the Poor People’s Campaign Challenged Racism, Poverty, the War Economy/Militarism and Our National Morality, eds. Saurav Sarkar, Shailly Gupta Barnes, and Aaron Noffke (Poor People’s Campaign/Institute for Policy Studies, April 2018), 17, https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/PPC-Audit-Full-410835a.pdf.
11. Barber and Theoharis, “Introducing the Poor People’s Moral Budget.”
12. Public Affairs, UC Berkeley, “Berkeley Talks Transcript: Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II: ‘Forward Together, Not One Step Back,’” Berkeley News, April 14, 2019, https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/04/14/berkeley-talks-transcript-rev-dr-william-j-barber-ii.
13. Public Affairs, UC Berkeley, “Berkeley Talks Transcript: Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II.”
14. Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 53.
15. The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer: Never Turn Back, dir. Bill Buckley. (Emphasis added in text.)
16. It is significant to note that Mississippi was ranked the poorest state in the United States in 2019. See Liz Knueven, “The Typical American Household Earns $61,000 a Year. Here Are 15 States Where the Typical Resident Earns Even Less,” Business Insider, August 19, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/poorest-states-in-the-us-by-median-household-income-2019–8#1-mississippi-15.
17. DeMuth, “Fannie Lou Hamer: Tired of Being Sick and Tired.”
18. Hamer, “Fannie Lou Hamer Speaks Out,” 53.
19. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 16.
20. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 17.
21. William Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York: Harper and Row, 1963).
22. Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
23. Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 20.
24. National Sharecroppers Fund, From the Mississippi Delta Comes a Challenge to All Americans . . . (New York: National Sharecroppers Fund, 1964), https://www.crmvet.org/docs/nsf_brochure.pdf.
25. Dittmer, Local People, 125.
26. Dittmer, Local People, 125.
27. White, Freedom Farmers, 68.
28. White, Freedom Farmers, 68.
29. White, Freedom Farmers, 68.
30. Hamer, “‘I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,’” 5.
31. Hamer, “‘The Only Thing We Can Do Is to Work Together,’” 71.
32. Hamer, “‘I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,’” 5.
33. Hamer, “‘To Tell It Like It Is,’” 89.
34. Hamer, “‘The Only Thing We Can Do Is to Work Together,’” 71–72. For information on the NCNW, see Rebecca Tuuri, Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
35. Hamer, “‘The Only Thing We Can Do Is to Work Together,’” 72.
36. The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer: Never Turn Back, dir. Bill Buckley.
37. Hamer, “‘To Tell It Like It Is,’” 91.
38. Hamer, “‘To Tell It Like It Is,’” 92.
39. Hamer, “‘I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired’” and “‘What Have We to Hail?,’” 57–64, 74–83, respectively.
40. White, Freedom Farmers, 69; Brooks, Freedom Fighting Woman, 142.
41. Hamer, “‘I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired,’” 63.
42. Asch, The Senator and the Sharecropper, 133.
43. Hamer, “‘What Have We to Hail?,’” 75.
44. Asch, The Senator and the Sharecropper.
45. Tuuri, Strategic Sisterhood, 2.
46. Tuuri, Strategic Sisterhood, 186.
47. Hamer, “‘The Only Thing We Can Do Is to Work Together,’” 72.
48. Hamer, “‘The Only Thing We Can Do Is to Work Together,’” 73.
49. Hamer, “‘To Tell It Like It Is,’” 92.
50. Hamer, “Testimony Before the Democratic Reform Committee, Jackson, Mississippi, May 22, 1969,” 96.
51. Hamer, “‘What Have We to Hail?,’” 74.
52. Robert Dallek, Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
53. Dallek, Lyndon B. Johnson.
54. Ira Katznelson, “Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity?,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, eds. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
55. Hamer, “‘What Have We to Hail?,’” 80.
56. Brooks, Freedom Fighting Woman, 123.
57. “A Short History of SNAP,” US Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, September 11, 2018, https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/short-history-snap#1964.
58. Hamer, “‘Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either,’” 126–27.
59. Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir an Army, 158.
60. Hamer, “‘What Have We to Hail?,’” 82.
61. Hamer, “‘What Have We to Hail?,’” 82.
62. Albert J. Raboteau, “Is This America? Fannie Lou Hamer and the Voices of Local People,” in American Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals and Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
63. Hamer, “‘What Have We to Hail?,’” 83.
64. Peterson, “Fannie Lou Hamer: Mother of ‘Black Women’s Lib,’” 21.
65. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 144; Bracey, Fannie Lou Hamer, 138.
66. White, Freedom Farmers.
67. “Fannie Lou Hamer Founds Freedom Farm Cooperative,” SNCC Digital Gateway, https://snccdigital.org/events/fannie-lou-hamer-founds-freedom-farm-cooperative.
68. White, Freedom Farmers, 76; Lea E. Williams, “Fannie Lou Hamer, Servant of the People,” in Focus on Leadership: Servant-Leadership for the Twenty-First Century, eds. Larry C. Spears and Michele Lawrence (New York: J. Wiley & Sons, 2002), 75–76.
69. Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges, 18.
70. Hamer, “‘Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either,’” 128.
71. Hamer, interview by McMillen, 23.
72. White, Freedom Farmers, 65.
73. Dorothy I. Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003), 188.
74. White, Freedom Farmers, 157.
75. White, Freedom Farmers, 68.
76. “Fannie Lou Hamer Founds Freedom Farm Cooperative,” SNCC Digital Gateway; White, Freedom Farmers, 73.
77. White, Freedom Farmers, 79.
78. Hamer, interview by Neil McMillen, 25.
79. White, Freedom Farmers, 72–75.
80. Aldridge, “What Makes Fannie Lou Hamer Run?”
81. Hamer, “‘Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either,’” 127.
82. Paule Marshall, “Fannie Lou Hamer: Hunger Has No Color Line,” Vogue 155, no. 10 (June 1, 1970): 191; J. Todd Moye, Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945–1986 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 156.
83. White, Freedom Farmers, 73.
84. Hamer, “‘We Haven’t Arrived Yet,’” 191.
85. June Jordan, “Mississippi ‘Black Home’: A Sweet and Bitter Bluesong Mississippi,’” New York Times Magazine, October 11, 1970, 77.
86. Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges, 17.
87. Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol. X: Africa for the Africans, 1923–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 697.
88. Erik S. McDuffie, “A New Day Has Dawned for the UNIA: Garveyism, the Diasporic Midwest and West Africa, 1920–1980,” Journal of West African History 2, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 73–114.
89. McDuffie, “A New Day Has Dawned for the UNIA,” 89.
90. Hamer, “‘Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either,’” 127.
91. Marshall, “Fannie Lou Hamer: ‘Hunger Has No Color Line,’” 191.
92. Jordan, “Mississippi ‘Black Home,’” 77.
93. Jordan, “Mississippi ‘Black Home,’” 77.
94. Jordan, “Mississippi ‘Black Home,’” 74–77.
95. White, Freedom Farmers, 76.
96. White, Freedom Farmers, 76.
97. White, Freedom Farmers, 76.
98. Crystal Sanders, A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 204–6.
99. Rust College Head Start State Training office, “Overview,” 1977, Box 11, Folder 24, “Proposals,” Fannie Lou Hamer Papers, Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, New Orleans.
100. Sanders, A Chance for Change, 53.
101. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 205.
102. Tuuri, Strategic Sisterhood, 147.
103. White, Freedom Farmers, 84–86.
104. The trip formed the basis for Jordan’s children’s biography of Hamer. See Jordan, Fannie Lou Hamer.
105. Jordan, “Mississippi ‘Black Home,’” 74.
106. Jordan, “Mississippi ‘Black Home,’” 77.
107. Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 53.
108. John T. Edge, “The Hidden Radicalism of Southern Food,” New York Times, May 6, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/06/opinion/sunday/the-hidden-radicalism-of-southern-food.html.
CONCLUSION: UNTIL ALL OF US ARE FREE
1. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 165. It is significant to note that Delta Health Center has gone by a number of names over the years and newspapers and other sources of the period reported different names for the hospital. These include the Tufts-Delta Health Center, the Delta Community Health Center, and the Mound Bayou Community Hospital.
2. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 165–66.
3. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 166.
4. Hamer, interview by McMillen, 30.
5. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 176; Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 176.
6. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 176.
7. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 174.
8. Fannie Lou Hamer to Reverend Marion Elaine Myles, August 23, 1976, University of Mississippi Archive—Fannie Lou Hamer.
9. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 177.
10. Brooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, 176.
11. Annette Samuels, “People Profiled: Fannie Lou Hamer,” New York Amsterdam News, February 12, 1977.
12. Samuels, “People Profiled: Fannie Lou Hamer.”
13. Samuels, “People Profiled: Fannie Lou Hamer.”
14. Samuels, “People Profiled: Fannie Lou Hamer.”
15. Samuels, “People Profiled: Fannie Lou Hamer.”
16. “Fannie Lou Hamer Paid Tribute by National Figures,” Atlanta Daily World, March 22, 1977, 1.
17. Thomas A. Johnson, “Young Eulogizes Fannie L. Hamer, Mississippi Civil Rights Champion, New York Times, March 21, 1977, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/03/21/archives/young-eulogizes-fannie-l-hamer-mississippi-civil-rights-champion.html.
18. “Fannie Hamer’s Funeral,” Los Angeles Sentinel, April 7, 1977.
19. Johnson, “Young Eulogizes Fannie L. Hamer, Mississippi Civil Rights Champion.”
20. “Fannie Lou Hamer Paid Tribute by National Figures.”
21. “Fannie Lou Hamer Paid Tribute by National Figures.”
22. Marcia Gillespie, “Getting Down,” Essence 8, no. 1 (May 1977): 55.
23. Gillespie, “Getting Down,” 55.
24. Jessica Bennett, “Overlooked No More: Before Kamala Harris, There Was Charlotta Bass,” September 4, 2020, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/obituaries/charlotta-bass-vice-president-overlooked.html.
25. Denise Lynn, “Charlotta Bass for Vice President: America’s Two-Parties and the Black Vote,” Black Perspectives (AAIHS), January 21, 2020, https://www.aaihs.org/charlotta-bass-for-vice-president-americas-two-parties-and-the-black-vote.
26. Bennett, “Overlooked No More: Before Kamala Harris, There Was Charlotta Bass.”
27. Kamala Harris, “Transcript: Kamala Harris’ DNC Speech,” August 20, 2020, CNN, https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/19/politics/kamala-harris-speech-transcript/index.html.
28. Harris, “Transcript: Kamala Harris’ DNC Speech.”
29. Harris, “Transcript: Kamala Harris’ DNC Speech.”