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Fannie Lou Hamer
A Political Activist Who Lived by Love
The group made their way through the angry crowd of gun-toting white men and snarling dogs. They sang “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and “This Little Light of Mine” to bolster their resolve as they walked up the stairs and through the doors of the courthouse. “What do you want?” snapped the clerk in the voter registration office, glancing disdainfully at the women and men lined up before him. “We’re here to register,” announced a woman standing at the front of the group.
Just days prior, the same woman had raised her hand in a meeting at her local church in Ruleville, Mississippi, to volunteer as one of eighteen African Americans who would travel twenty-six miles in a borrowed bus to the courthouse in Indianola. The woman was forty-four years old, wife of a sharecropper, and mother of two adopted daughters. She had been the first in the room to raise her hand; the others had followed her brave lead. Fannie Lou Hamer was determined to obtain the right to vote.
Years later, Fannie reflected on how dangerous her decision was. At the time—1962 in rural Mississippi—African Americans who attempted to register to vote typically faced serious threats, ranging from verbal harassment and the loss of their jobs to physical beatings and lynching. “I guess if I’d had any sense I’d a been a little scared,” Fannie said later. “The only thing they could do to me was kill me and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.”1
Fannie Lou Hamer didn’t actually register to vote that August day in 1962. She flunked the registrant’s examination, which required that she read and interpret section 16 of the Mississippi state constitution, a section dealing with de facto laws. Registrars had the liberty to pick whichever constitutional passage they wanted for each test, which explains why whites easily passed and blacks rarely did. That day was the first time Fannie, who had a sixth-grade education, had ever laid eyes on her own state’s constitution. As she put it, she knew “as much about [de] facto law, as a horse knows about Christmas Day.”2 But despite this initial failure, Fannie resolved to return to the courthouse as many times as it took until she passed the test.
Hate Was Not an Option
Fannie Lou Townsend was born the youngest of twenty children in Montgomery County, Mississippi. Her father, Jim, was a sharecropper who served as a minister and worked as a bootlegger on the side. Upon Fannie’s arrival, her parents were paid fifty dollars by the plantation owner, a reward for producing another future field hand.
By age six, Fannie was working the fields, picking sixty pounds of cotton each week. By the time she was thirteen, she was able to pick between two and three hundred pounds of cotton a day. When the cotton crops didn’t yield enough, the Townsends earned a living by “scrapping cotton,” walking up to twenty miles a day in their bare feet to each plantation in the area to request leftovers from the landowners. Fannie’s mother would have her family scrap the leftover cotton they acquired, picking the plant until it was clean. Sometimes they scrapped enough in a single day for a five-hundred-pound bale, which they would haul to the gin and turn in for cash.
Throughout her life Fannie reiterated the impact her mother had on her as a child. “She went through a lot of suffering to bring twenty of us up, but she still taught us to be decent and to respect ourselves, and that is one of the things that has kept me going,” she said.3 Fannie’s faith was the other strong factor. Although she joined the Strangers Home Baptist Church at age twelve and was baptized in the Quiver River, much of what she learned about the Gospels she learned from her mother, who taught her children that hate was never an option. Even during her political activism days, after Fannie had been held for a week in jail and ruthlessly beaten by the guards, she refused to speak with malice against the perpetrators. “Ain’t no such of a thing as I can hate and hope to see God’s face,” she said time and time again.4
“I Went There to Register for Myself”
Sometime in the 1940s (there were no marriage records for Southern blacks at the time, so the exact year is not known), Fannie married Perry (Pap) Hamer, and the couple moved to W. D. Marlow’s plantation in Ruleville. The couple did not have children of their own but instead adopted and raised two girls who could not be cared for by their own families. In 1961 Fannie was the victim of a crime that made childbearing impossible: she was sterilized against her will. When she was admitted to the hospital to have a small abdominal cyst removed, she awoke from the surgery to learn she had been given a hysterectomy as well, a scenario that was not uncommon in the South during the 1930s through the 1960s.
Pap farmed and Fannie worked as the plantation timekeeper. She was responsible for maintaining employment records and recording the number of bales picked by each field hand and the amount of pay due to each worker. Fannie’s sixth-grade education and her aptitude for both math and reading enabled her to land such a rare job and excel at it.
To make ends meet, especially during the winter, the Hamers also ran her late father’s bootlegging liquor operation, and Fannie frequently did domestic chores in the owner’s house for extra cash. Even that minimal financial stability came to an end, however, when Fannie boarded the bus bound for the courthouse in Indianola. Despite the fact that she wasn’t actually able to register to vote, when she finally made it back to the plantation that night, Fannie was met by her enraged boss, who demanded that she withdraw her voter registration application or leave the farm. Fannie refused. “Mr. Dee, I didn’t go down there to register for you,” she declared. “I went there to register for myself.”5 After serving eighteen years as his loyal employee, Fannie fled the farm that night, forced to leave her husband and daughters behind.
Everywhere Fannie went, violence followed. Ten days after her eviction from the plantation, sixteen bullets were fired into the neighbor’s home where Fannie was staying, fortunately not harming any of the inhabitants. That same night, shots were fired at the home of another woman who had attempted voter registration. Two young women in the house were gravely wounded, sustaining multiple gunshot wounds to the head, neck, legs, and arms.
Finally, after two months on the run, Fannie decided to return to Ruleville. She was not able to get her job back, and her husband had subsequently been fired by Marlow as well. Instead, she found new and unexpected employment as a local leader with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (better known as SNCC), the organization leading the voter registration campaign. Fannie’s mission was clear: she was quickly becoming a well-known political activist.
A National Political Activist Is Born
It didn’t take Fannie long to return to the Indianola courthouse. On December 4, 1962, she took the voter registration exam again, telling the clerk, “I’ll be here every thirty days until I become a registered voter.”6 This time Fannie was prepared—she had studied the Mississippi constitution with the help of the SNCC volunteers—and she passed the test. Of course, when she went to vote the following August in a primary election, Fannie was informed she was ineligible because she had not paid the poll tax for two years—obviously because she had not been registered.
The SNCC officials recognized a leader in Fannie. As biographer Kay Mills notes, “Fannie Lou Hamer had a presence. She was smart. And as a poor black southern sharecropper, she represented the soul of the people whom the movement wanted to represent. . . . She had a personal story, which would only grow more compelling the more she endured. And she had a voice with which to tell it. Virtually everyone whose path crossed hers remembered first and foremost her singing and her speaking.”7
However, her new role as a political activist was not without serious risks. On June 9, 1963, Fannie was on her way back from Charleston, South Carolina, with other activists from a literacy workshop when the group was arrested on a false charge and jailed in Winona, Mississippi. Fannie was beaten by the police, almost to the point of death. While in her cell, she overheard officers in the booking room plotting to kill the activists and dispose of their bodies in the nearby Big Black River. Fortunately, volunteers at the SNCC headquarters tracked down the missing activists and succeeded in getting them released from jail. It took Fannie more than a month to recover from her injuries. On December 2, an all-white jury found Montgomery County Sheriff Earle Patridge, Police Chief Thomas Herrod, and three other officers involved in the incident not guilty.
Fannie walked out of the Winona jail and away from the travesty of the trial more determined than ever to become a first-class citizen and make that right available to every African American person in America. In 1964 she helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which challenged the legitimacy of Mississippi’s all-white delegation to that year’s Democratic convention. She appeared before the convention’s credentials committee and told her story about trying to register to vote in Mississippi, a speech that was televised by most major news broadcasts, despite President Lyndon Johnson’s attempts to preempt it with an impromptu press conference. That same year Fannie ran for Congress in Mississippi, to demonstrate to the people that a “Negro can run for office,” she said.8
The MFDP was not successful in its bid for seats. In fact, when the Democratic Party suggested a compromise that would offer the MFDP two nonvoting seats in exchange for other concessions, the MFDP refused to concede. Fannie sharply rebuked Democrat senator Hubert Humphrey, who was running for vice president at the time, for suggesting the compromise:
Do you mean to tell me that your position is more important than four hundred thousand black people’s lives? Senator Humphrey, I been praying about you; and I been thinking about you, and you’re a good man, and you know what’s right. The trouble is, you’re afraid to do what you know is right. You just want this job [as vice president], and I know a lot of people have lost their jobs, and God will take care of you, even if you lose this job. But Mr. Humphrey, if you take this job, you won’t be worth anything. Mr. Humphrey, I’m going to pray for you again.9
After her bold challenge of Humphrey, Fannie was not asked to participate in future meetings.
Although the MFDP failed to win a seat at the Atlantic City Democratic National Convention in 1964, four years later in Chicago it was successful. Fannie Lou Hamer received a thunderous standing ovation when she became the first African American to take a seat as an official delegate at a national-party convention since the Reconstruction era following the Civil War. She was also the first woman ever from Mississippi to do so.
For more than fifteen years Fannie Lou Hamer worked tirelessly to pave the way for African Americans to vote, to run for political office, and to be treated, in her own words, as first-class citizens. However, despite the fact that she is best known today as a civil rights leader, her most lasting contribution might very well be her legacy of love.
Throughout her entire lifetime Fannie was a victim of the most pervasive, violent kind of hatred. This was a woman beaten nearly to death at the hands of white men; terrorized by her own neighbors; and relentlessly scorned, demeaned, threatened, and bullied. Yet because her love for her fellow humans was connected so closely with her faith, she never succumbed to hatred or bitterness. “You have to love ’em,” Fannie told fellow civil rights activist Unita Blackwell the first time she met her.10 Her statement wasn’t empty political rhetoric but evidence of the way she lived out her faith in the face of daunting obstacles and enormous hardships. Whether confronting a belligerent voter registration official, lying bloody and beaten on the cold floor of a jail cell, or standing triumphant as a delegate before a national audience, Fannie Lou Hamer lived out love day by day.