When you hear stories about the civil rights movement in the '50s and '60s, it mainly revolves around figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, and Medgar and Myrlie Evers. But did you ever hear about Fannie Lou Hammer? She wasn't just a civil rights activist. Hammer was a voting and women's rights activist as well as a community organizer. She was the founder of the Freedom Democratic Party and was the co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus. But her path to register and help thousands of African-Americans in Mississippi to become registered voters was met with threats, extortion, and assaults. She faced a lot of tragedy and setbacks in her quest to gain equality and freedom during the civil rights movement. Let's take a look.
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00:00Fannie Lou Hamer was a force to be reckoned with, enduring intractable racism, police
00:06beatings, and even forced sterilization. She never stopped working for equal voting rights
00:11for all. This is the tragic real-life story of Fannie Lou Hamer.
00:17Born on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, Fannie Lou was the 20th and youngest
00:24child of Lou Ella and James Townsend. Both Lou Ella and James worked as sharecroppers
00:29their entire lives. When Fannie Lou was just six years old, she joined them despite having
00:35endured a bout of polio just a year earlier. Hamer was eight years old in 1925 when she
00:42saw Joe Pullum, a local sharecropper, lynched. In an interview with Jack O'Dell in 1965,
00:48she said,
00:49"'I remember that until this day, and I won't forget it.'"
00:53Poverty forced Hamer to drop out of school at the age of 12, and by the age of 13, she
00:58was picking as much as 400 pounds of cotton in a day and receiving $1 for her work. Since
01:04Hamer had learned how to read and write during her brief time in school, she also worked
01:09as a record-keeper on the plantation, and soon discovered just how the owners would
01:13cook the books to cheat the poor sharecroppers out of their fair wages. To offset this, Hamer
01:20began secretly tilting the scales to ensure people weren't cheated. She later recalled,
01:25"...I didn't know what to do, and all I could do was rebel in the only way I could rebel."
01:30In 1944, Fannie Lou married Perry Pabb Hamer, a tractor driver on a local plantation. Seventeen
01:37years later, in 1961, she underwent surgery to remove a small cyst in her stomach. When
01:43she woke, she discovered that she'd also been given a hysterectomy without her consent.
01:49According to PBS, this type of forced sterilization was so common at the time that it became referred
01:55to as a Mississippi appendectomy, a term coined by Hamer herself. On June 8, 1964,
02:02Hamer testified before a panel in Washington, D.C., that at the North Sunflower County Hospital,
02:07six out of the ten Negro women that go to the hospital are sterilized with the tubes
02:12tied.
02:13Forced sterilizations have a dark history and an equally dark present in the United
02:17States. Indiana passed the first forced sterilization law in 1907, and while they hit their peak
02:23in the 1930s and 1940s, targeting those deemed to be criminals or unfit by the 1950s, sterilization
02:31laws started targeting welfare recipients as well.
02:34Forced sterilizations were frequently racially motivated. This became abundantly clear when
02:39Mississippi proposed a bill that would make it a felony for a parent on welfare to have
02:44more than one child. Jail time could be avoided if the parent consented to sterilization.
02:50Ultimately, sterilization was removed from that bill, but untold women like Hamer still
02:55were sterilized without their consent.
02:58On August 31, 1962, Hamer and 17 others went to the courthouse in Indianola, Mississippi,
03:04to register to vote. According to PBS, most of the group was blocked from even attempting
03:09to register. Only Hamer and one other man were allowed to fill out an application and
03:14take a literacy test. At the time, literacy tests were purposefully designed to keep Black
03:19people from voting, and when Hamer was asked to explain de facto laws, she later recalled
03:24that,
03:25"...I knowed as much about a facto law as a horse knows about Christmas Day."
03:29After failing the literacy test, the group was denied the right to register to vote.
03:33On the way home, their bus was stopped by police and fined $100 for being too yellow.
03:39Then the persecution got worse. The owner of the plantation where Hamer worked and lived
03:44demanded that she withdraw her application to vote.
03:47Mr. Marlow told me that I would have to go down and withdraw my registration or leave
03:53because they wasn't ready for that in Mississippi.
03:56Hamer refused and was immediately thrown off the plantation where she had lived and worked
04:01for 18 years. She temporarily stayed with a friend before finding a new home, and just
04:06narrowly missed being murdered by those who were trying to suppress the Black vote.
04:11They shot in the house 15 times thinking that I was there.
04:17On January 10th, 1963, Hamer was finally able to pass the literacy test. According to The
04:23Nation, after her second attempt on December 4th, she told the registrar, quote,
04:27"...you'll see me every 30 days till I pass."
04:30A month later, she passed. But despite now being registered to vote, she discovered that
04:35she still wasn't allowed to vote because she didn't have any poll tax receipts.
04:40In some parts of the United States, people were required to pay a tax in order to vote
04:44— a tax put in place to ensure that the poorest people, who were often people of color,
04:49didn't get a voice in the government. And they weren't subtle about this fact, either.
04:53For instance, in 1939, Alabama's Tuscaloosa News published an editorial that read in part,
04:59"...this newspaper believes in white supremacy, and it believes that the poll tax is one of
05:03the essentials for the preservation of white supremacy."
05:06In 1962, the United States passed the 24th Amendment, which outlawed poll taxes for federal
05:12elections. Despite this, Hamer was still denied the right to vote a year later because it
05:17wasn't really enforced until 1965. And to this day, eight states, including Mississippi,
05:24still haven't ratified the amendment.
05:27While PAP worked to pay off their sharecropping debt at the plantation, Hamer continued working
05:31toward voter registration and desegregation. On June 9th, 1963, Hamer and nine other activists
05:38were returning on a bus from a voter registration and civic education training session in Charleston,
05:43South Carolina. The activists had tried to integrate lunch counters at the various bus
05:47stations along their way home, and their protests had enraged their bus driver. According to
05:52Fannie Lou Hamer, America's Freedom Fighting Woman, by Megan Parker Brooks, the driver
05:57began using the phone at every stop, reporting their location to Mississippi police. In Winona,
06:03Mississippi, police arrested at least six of the activists, even those who'd remained
06:08on the bus, and took them to jail. Hamer and her fellow activists weren't released from
06:12jail until June 12th, and in those three days, Hamer sustained such severe and prolonged
06:18beatings that she suffered from lifelong damage to her kidneys, eyes, and legs. In addition
06:23to beating the activists themselves, police also forced the other Black people who were
06:28also imprisoned in the jail at the time to beat the activists as well. While there was
06:33later a brief trial, the police were cleared for their actions.
06:38After several failed attempts to work with the all-white, pro-segregation Mississippi
06:41Democratic Party, Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and in 1964, she
06:48went to the Democratic National Convention in an attempt to get representation. As a
06:52result, she received death threats. When she reported them to the police, they told her,
06:58quote,
06:59"'Don't look to us for help.'"
07:00On August 22nd, 1964, Hamer testified before the Credentials Committee at the Democratic
07:05National Convention. She started by stating her full name and home address, defiantly
07:11signaling her fearlessness to every white supremacist. According to the Washington Post,
07:16President Johnson was terrified that her testimony at the convention would break up
07:20the coalition of white Southern delegates he needed to get elected. He tried to convince
07:25her not to speak, but when she did anyway, he abruptly called a pointless live press
07:29conference so the TV broadcast would have to cut away from Hamer's testimony. It backfired,
07:35bringing more media attention to Hamer's testimony than it otherwise might have gotten, with
07:39many evening news programs giving full coverage of the speech that Johnson had interrupted.
07:44"'Because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in
07:52America.'"
07:54As a result of pressure from President Johnson and vice presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey,
07:59the convention refused to accept Hamer as an official delegate. Instead, officials offered
08:04a farcical compromise to the MFDP. They'd be allowed two delegates, but they could neither
08:09sit in the Mississippi section, nor would they be able to cast votes. Oh, and neither
08:14one of those seats were allowed to go to Hamer. Why? According to Humphrey, the president
08:19has said he will not let that illiterate woman speak on the floor of the Democratic convention.
08:24The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party voted unanimously to reject the administration's
08:29compromise. In Hamer's words, quote,
08:31"'We didn't come all this way for no two seats.' They returned to Mississippi, shut out once
08:36again by a process meant to empower them."
08:39In 1964, Hamer also ran unsuccessfully for Congress. According to an interview with Jack
08:45O'Dell, Hamer recalled that it was harder for her to pass the literacy test in order
08:49to register to vote than it was for her to qualify to run for Congress. And despite being
08:54barred from the official ballot, the MFDP gave out freedom ballots that included candidates
08:59of all races.
09:01According to Smithsonian Magazine, after her first bid was unsuccessful, Hamer ran for
09:06office two more times, in 1967 and 1971. Unfortunately, her 1967 run was disqualified
09:13on a technicality, and she lost to the incumbent in 1971. She did have one moment of triumph,
09:19though. In 1968, the Democratic Party began requiring equal representation for state delegations,
09:26and she finally was recognized as an official delegate for Mississippi at the National Democratic
09:31Party convention. She used her platform to protest the ongoing war in Vietnam.
09:36Seeing that not much progress was being made on the political front, Fannie Lou Hamer turned
09:41most of her attention toward economic justice as a way to fight for racial equality. In
09:461969, Hamer founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative in order to provide Black people with land
09:51that they could own and farm collectively. With the help of donors such as the Measure
09:56for Measure organization and Harry Belafonte, by 1970, the co-op had amassed 680 acres for
10:03cultivation. Membership for the co-op was a dollar a month, and even though only 30
10:08families could afford the dues, those who couldn't pay weren't excluded. Roughly an
10:11additional 1,500 families were also part of the Freedom Farm Cooperative in name.
10:16In 1970, the collective also started a pig bank for impoverished families. With help
10:21from the National Council of Negro Women, the collective purchased five male pigs and
10:2635 female pigs, and over the next three years, thousands of pigs made their way to Black
10:31families. Hamer especially loved the pig bank, stating that, quote,
10:35"...I wouldn't take nothing for our golden pigs."
10:38Unfortunately, without institutional backing or resources, the Freedom Farm Collective
10:43only lasted a handful of years, but at its height, it was one of the largest employers
10:47in Sunflower County, Mississippi.
10:51According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, Hamer was actually partly responsible
10:55for the Voting Rights Act's passage thanks to her 1965 civil rights case, Hamer v. Campbell.
11:01Brought against the Circuit Clerk of Mississippi for restricting Black people's right to register
11:05and vote, Hamer's victory in court even allowed the elections to be overturned due to their
11:10discriminatory practices.
11:12Even after the Voting Rights Act was finally passed in 1965, Fannie Lou Hamer continued
11:17to focus on equal voting rights. Despite the federal protections that the Voting Rights
11:22Act claimed to guarantee, though, white people in power continued to try to prevent Black
11:26people from registering and voting. Still, she fought on. According to PBS, in 1970,
11:33Hamer organized plaintiffs for a class-action lawsuit regarding school desegregation in
11:37Sunflower County. This suit resulted in the district court ordering the county to merge
11:42its segregated schools into a single public school system.
11:47Fannie Lou Hamer's health suffered during her final years. In 1976, she was diagnosed
11:52with breast cancer and underwent a radical mastectomy. She continued her civil rights
11:57work as long as she could, but as her health worsened, fundraising and public speaking
12:01became more and more difficult.
12:03Hamer died on March 14th, 1977, her life cut tragically short at the age of 59. Hundreds
12:09of people came to pay their respects, but some regretted the media circus that transpired.
12:15According to Fannie Lou Hamer, The Life of a Civil Rights Icon by Ernest N. Bracey, some
12:20of her fellow activists believed that dignitaries looking for a photo-op ended up overshadowing
12:25coverage of Hamer's life and work in the mourning being done by her real friends, family, and
12:30neighbors.
12:31Hamer was buried at the Freedom Farm Cooperative, and her gravestone bears her famous motto,
12:35We are sick and tired of being sick and tired.