"History They Didn 't Teach You in School"--October 6th, 1917: Fannie Lou Hamer b : Houston Indymedia

On October 6th, 1917, Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer, one of the most memorable figures in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, was born in Mississippi, the youngest of 20 children, born to Mississippi sharecropper parents. She attended school for just 6 years and couldn't read or write well, but she was a major contributor to the black struggle for freedom.

Fannie Lou Hamer became active in the Civil Rights movement in 1962, when, inspired by the activities of the SCLC and SNCC, she helped organize a voter-registration drive among the African-Americans of Ruleville, Mississippi, although she herself was denied the vote because she couldn't pay a poll tax.

In June 1963, she and other African-American women who had been riding a Trailways bus to attend a civil rights workshop, were stopped by Mississippi county police and taken to jail, where the chief of police forced black male prisoners to beat her and her companions. After the beating she was held in a cell for three days and sustained permanent damage to her feet, kidneys and one eye. That same night she was beaten, he friend Medgar Evers was assassinated in his own Missiiippi driveway. Later that fall, the police who had beaten her were put on trial in federal court in Jackson, Mississippi, where an all-white jury acquitted them.

In 1964, she helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an alternative to the white racist Missisiisipii Democratic Party, and at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, she and other MFDP delegates challenged the regular Mississippi delegation for floor credentials. Thouugh several other states delegations supported their challenge, establishment liberals like Joe Rauh, Hubert Humphrey and President LBJ denied the MFDP seats at the convention.

Though they'd lost the battle, Fannie Lou Hamer electrified Americans with her testimony before the Democratic Party credentials committee: "If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America? The land of the free and the home of the brave? Where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hook, because our lives be threatened daily?" She told them how the blacks in Mississippi had been prevented from voting, from attending precinct meetings and from the most basic forms of democracy, about how she had been beaten in Winona, and then she wept. Offered a compromise of only two seats at the Convention, she rejected it saying "We didn't come all this way for no two seats when all of us is tired." Lyndon Johnson, to try to stifle the impact of her powerful words, called a press conference at the very moment Fannie Lou Hamer was testifying to try to take attention away from the Democrat's hypocritical position on Civil Rights, but Hamer's message was too strong to suppress.

In 1968, The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party took on a new name - The Mississippi Loyalist Democratic Party, to reflect its broadened membership which now included sympathetic white members. In fact, Fannie Lou Hamer was an offical delegate to the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, where she took her seat to a standing ovation.

In the years following that convention, Fannie Lou Hamer worked to help the poor of Ruleville, while in fact, she was still poor herself. In the following nine years, until her death in 1977, she raised money for low-income housing, started a day-care center, which still bears her name, and made plans for a garment factory to provide jobs, and she ran, unsuccessfully, for the Mississippi state senate in 1971.

Her most cherished project was the Freedom Farm Cooperative. She liked to say "if you give a hungry man food, he will eat it. If you give him land, he will grow his own food." That's precisely what more than five thousand people did on the 680 acres of the Freedom Farm. When she started the Freedom Farm Cooperative, she had only 40 acres.

She often said that she was "sick and tired of being sick and tired" and she would always sing the old Negro Spiritual "this little light of mine" as a rallying song for civil rights and non-violence. Though living in poverty and lacking formal education, she challenged the powerful white establishment and articulated the most cherished hopes of blacks and poor people everywhere.

Recommended reading:

Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer

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