In 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer helped to found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. That is one of a number of benchmarks of the Civil Rights Movement that we will recall on their 50th anniversaries this year.
Activists established the party to protest recognition of her state’s all-white delegation to the Democratic National Convention, and Hamer will long be remembered for her testimony before the party’s credentials committee during a televised session detailing the brutal beatings she and others suffered for taking a stand for civil rights.
“Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we . . .[are] threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?” she asked those on the committee and the nation.
March is Women’s History Month, which this year will carry the theme “Celebrating Women of Character, Courage and Commitment,” and Hamer was the embodiment of those attributes.
Hamer, one of many notable women of the movement, also worked closely with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other endeavors to combat discrimination, injustice and poverty. Born on Oct. 6, 1917, as one of 20 children in a sharecropping family in Montgomery County, Miss., she worked in the cotton fields from the time she was 6 years old, alongside her family and later at her husband’s side, according to published accounts. She had little formal education.
Her civil-rights activism may have begun earlier but was ignited in 1962 at the age of 45 when after attending an organizing meeting, she traveled with a group to a county courthouse to attempt to register to vote. They were unsuccessful, but that act cost her a job and a home that same night when in retaliation for her participation in the voter-registration action, she was kicked off the plantation where she had labored for nearly two decades. This strengthened her resolve to work through the movement to secure the right to vote for others though she was often threatened, shot at, jailed and once beaten badly enough to suffer permanent damage to her kidneys and a leg. She died in 1977 after a long battle with breast cancer. One of the quotes for which she is best known appears on her tombstone: “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
She is one of 39 women whose speeches are included in an anthology, Women and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965, compiled by Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon. (University of Mississippi Press, January 2009), available for $45 on DiverseBooks.net
