Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer lived most of her life working as a sharecropper in the Mississippi Delta. She became active in the civil rights movement once members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) spoke at her rural church. The year was 1962; Hamer was 44 years old and after learning about her rights and entitlements as an American citizen she spent the next fifteen years working for the interrelated causes of civil and human rights for all.

She is pictured here speaking before the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Hamer told this committee--and the nation--about the retaliation she suffered upon trying to register. Hamer stunned her respective audiences as she spoke about being fired from her job and shot at for trying to register, in addition to being arrested and brutally beaten for attending a voter registration workshop. "Is this America?" She asked through tears, "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?"

After this impassioned address, Hamer got invitations to speak in communities across the nation. She traveled from Mississippi to Seattle to Boston, New York, and Berkeley, California, sharing her experiences and encouraging all Americans to join the fight for civil rights.

Beyond the causes of voting and representative politics, Hamer also raised awareness about poverty in the Delta. She spent the last years of her life organizing a farm cooperative for the poor in her community, as well as securing decent homes and clothing for her neighbors.

Hamer died in 1977. At her funeral, which was held in the same church where she first learned of her citizenship rights, Ambassador Andrew Young declared: "Once in a while, in the course of human events, there comes a person who by the sheer force of the human spirit is able to change that course of events." To Young, Hamer embodied "just how far we can come simply on the power and the faith of the human spirit."

I find Hamer intriguing not only because of her strong spirit, but also because of the way she expressed this spirit through discourse--written, spoken, and sung. I am currently working on several Hamer-related projects. The first is an anthology of her speeches, which I am co-editing with Davis W. Houck and publishing with the University Press of Mississippi. The second project is a rhetorical biography, a revised version of my dissertation that I plan to pitch to several presses this spring. And the third is a documentary project spearheaded by Hamer’s niece, Ms. Monica Land.

If you share my interest and devotion to Mrs. Hamer, consider donating to a statue fund in her honor. For more information about the statue and other efforts to honor her legacy, visit:http://www.fannielouhamer.info/

See the Publications tab for more information and check back for links to her speech recordings, coming soon!

Maegan Parker Brooks, PhD

Independent Scholar