← The History Chicks : A Women's History Podcast
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- [00:01]
Susan
Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental. Hello and welcome to the show.
- [00:10]
Bea
In honor of Martin Luther King Day, here again is our coverage of Fannie Lou Hamer, who put her own body on the front line for civil rights.
- [00:20]
Susan
And now on with the show.
- [00:24]
Bea
Fannie Lou Hamer began life as a small child whose hard labor was key to her family's survival. She grew up to become a fiery civil rights activist who would not be silenced by intimidation, violence, or the personal wishes of the President of the United States himself. Let's talk about Fannie Lou Hamer.
- [00:47]
Susan
But first, let's drop her into history. In 1962, Rwanda and Jamaica both became independent countries. The elite military force, the U.S. navy SEALs were established. An anxiety induced psychogenic illness that was not funny at all, called the Laughter Epidemic, spread across modern day Tanzania. First lady Jackie Kennedy gave her famous televised tour of the White House. The Beatles, Barbara Streisand and the Osmond brothers began their professional careers. And Walter Cronkite began anchoring the CBS Evening News. The Jetsons, the Lucy Show, Johnny Carson's Tonight show and the Beverly Hillbillies all made their TV debut. Rachel Carson's environmental science book Silent Spring was first published. Jim Carrey, Sheryl Crow, Steve Irwin, Matthew Broderick, Tom Cruise and Jodie Foster were all born. Marilyn Monroe and Eleanor Roosevelt died. And in 1962, Mississippian Fannie Lou Hamer learned that she could vote. And it changed her life.
- [01:47]
Bea
Fannie Alma Louise Dubois Townsend was born on October 6, 1917, the youngest of the 20. That's a 2 0. You heard me. Children of James and Louella Townsend in Montgomery County, Mississipp.
- [02:02]
Susan
Of those 20, there's 14 brothers and five sisters. That is a huge family.
- [02:08]
Bea
Mr. And Mrs. Townsend were sharecroppers. And sharecropping was a system of agricultural life where poor families provided the work in exchange for a share of the profits. Sounds good. Ish. But practically speaking, it was little better than the slavery it had replaced. Landowners really had such power over the workers. And number one, they owned the houses. They could charge whatever rent they wanted, and they typically would advance the workers money for rent and for supplies. And so, oh, what happens at the end when harvest comes? Oh, you owe a lot of money. How much money? Oh, well, and then you get this CVS receipt looking list, you know what I mean? Three feet long and full of details that you don't remember. They also owned whatever stores there were in the neighborhood and set the prices abnormally high. What are you going to do? You know, you're not going to drive to the next town because the prices there are set by the next landowner for his people. Not very many people could read and write or tote up with the owners had advanced them for farm equipment or for store credit. And you are not going to believe this. The seeds and the fertilizer came out of the sharecroppers half before the split.
- [03:26]
Susan
Fannie was born just two generations out of slavery. Unfortunately, not much had changed. The plantation owners had just substituted sharecropping for these people that they had owned before. And they, you know, they didn't technically own them, but financially they were tied to them for life.
- [03:42]
Bea
Say it was a poor crop year, the owner could legally prevent you from leaving to seek your fortune elsewhere. Yes. Because you owed money and, and so you'd have to try to flee in the night and hope you made it to somewhere safe. If that seems like a whole bunch of loopholes to get around the Emancipation Proclamation, why, you would be right. It didn't come to that exactly for the Townsend family though. The boll weevil, which is like a bug that attacks the cotton plant, chased them out of Montgomery county to the plantation of one Mr. E.W. brandon over in Sunflower county, one of the only places around that escaped the boll weevil. Why, I'm not an entomologist, I have no idea. But somehow this area, you know, okay, Harken back to Forrest Gump. The hurricane has taken out all the other shrimp boats and here's Forrest Gump with all the shrimp. Well, that's what happened to Sunflower County. Everyone else got decimated by the boll weevil and Sunflower county ended up being the best producing cotton land in the best producing cotton area in the world, the Mississippi Delta, where all of the nutrients from the Mississippi river end up getting dumped off it's fertile ground.
- [04:57]
Susan
It's fertile ground and it's close to transportation. This is valuable land when cotton plantations were just forming.
- [05:04]
Bea
Unfortunately for the workers, cotton is one of the most high maintenance crops you can possibly grow. From clearing the land to planting itself, to nearly constant thinning, weeding, hoeing, to the long months of harvest, often in the blazing heat. So you're a landowner and a family of 22 shows up, come right in. That's a good workforce when you only have to provide one house, one house.
- [05:32]
Susan
For all those people.
- [05:34]
Bea
Two year old Fannie Lou, as she was called by the family, and a few assorted other Littles had to stay at home. But since it was critical that all possible workers were dealing with the cotton at all possible times. Fanny was in the care of very small children all day, which led to a major catastrophe. While her brother was trying to give her a bath, he dropped her on the ground and her leg broke audibly and visibly. Her slightly older sister, I mean, look around if you have small children, bent the child's leg back as best she could and wrapped it up in a piece of clothing from the clothesline. Nobody went for a grown up. These were definitely kids under 10 and probably kids under the age of 6. And Fanny limped for the rest of her life. Additionally, it is thought that she, like most of the sharecroppers in this area, survived polio in her childhood, which left her limbs damaged and set her up for a future syndrome where the polio comes back and gets you decades after you've had polio the first time. Sanitation was a low priority for the landowners, of course, since it didn't make any money and disease just ran rampant through the workforce. I actually was wondering if it was much better today, like at a non polio level. Maybe like think E. Coli level. I just will never forget I had this assistant named Miguel who grew up as a child picking strawberries in the field. And he used to say to me, b, there was never a place to wash your hands. I don't know what you think we're doing out there. It's food for thought. And sometimes there's just, especially these days, so much to care about that I was like, okay, filing it away, filing that away for Dolores Huerta, because I can't. I mean, you know what I mean? There's like layer upon layer of badness here. And I just, I couldn't unpack everything. The thing about her leg is for her whole adult life, the polio was given as the reason she was limping. And it wasn't until they were grown Alec adults, I want to say, in their 40s, that her brother admitted that's what had happened. For real.
- [07:47]
Susan
Ah, well, I saw that it some said just polio and I was like, okay. And then I saw a broken leg and I was like, oh, where did that come from?
- [07:55]
Bea
From the brother's lips.
- [07:57]
Susan
Yeah.
- [07:57]
Bea
The Townsend's house for 22 people was like spare wood nailed together like a tree house with a fire pit in the middle. Not that much of a house. Water was carried by hand from a nearby river. They were able to grow a few food crops outside. Greens, sweet potatoes and onions mostly. But the staples of rice and flour to make bread had to be bought at inflated prices from the landowner's exploitative company store. The deck was stacked against sharecroppers no matter which way you looked, and in a way that I don't fully understand, so maybe you can explain it to me. Mr. Brandon sort of tricked Fannie Lou into starting her own indebtedness to him at the age of six. Like he kind of funneled her into the workforce in a tricky way.
- [08:48]
Susan
My guess is this worked so smoothly. This was not the first time he did this. And this is what he did to. I'm going to guess all the kids. You know, once they looked like they were old enough to start working in the fields, they became kind of his targets and he worked on them until they gave in. In this particular situation, Fanny was playing on the side of the road and he drove by and stopped and said, hey, kid, you think you can pick cotton? Sure you can. I'll tell you what, I'll pay you with some candy from the commissary. How does that sound? She's like, candy, all right, let me see what I can do. She went in that very first week and she picked a 30 pounds of cotton her very first week in the fields. She couldn't have weighed much more than. And from that point, because of the loan of the candy, she was indebted to him, right at the age of six and out in the fields, part of the system.
- [09:39]
Bea
So Fannie Lou was a full day's worker when you and I were just now discovering Sesame street and counting with the count. So from sunup to sun down during cotton season, it differed by year, generally April to October ish, sometimes stretching to November, depending on the year. In all weathers, beating sun, driving rain, Mrs. Townsend Luella would sing to help everyone pass the time. Church songs, field songs, songs passed down from her African ancestors. And again, look into your heart, parents, among you. Who hasn't tried the. Let's see who can put the most Legos away the fastest. I'm gonna time you. It's all fun and games when all you want to do is clean up the living room before dinner. But this mom had to make her children's work into a game as best she could in the same ways, you know, I'll count to 10. It's a race who can do it backwards. Unlike the Legos, though, this was in deadly earnest. This was more like that everything is beautiful movie where the mom tried to make the field or I. E. The camp not so bad for her children. And that's really heartbreaking how much energy she spent in that pursuit. And that is a mental load, you know, in its own. In addition to all the physical load.
- [10:59]
Susan
Yeah. You know, one of the songs that she sang, it kind of tumbled me down a little bit of a hole because I remember jumping rope to this, I think when I was a kid, and suddenly I was like, oh, my gosh, this is horrible. I can't believe that Jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton was actually picking a bale of cotton. I thought it was just words when I was a kid. And apparently schools are still teach, but fortunately, parents are parents smarter than I are speaking up and saying, do you know the racist origins of this particular song? It is a slave song. Do you really want our kids standing up on that stage singing it without context?
- [11:39]
Bea
I think context is key. I think knowing the songs is actually very beneficial, but with the appropriate background so nobody forgets, you know?
- [11:49]
Susan
Exactly.
- [11:50]
Bea
So that's like so much of history. With the proper framework, you can just teach, you know, just like a Confederate statue in a museum is a different thing.
- [12:01]
Susan
Right. Than on the street.
- [12:03]
Bea
Yeah. So emphasis. Speaking of deadly earnest on the word deadly, one day, the overseer. Yes, they still call him that. I'm going to call him the assistant manager, because it's my podcast too, you know, grabbed a hold of one of the littler boys one day, and Mama was over there, lickety split, twisting that white man's arm behind his back to the point where he begged her to let him go. No white man is going to beat my kids. Do you hear me? Mama, who's one generation removed from slavery. Her own mother had been such a victim that 20 of her 23 children had been born to white men. And her daughter was not. Not going to play this, you know, she was not going to play around with the limited freedoms they had wrested from white.
- [12:55]
Susan
So what Mama started to do was every day she went out in the fields, she brought with her a bucket, and in that bucket was a Luger, a gun, just in case she needed it to protect her children. That's how far she was willing to go.
- [13:08]
Bea
And that is a dangerous proposition in Mississippi. But evidently the fear in his heart was sufficient because he didn't re up on his aggressiveness. I have never, not ever, in the whole course of our podcast, heard of anybody who worked harder than Fanny Lou's parents. In addition to work in the fields, Mrs. Townsend did the landlord's family laundry and cooked for them. In the off season, she helped process pigs in the neighborhood in exchange for parts like this snout, which they called the snoot, by the way, the trotters, the intestines. And then she would go scrapping with the younger kids. So this is a long standing tradition that goes back at least to the Bible, although it was called gleaning. After a commercial harvest when the owner is done, as far as he's concerned, everything that can be easily gotten is gotten. Poor people, in this case the Townsends, could go through the field and pick off just anything that had been blown by the wind or fallen little half things that aren't worth messing with and sticking in the sack. And no one had any shoes and the frozen ground froze their little feet. But sometimes if they went to enough fields, they could get a whole sack to trade for essentials. At this store, though, everyone had to walk miles and miles to get a sack in this way. This is how poor they were. That that was something they felt like was reasonable for them to do.
- [14:40]
Susan
Papa also had a couple things on the side. In addition to all of the work on the plantation, he was also a minister, which isn't a fiscally rewarding job, but it is spiritually rewarding. And it was good for the family. All the kids were raised on the Bible. In Bible stories, they were their childhood stories. He also had a little side moonshine business, a little still going.
- [15:06]
Bea
And he ran a little juke joint like a local hangout. I have to tell you, no judgment. I myself had a great grandpa who alternated between local sheriff and really good bootlegger. You do what you have to do. But the unrelenting struggle of it all was just what killed me. I mean, circumstances just rigged against you. Get this too. Cotton loses 2/3 of its weight when the seeds come out. And that weight is what they paid for, not the weight your actual human body had to drag through the fields in the 100 degree heat. And then the scales were calibrated to give short weight. After all of that, you know what greed is? Evidently a hell of a drug.
- [15:47]
Susan
Yeah. Considering that those same seeds would be sold back to the family.
- [15:51]
Bea
Oh, so after all of this hard work and suffering, the family was still often hungry still. And six year old Fanny once asked her mother, why don't we have anything and the white people have good food and shoes in a house and they don't do anything. I want to be white.
- [16:09]
Susan
Mama's response was quick and loving, but firm. She said, there is nothing in the world wrong with being black. If God had wanted you to be white, you would be White. Accept yourself for what you are and respect yourself as a black child. When you get grown, respect yourself as a black woman and other people will respect you too.
- [16:29]
Bea
That's good. That's, that's good for self esteem and, and the underlying message of her mother's words in these formative years, it's not because those white people are better than you that they have these things. It's because these particular white people are cheats and crooks and criminals and terrorists. This is me, Bea, not baby. Fannie Lou. I mean, Mississippi was the site of hundreds of lynchings of black Americans for made up reasons or no reason at all, except to keep the African American population afraid to go against the rigged system. The Townsends sent their children to school. What school there was held in a rickety jack with cobbled together supplies cast offs from white children in the neighborhood. And the school only went from December to March when the kids weren't needed for the cotton. And since no one had any shoes or coats, there were weeks that even though school was technically in session, the students just physically could not go. Which is also heartbreaking, you know, which.
- [17:30]
Susan
Makes the amount of education that Fannie actually got pretty remarkable. She was an extraordinarily bright child. She picked up easily on math, she rocked spelling bees, and she was a voracious reader. She loved to read. Fortunately for these kids, they also had Sunday school, which we think, oh, it's just going to be Bible lessons. But no, because you're going to be reading the Bible, you know, you're going to be thinking, how does that lesson apply to my life? Which is critical thinking. So they are learning things in Sunday school that was supporting the things that they were learning in real school. So she had that backup education also.
- [18:09]
Bea
They, though unlucky in so many ways, were lucky enough that during the period when Fanny was in school, they had this college educated, passionate, encouraging teacher who was 100% in, in developing the kids under his care. That was not always the case even in white schools, you know, where sometimes the ladies would take a teaching job until they got married and that's the end, you know, and they were just marking time. This was not one of those teachers that he sourced reading mater for his brighter students. He cared about their education. He taught them poetry. Fannie Lou, her parents were so proud that would have her perform for the neighborhood, reciting poetry with her little hand gestures on the, on the table while everyone sat around and clapped. And half the time, you know, those kid performances are like. But no, she really had a Great voice and a good memory and, you know, good eyebrows for expressive talking. And she was the hit. She was good.
- [19:07]
Susan
You grow up in a church like she did, you get some very animated pastors. And I suspect that's where she got her, you know, her training, the hand gestures and the eye movements and, you know, just projection from the pastors.
- [19:24]
Bea
I just really wish that she had had access to a library.
- [19:29]
Susan
I know.
- [19:29]
Bea
You know, the books that were around, especially since they'd come from white schools, were not depicting the black experience in very positive ways. They were slaves with poor diction. They were the fools that, you know, the closest you could get to a hero was Little Black Sambo. And if you read the story of Little Black Sambo, sure, he's a hero, but the illustrations were so problematic. And, you know, even Langston Hughes later said that that book and its illustrations did more damage to the black children's psyche than almost any bullying they got in the outside world. You know, they internalized that as the picture of themselves. They didn't see quality role models in their education, except for Fannie and her sisters and brothers and the other children that went to that school because their teacher was that role model. You know, so I just grasping at straws for something positive.
- [20:27]
Susan
And they also had parents who were supportive of their education.
- [20:31]
Bea
Yeah.
- [20:31]
Susan
You know, and they, first off, they let them go to school. That's a big deal. And not be, you know, working during those particular hours, even though it was the off season.
- [20:42]
Bea
And so daily life went day after day, year after year, until a series of incidents which began when Fannie lou was around 12. She and her mother were working with a crew clearing land. That's what you have to do right before the planting season, when all of a sudden, Mrs. Townsend shrieked and covered her face, and Fanny Lou pried her mother's hands away and saw with absolute horror a wood chip protruding out of her mother's eyeball. What can you do? Fannie Lou pulled it out. Oh, my God.
- [21:20]
Susan
I know the shivers.
- [21:21]
Bea
I just washed out her mother's eye and bound it up. And. And my friends, that is all the medical attention that her mother ever got for this condition.
- [21:30]
Susan
That's kind of the same method that her sister used on her leg when she broke it.
- [21:34]
Bea
And we know how well that worked. So Mrs. Townsend's vision continued to worsen. The kids, like they do, were growing up and moving on. The workforce was diminishing. Fannie Lou's parents were in their 60s now, and it was time honestly to start executing their plan. B All those jobs, all those years with help from grown children and rock hard discipline had made. I was gonna call it a retirement fund, but like a new life fund possible. Mr. Townsend rented a nicer, still dilapidated but solid cabin on a new lot and was in the process of fixing it up. He bought second hand farm machinery little by little. A used car. I mean that's the Heights. Three mules named Ella, Henry and Bird that were half pet and half farm labor. Surprised they had any fur left because they were petted so much. He bought a cow they named Della who produced milk and got hugged within an inch of her life. Every day the kids would go to the new place before school and feed everybody and tell them about their day and give them kisses on their foreheads. It was so exciting, this new potential life that they were building.
- [23:04]
Susan
It was exciting for them. But to the white supremacists in the area, it was a black person going above their station in the middle of the night. Someone came in and put a highly toxic roadicide to kill mice and rats into the livestock food.
- [23:22]
Bea
So they arrive in the morning to find one of the mules dead and the other three animals dying in in agony in the farmyard. You know, for no other reason but spite, all the animals died and the dream was dead too. We never did get back up again, said Fannie Lou later. And so, at 13, despite her passion for learning, Fannie Lou left school to work full time to help her family. What was the point of life? I mean, the despair. After all of this, the Townsends found their comfort at church, the only African American led institution anywhere on earth, as far as they could reach. And Papa channeled his feelings into these impassioned speeches from his pulpit. You know, fret not due to evildoers, for they shall be cut down like the green grass and wither away. Amen. Mr. Townsend, as preacher, as Susan said earlier, viewed his work a lot like we do ours. Maybe relate the scripture to the experience of your audience, use stories to explain principles. He was a naturally powerful speaker. That example stood Fanny in good stead. He passed that trick onto several of his children. Some of his sons became ministers on their own. And Fanny learned to vent her own passions in song with her remarkable voice. And a song I didn't even know I knew has been stuck in my head now for like a week.
- [24:56]
Susan
I knew the song. I know that song very well. And it was stuck in mine too.
- [25:00]
Bea
It's that this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine. You know that song and I can just imagine everyone standing up and clapping. And it was just the one period in every week where you could have some hope.
- [25:15]
Susan
And the songs were stories that Papa had taught them to apply to their own lives, too. They are the little lights. They got that lots of little kids just think it's a light. They imagine a candle. She's realizing she's that light.
- [25:29]
Bea
At 20 years of age, Fannie Lou Townsend became Mrs. Charlie Gray. Mr. Grey, a shadowy figure about which we know nothing. He's lost in the midst of time. The only thing we really know about him is that they did make it official. They had a legal marriage in these days of common law, accepted marriages. And we really only know about him because he ended up filing for divorce. More on that in just a second. But Fanny had been married only a year when her father died of a massive stroke. The heart of the community really went with him. And so in the last mention of Mr. Charlie Gray forever, first I'm concerned. He filed for divorce when Fannie Lou was 26, citing desertion and adultery as his wife was openly living with another man. And a year later, Fannie Lou Gray became Fannie Lou Hamer.
- [26:26]
Susan
Charlie made a very clean exit because in 95% of the material you'll read about her, he doesn't even exist. That whole marriage, when she's talking about it, when other biographers are talking about it, they skip right over it. So we didn't. But there you go.
- [26:43]
Bea
He obviously had a very big impact on the arc of her life.
- [26:46]
Susan
Yeah, no kidding. Husband number two and final husband was a man named Perry Hamer. He was nicknamed Pap. He was a tractor driver on the plantation next door. So Fannie took her life on one plantation and simply moved it to the one next door.
- [27:04]
Bea
So Mr. Hamer worked as a sharecropper? Yes, but he also drove the tractors and all the farm equipment, which is more skilled than you think. You have to know how to drive those machines. And he repaired them. Kind of the only one on the farm that knew how half that stuff even worked. That's pretty valuable. And he was kind of more of an assistant manager than he was just a person who worked on the land. So he had more of a position of power within her new home than her own father had had. And right after they settled in, a local single mother gave them her daughter to raise. Dorothy Jean was their first child and a great, great comfort as Fannie Lou suffered a series of miscarriages. So Pap already had this position of responsibility. And after a while Mr. Marlowe, this is the landowner in question in the new house, realized how intelligent and literate Fannie Lou was, and he made her his timekeeper.
- [28:08]
Susan
Like Pap's job. This is a very respected job on the plantations. Her job was to work between the workers and management and weigh everything and keep those logs that said, you owe us this and you've earned that.
- [28:25]
Bea
And she, in her subtle way, got back at old Mr. Marlowe and his cheating ways because the machine she used to weigh the cotton was actually calibrated correctly. So the people that brought in the cotton got paid for what cotton they brought in. Revolutionary. And kind of dangerous actually, too.
- [28:44]
Susan
Yeah, very dangerous. She would keep Marlo's scale with her, use her own, and then when she saw somebody coming, she'd hide her own and get his out. So she must have done a brilliant job, not only acting, but with the books, you know, just to make it look like there wasn't this huge increase in the crops that couldn't be explained.
- [29:06]
Bea
Right, right. So it's a long game.
- [29:09]
Susan
It is. And she played it very well because she was highly respected. The Hamer family got the quote, nicer house on the plantation. It didn't leak. That would be about all that made it nicer.
- [29:22]
Bea
She followed her mother's example and worked in white families houses in the off season. But similar to the way that she had subverted the system in the fields, when the white families mistreated her, she leveled the playing field in her own way, in her domestic work as well.
- [29:42]
Susan
I love this. I'm like, which of us gets to tell this story? Go ahead.
- [29:46]
Bea
She subverted in her own way. If they told her she wasn't good enough to eat with them, she served herself a full meal in the kitchen before the white family had a bite. Can't use your bathroom many's the time she chuckled with satisfaction. Chin deep in bubbles in your bathtub. I love it. But, you know, humor aside, it sort of crystallized again when a little white child told her, oh, Fanny Lou, you don't have to be so careful with that third bathroom because it's only our dog's bathroom. The Marlo dog had a bathroom when Mr. Marlo had them living in a house with a broken toilet that he refused to let anybody fix. The system is a crook, thought Fannie Lou. And everybody is crooks in it. Mrs. Townsend came to live with Fannie Lou's family when her daughter was 36. And shortly afterward, a man showed up on their doorstep with his niece, a little tiny baby who Was badly burned, due, he said, to the neglect of her parents. Or maybe it was the same situation that landed Fannie Lou with a limp. You know, small children in charge of babies who fall into the fire.
- [31:40]
Susan
Right.
- [31:41]
Bea
As busy as everybody was, I mean, it didn't necessarily have to be willful neglect.
- [31:47]
Susan
No.
- [31:47]
Bea
Just the way those books are written are like, her neglectful family, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, it could just be circumstances.
- [31:53]
Susan
Yeah. I read one that the family was too impoverished to properly take care of her and address her medical needs, which was nicer, I guess.
- [32:02]
Bea
Yeah. Well. So the Hamers nursed that baby. Virgie.
- [32:06]
Susan
Yeah.
- [32:07]
Bea
Is that the feminine form of Virgil? I guess. I don't think there is one.
- [32:11]
Susan
I think it's kind of a Virginia, but I don't think that was her formal name.
- [32:15]
Bea
Well, they nursed that baby back to health, upon which time her biological mother came to claim her, of course. Fair enough. But soon that uncle was back, claiming neglect and mistreatment again. And the Hamers agreed to take her back, but only if it was permanent. And so they adopted her. Our Fanny Lou was working all of the hours that were sent from above to make sure, and I quote, her mother was treated like a human being at last. That always weighed on her, that her mother had only had indignity in her life. In the early 1950s, the Hamers started attending this yearly conference that was held in the nearby all black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi. And the mission of this group, called the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, was to promote civil rights and education and business ownership. Some of the members you might recognize include Medgar Evers and Thurgood Marshall. They instituted a boycott. Don't buy gas where you can't use the restroom. They talked about school integration, voting rights, community outreach, the future trajectory of, quote, the African race. Fannie Lou later said the experience of all this passion and optimism really blew her away. That spark of hope that went out when she left school at 13 was reignited. But first, closer to home. Virgie was only one year old when a boy named Emmett Till was visiting family from his home in Chicago, 45 minutes away from Fannie Lou's house in Mississippi.
- [33:55]
Susan
If you don't know the story, Emmett Till was lynched. He was murdered for the alleged crime of whistling at a white woman. They took him, murdered him, mutilated his body, threw it into a river. Now, why we know about Emmett Till and none of the other hundreds of lynchings that were happening in Mississippi at the time. Mississippi was the lynching capital of the United States is because his mother decided to call the press and bring them to his funeral after they found his body and show them what people had.
- [34:26]
Bea
Done to her son, who was only 14. The all white jury failed to convict his murderers, causing celebration from the likes of the kkk. And after this scenario and the unbelievable acquittal of his murderers, the vaguely bubbling cauldron of the civil rights movement, which had been heating up since back in the days of the civil war, came to a rolling and angry boil all over America. In the world at large, the following events were happening. Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus and caused the Montgomery bus boycotts. One of our episodes, don't know the number. Ultimately, 40,000 African Americans boycotted the bus system for over a year. The Little Rock nine were the first African American students to integrate a high school in Arkansas in 1957. The Civil Rights act of 1957 that we literally just talked about during the Zephyr Wright episode was passed, though, of course, chock full of loopholes. In 1960, sit ins began at Woolworth's lunch counter in North Carolina, inspiring similar protests all over the country. 1960, Ruby Bridges, age 6, integrates an elementary school in New Orleans. And in 1961, the Freedom Riders began their forays through the South. Both black and white activists who protested segregation at lunch counters and buses stations and were met with horrific racist violence up to and including someone blowing up one of their buses. That same year, though, Fannie's personal life got a one, two punch.
- [36:10]
Susan
She had been having some abdominal pain and went to the doctor who said that she had a mass that needed to be removed. Okay, well, let's do that. So she scheduled the surgery. While doing the surgery, the doctor also performed a hysterectomy, something she had not approved, but shockingly, was legal for him to do.
- [36:29]
Bea
Surgery is always scary and you have to have trust in your doctors that they have your best interests at heart. And he did this procedure not for any legitimate reason. Like, oh no, I got in here and I'm seeing all this cancer. You know what? You could buy that, right? Like, oh no, I didn't know till I saw it. And it was dangerous and I took it out. Oh no. Brace yourselves for this scenario. The south was using this as a tactic to limit the black population. Involuntary sterilization. And the doctor didn't even tell her with his mouth that he had done it. The cook at his house heard his wife tell one of her white friends and the information made its way back to Her. The whole procedure was disrespectful. The whole just dismissal of, oh, well, you know, we don't need to tell the patient is inhuman. It's barbaric.
- [37:21]
Susan
And it was legal. I mean, Ms. legislation gave doctors the right to either tie the tubes of women without their knowledge who are giving birth or perform hysterectomies. If they only thought that perhaps that woman was too poor to take care of the child, that was what they'd hook it on. You know, oh, she's too poor to take care of a child. I'm doing this for her own good.
- [37:41]
Bea
A decision like that, you have to make that thoughtfully. And even then, it causes distress. Ask me how I know. And. And here is this white man asserting control over her body while she is unconscious. Are we horrified? 8,000 women over the course of this program fell victim to this exact practice. And I actually read on a eugenics website, which, you know what? For me to. You draw a red circle and then, hey, diagonal line through. Let my experience be your guide. It could have been as high as 65,000 people Sterilized men and women during this movement that didn't end until the 1970s. That is within my lifetime. Fannie Lou was only 44, and she would have loved to have had more children if she could, if her body would have cooperated after the removal of this fibroid or whatever was in there. But this choice was taken from her. This chance was taken from her. But what could she do? Get a white lawyer to sue a white doctor? She said, I may as well start hammering nails in my own casket. Fannie Lou Hamer is credited with calling this practice common as it was a, quote, Ms. appendectomy. And just after she had recovered physically from this major trauma, her mother died. Her heartbreak was indescribable. The bond between Mrs. Townsend and her youngest child had always been especially close. The whole family remarked on it, and Fannie Lou grieved that she, during her mother's lifetime, could not wash away the indignities of her mother's whole life. So it wasn't just the loss of her parent, you know, her heart, which was bad enough, but her just impotent rage against the system that had robbed her mother of what value? I just don't know what I'm trying to say. A lasting mark on society, like. Like the world wasted her mother's potential and. And you know, what world? It's not going to waste mine too. And something took hold of her. That was the spark, I think, for her Future affairs. And a window of opportunity opened up to her at the age of 45, when a national coalition of civil rights groups had begun a voter registration drive and she was asked to attend what was called a mass meeting to talk about registering to vote. Former generations of activists had put their focus on encouraging educated African American citizens to vote. They fought to get the vote in the first place and used it, too. We've spoken about their efforts and many other of our shows, but the strategy afoot in Fannie Lou's day was numbers. It's a Numbers game. Only 5% of eligible African American voters in Mississippi were registered at all. And so their votes, should they even be able to cast them, didn't really have that much of an impact. Many counties in this state had a majority black population, so what couldn't we do with a ratio like that? And that was what the voter registration drive was about, just getting the dragnet and leading people in great numbers to register to vote. But the loopholes, the intimidation tactics, lynching, violence, requirements, like if you, your father or grandfather were eligible to vote before January 1, 1867, then you could too. Who, I ask you, dear listeners, might be excluded from a rule like that that is the original grandfather clause. We didn't know that had a racist background to be grandfathered in, did we?
- [41:16]
Susan
But as the years progressed, they added more and more things to the laws of Mississippi that made it even harder for black people not only to register to vote, but to vote. If you registered to vote, your name got put in the paper. So it was broadcast for the entire county that you, a black person, sharecropper from this particular plantation, are trying to vote. Now, what happens when there's a huge white supremacist population in Mississippi, which there was. It was dangerous. It was very dangerous to do something as simple as registering to vote.
- [41:50]
Bea
Also having a literacy test when you mostly kept black children from any schooling past fifth grade, a poll tax they had to pay when you kept them poor. You know, it's just one thing after another. Fannie Lou Hamer was invited to a, quote, mass meeting. It's a word of mouth situation. Keep it on the DL at a church over in Ruleville. And the speaker's message really resonated with her. By exercising your constitutional right to vote, you can change the world. Now, Fannie Lou Hamer later says that this speech, this meeting that she went to in the year 1962 was the first time that she understood that African Americans had the right to vote.
- [42:35]
Susan
I had given that some thought and Perhaps she did know that black people could vote, but she also knew not only the hurdles that were in place, but the danger to her life if she tried to register. So being in this group of people, being told that yes, it is possible is what happened. It wasn't that she knew that she was, you know, constitutionally protected to vote. It's that she knew she could vote. That's how I read it.
- [43:01]
Bea
So all the meetings in the 50s told her it was theoretically a legality, but, like, looking around her, she's like, yeah, okay, Professor. Professor Google, it's not possible down here. Right. No matter what you say. But now with these people in a big group, she's like, okay, we might be there. Okay, you know what? I can accept that. Because I thought, didn't you go to all those meetings in the 50s? What were they talking about the whole.
- [43:24]
Susan
Time she went to those meetings? But she also lived her life in the community knowing what happened to people who tried.
- [43:30]
Bea
Yeah, I a hundred percent get that. Okay. So that actually nicely closes the circle for me because I had a big question mark. So at the end of this meeting, the organizers asked, who is brave enough to go to town on Friday and try to register to vote? And 18 hands went up, which was an unexpectedly high number for these organizers. Like, whoa, oh, okay. You know, including, of course, Fanny Lou. That's why we're talking about it. But they had so many people, they didn't fit in everybody's cars, and so they had to kind of cast around for a big ride. And one of the farmers had this decommissioned school bus that he used to kind of transport migrant workers from the farm to the bus stop when it was harvest season. And so he said that they could use that and he would drive them because, like, who knows? You know, old bus has a lot of tricks. I might as well drive it rather than try to explain it to you. I've had those cars before, too. So it was him in a bus driving these 18 people. And then all the organizers were either on the bus or convoying in cars before and aft Fannie Lou Hamer with her pocketbook on her arm and a.
- [44:35]
Susan
Spare pair of shoes, because although she was willing to try to vote, she knew what the repercussions might be and that she might get thrown in jail.
- [44:43]
Bea
So she brought spare shoes, like comfortable shoes, so her heels wouldn't pinch.
- [44:48]
Susan
These are my jail shoes, just in case.
- [44:51]
Bea
Well, so they turned a corner, and the mob scene that met them was a little unexpected. I wonder what's going on with Fanny Lou's first thought. And then she realized, oh, we're going on. This is for us. And the local citizens Council, upstanding businessmen that Fannie Lou Hamer called the KKK with lipstick on, met them en masse on the sidewalk outside the bus. People were not cheerful. People were not using language appropriate for this particular podcast. And it was very, very intimidating, even to the organizers who had been through something sort of like this before. But Fannie Lou Hamer thought, you know, I do it now or I regret it forever. Fannie Lou said. She put her handbag on her arm and marched right up to that door, honey, eyes on the door the whole time, ignoring what was going on around her. And they all made it inside the door, and the registrar yelled at them, like, what do y'all want? And they said as politely as they could, we're here to register to vote. And trying to make it as big of a hassle as they can. The registrar said, okay, but only two of you at a time can go through this process. Everybody else has to wait outside. Wait outside. Among the white supremacist protesters who Fannie Lou Hamer later described as, and I quote, Jed Clampett. But they wasn't kidding.
- [46:15]
Susan
We rarely get to tie in to the dropped in history because the Bearly Hillbillies.
- [46:21]
Bea
Yeah.
- [46:22]
Susan
Debuted this year. Well done.
- [46:24]
Bea
Yeah. So the whole process, though, was purposely intimidating. But Fannie Lou was one of the first two.
- [46:32]
Susan
They brought them into a room. This is a literacy test now, we think, oh, you just have to read. She's got that right. No, they had to read a section of the Mississippi Constitution, which is essentially a legal document. Then they had to copy down what they had just read, and then they had to interpret it. It to the satisfaction of the registrar. So you could do the first two things that was cut and dry if you did it or not. The third thing was subjective. And the section that Fannie Lou had to read had phrases about de facto law. And she said later, I know as much about facto law as a horse knows about Christmas Day. So she failed that.
- [47:13]
Bea
All 18 of them failed. Surprise level. Well, to me, low. When the registrar has all the power to assign, hey, you know, they're going to show a picture of a stop sign to a white person. What does this encourage you to do? And the white person would be like, that's a stop sign. Oh, correct. Go ahead, you're registered to vote. But then they give her an obscure passage from the Mississippi Constitution to interpret. You know, like, you can see the implicit bias Just right there. So spirits were low on the bus on the way back, you know, what had they even accomplished? And the first thing that happened was name of your employer, question mark. And like, what have they done? They were jeopardizing all the hard work. You know, this was important, but was it this important to ruin up their lives? And, and now their names were out there and Fannie Lou started to sing and she sang and sang and they all started to join in and you can kind of see the movie scene, you know, one by one the voices raise in song and the mood lifts a little. The string orchestra comes in, you know, I'm just saying I can, I know, I can totally see it too. Yeah. But then they go into like a minor key because. Ruh. Row. A patrol car has pulled over the bus, joined by a whole group of other lit up police vehicles. This is not good. They board the bus and they began to harass the driver who was the owner of the bus. And what did they charge him for?
- [48:39]
Susan
The bus was the wrong color, it was too yellow. What? I know you could come up with a made up charge that was better than it kind of sort of looks like a school bus. A bus that this driver had been driving for years around the area.
- [48:55]
Bea
Yes. So suddenly, though, it has become incorrectly yellow. They threatened to take the driver to jail. And Fannie Lou and the other occupants of the bus said if you take him to jail, you have to take us all to jail. And that's paperwork in trouble. And fraka. And he's like, all right, all right, big fine hundred dollars. And everyone dug in their pocketbooks and their purses and tried to find some money and they came up with 30. And the policeman, who this was not on any kind of fine list, said he would accept 30. Okay, that's fine, you know, for your big transgression. And you guys can all get on your way now.
- [49:32]
Susan
Yeah, and me and my buddies have enough to go buy a couple beers each and talk about how we harassed.
- [49:37]
Bea
You all day that day. Unbeknownst to Fannie Lou, Mr. Marlowe, landowner of the place where she worked, had been over to ask her husband, where is Fanny? Oh, she went over to town, said Pap. No she's not. She's off to register to vote and we ain't gonna have that, said the owner. And Pap thought, huh, if he's willing to get this head up about it, this must be a very big deal. I, I didn't 100% understand what this was, what this meant. I thought it was going to be fruitless. But, like, he's mad, and this is probably a bigger deal than I thought. And when Fanny came home, Mr. Marlo came back over special and had some words for her, too.
- [50:19]
Susan
Now, remember, she's been working for this man for 18 years. She's a trusted and valued employee in his business. But he was insistent that she take her name off the registration, and she absolutely refused. Later in life, she said, I didn't go down there to register for him. I went down there to register for me. So her no was firm.
- [50:41]
Bea
He said, you know what? You can't stay here, Fannie Lou, if you don't do as I say. You get your name off that book or you have to go and get off my land. And you have till tomorrow morning. And Pap and Fannie Lou agreed it wasn't safe for her to stay at home even overnight if that info got around.
- [51:01]
Susan
Because telephone, telegraph, teleracist, the information was all over the county of what Fannie and those other 17 people had tried to do that day.
- [51:11]
Bea
So she walked back to town, and even that was probably dangerous because he'd been mad since, like, one in the afternoon, and now it was dark. You know, think about that. Just the walk back to town was fraught with possible catastrophe. She got back there and told the civil rights workers that she'd been thrown off the plantation because her feeling was firm. She doesn't want to take her name off the book. She trusted, employee for 18 years, was thrown away. Poof. Like that. And the visiting civil rights workers were in awe of the sacrifice she was making. They were mostly in their 20s and had a lot less to lose than she did. And Fanny was going to stand on her principles. So that night, after the civil rights workers had given her all the hugs and they had shed all the tears, one of Fannie Lou's best friends in town, almost like a mother figure to her, named Mrs. Tucker Tuck, they called her, said, just come stay at my house. Oh, my goodness. You know, Fannie Lou, I had invited you to this mass meeting. You had been reluctant to come, and now here you are, the hero of the hour. Kind of blew Mrs. Tucker's mind that she had had such an impact. So she stayed at that house, but only for one night. But back at the plantation, Mr. Marlowe was back at their house, ranting and raving that if. If Pap went with his wife, wherever she was, he would seize all their property and he would have Pap arrested. Unless you stay through harvest, he said, interesting. So Pap stayed at home and thought about his circumstances and his wife's circumstances, and he was afraid, Mr. Marlowe, and. And his. His anger would stir up trouble and some white person would come kill Fannie Lou. And he couldn't rest. And the next day, he took Fannie Lou and his daughters out to some relatives who lived way out in the country in another county. And if you think about his circumstances, here's Pap on the farm. His wife has registered to vote or at least tried, and I would be very afraid for him. But then I thought, well, Mr. Marlo's sheer need for his work may just have kept him alive. You know what I mean?
- [53:14]
Susan
Mm. Yeah.
- [53:15]
Bea
She didn't even successfully register to vote. This is what is killing me. This was all for just trying it. Her name's not on the voter rolls.
- [53:24]
Susan
No, but in his mind, she was stepping out of her place. She was stepping up to a place where he didn't want her.
- [53:31]
Bea
Sources vary as to timing on all of this. Moving around from shelter to shelter. So either the next night, ten days later, or that very night, Fannie Lou was there or Fannie Lou was not there, shots were fired into the Tucker's house where she had been staying. And at another house of someone involved were two young women who were only visiting were shot through the window. And when the people tried to take them to the hospital, the mayor of Ruleville stopped everyone at the door of the hospital and said, you did this to yourselves. Don't think you can just come in here now. It took pushing past him to get the women treated by the doctors. And after that, that, quite naturally, voting registration in Sunflower county came to a little bit of a halt as intended. But that did not stop outside groups from coming in and giving it another go. It was just that important.
- [54:27]
Susan
One group in particular is called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which actually can be pronounced sncc. SNCC was one of those organizations that was coming down into the area to.
- [54:38]
Bea
Help people register, but they needed a way in. People were, as you would guess after what had just happened, a little bit leery of strangers right now. And they remembered Mrs. Hamer's bravery in particular. Some of the members of SNCC had been previous group adjacent. And her song on the bus, her lifting of spirits, her willingness to be the first one out of the bus, really stuck in people's minds. And word came down from SNCC's headquarters. See if you can find this lady and bring her to the conference in Nashville. We want her to tell Some reporters up here about how she got fired for just trying to register to vote. That would be a good narrative. And this guy just asked around from here to there and actually made his way to her hiding place. He was African American, and so I think he got more cooperation than he would have had. They sent one of their white activists. He said, I need you to come to Nashville and talk to these reporters. And she packed her bags and just went with this guy, which is awfully trusting of her. And he later marveled like, I could have been anyone. I could have kidnapped her. And she was so willing to come and help with the cause that she just got in my car. That does not seem very savvy to me.
- [56:00]
Susan
Well, it was one of those motivation meets opportunity situations. But in Fanny's eyes, God had sent him. She was ready, and if he could find her, it must have been divine intervention. Packed her bags, although some sources say her bags were already packed, which makes a better story, as if she knew he was coming. So he asked her, how did you know? And she said, well, God sent you. Now, the man who had sent him was Bob Moses. And this gentleman said, bob Moses sent me. And Fanny's like, no, God told Bob to tell you to come and get me. That's how she's thinking.
- [56:37]
Bea
She was definitely, how shall I say, an elder statesman among this particular activist group. She was in her upper 40s, and they were mostly in their 20s. They thought it was amazing, them, you know, free to roam about the country with very little responsibility. She had a lot more to lose than they did. And she said, oh, they kicked me off the plantation. They set me free. It's the best thing that could happen happen. And now I could work for my people. Well, there was some bad news waiting for her when she got home from Nashville. Mr. Marlo had evicted Pap too. The harvest was over, and Mr. Marlowe had kept everything they owned in payment of a debt, just like what happened to her mother and father. A white man had taken everything from them, and there was no legal recourse. And people wouldn't hire Pap for anything. They were too afraid of punishment, if not just anti themselves. And someone let them rent this kind of shacky house without running water. And that was to be their home for the next few years.
- [57:45]
Susan
SNCC did help pay for the house. They didn't have a lot of money. Their budget was really stretched thin. But they were able to offer Fannie $10 a week week to work with them. She had a salary and the house that they rented was at 626 E. Lafayette St. Ruleville.
- [58:03]
Bea
One thing Fannie Lou did, in addition to taking up her new position was take that registration test twice more until she passed. Hooray. But they still wouldn't let her vote. She needed to pay a poll tax twice. Boo. It's always something.
- [58:21]
Susan
And it was like, months. Like, she found out she passed, and then just a few months later, she had the opportunity and was again denied.
- [58:28]
Bea
Well, as a field secretary for sncc, Fannie looked around and decided that theories are all well and good, but it was practicality that was going to get her foot in the door around the neighborhood. And she began what she called a poverty program and mainly worked to remove obstacles for people that were receiving, quote, commodities. Just they're like basic foods that were given to them to tide them over until the harvest was in every year. And you used to have to go with a white person to pick them up. Yeah. So she worked to remove that requirement just on humanitarian grounds. And she asked for and received money from the federal government to provide clothes for people. And all over the area, from church to the field, Fannie Lou used her network and talked to her people about their right to vote and the importance of taking a stand. She was one of them. She was her father's daughter. You know him. And she was quick with the right phrases in the right moment. She's very familiar. And as far as Snick was concerned, she was the person that Snick was trying to reach. And she said to everyone she met, these people treat me like a human being, and they value you, too, and they're going to treat you like a human being. One of her SNCC friends said, Fannie Lou, you do better without a script. It actually.
- [59:50]
Susan
Oh, yeah.
- [59:51]
Bea
She said, yeah, you're so good right off the cuff that I honestly think you should just look at the talking points and then throw the paper away. Her confidence grew based on feedback like that. Like, people were just, like, standing up, shaking their heads, clapping in the back, like, yes, that's what we signed you up for. That's hooray, you know? And she was sent up north to give speeches to mostly white white audiences about her story. And the black Southerners Great Awakening, need for change. One of her famous phrases in her speeches up North, I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. And it turned out she was one of SNCC's very best fundraisers.
- [60:34]
Susan
And those speeches that she was giving, it's not just she stands at a podium and gives her testimony and Walks away. She's adding song to it. She's adding Bible stories to relate the situation that the black population has in the south to Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt. The head of SNCC at that time, his name was Bob Moses. So Moses leading his people out of bondage was a very easy story for her to tell and for other people to understand. She really truly believed that, that the black people of Mississippi were God's chosen people. She believed this, this wasn't just a line she was throwing out. This is her, the, this is how she's thinking.
- [61:18]
Bea
Well, in, in a less fanciful way, Bible stories were something that. It was common ground that she had with her white audiences, you know, in the America of the time, of course, largely a Christian audience. So that was her way in There, there, you know, see, I'm one of you. I also have these stories in my, in my background. It was very wise. It was. As her fame grew, so did the harassment. One day they got a nine thousand dollar water bill for a house that had no running water, for which Pap was arrested for non payment. Oh, yes. One day they woke up to two policemen in their bedroom with their guns drawn, but no search warrants. I don't need one, said the policeman. Fanny Lou said, I guess if I'd had any sense, I would have been scared. But what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me. And it seemed to me like they'd been trying to do that a little at a time since I was a little girl, as far back as I could remember. So that's her perspective. I wow. Finding men with gun drawns in your, in your bedroom leads to that statement. That's pretty brave. On June 9, 1963, Fannie Lou and some colleagues were coming back on a Trailways bus from Charleston, where they had had a training conference on how best to reach the black voter and how best to attract white support and, you know, your typical corporate meeting, but with songs and awesomeness instead of, you know, old donuts or whatever. And so they were coming back on the bus and there was a scheduled stop in Winona, Mississippi. For two years, segregation had been illegal in bus terminals federally. But this haven of the old south still kept true to its old ways.
- [63:10]
Susan
On their way to Winona, they had stopped at other bus stops with whites only signs. And there had been problems. They'd had a rough trip just to get to Winona.
- [63:20]
Bea
Well, so they stopped here and, and got out like you do at any truck stop. Six of the workers went in to either use the restroom or grab something to e and all of a sudden they all came peeling back out at top speed. The chief of police had told them all to get out. Fanny Lou stepped out of the bus to see what was going on and got swept up in the madness. And all seven of the workers outside the bus were taken to the county jail where the police found out they'd been registering African Americans to vote. And. And I would like to say that now is the time to pause if you have littles or mediums or even honestly sensitive bigs in the airspace with you and preview this. There just might be a trigger for violence here. So proceed with caution. We're not going to get too graphic, but what happened next is really just beyond violence. Those police found out what their job was and they said, said out loud, we are going to make you wish that you were dead. And the women were beaten to the point of leaving trails of blood on the floor. They were accused of, and I quote, stirring up and making it smell around here and planning a demonstration. Uppityness and just, you know, wham, wham, wham. One of the ladies eyeballs were red, not with crying, but with blood. Fanny came in, I think for the most horrible treatment. They. They had called back to Ruleville to verify her identity and gotten an ear full of poison, I think. And the officers enlisted two African American male inmates to beat Fanny Lou with a blackjack. This famous troublemaker and, and what a blackjack is, is basically a strip of leather with a. With a metal weight sewn into it. I didn't know what one is either. I had to look at up. One man beat her with it until he tired out and not even punishment could make him go on. And then the other one took up the blackjack until Fanny Lou's body was so swollen that the others later described her as being as hard as a piece of wood. Her skin felt like snakeskin. They said she almost didn't look human anymore. She was covered in blood and bruises from head to toe. And later examination would reveal a blood clot in her eye that impaired her vision and lasting and severe kidney damage, among other things that. That didn't ever heal. A SNCC worker who had been alerted by the people left behind on the bus arrived to try to get his colleagues released. He's an African American man and he was beaten badly as well and arrested. But what charge? We don't have to have a charge. Those police were not going to let a doctor come anywhere near the jail. No phone calls allowed. No news allowed for three days. And Nick, alarmed that their worker hadn't come back or been heard from, and started to flood the police station with calls. Like all they could do is say, we know they're there. We see you. We will make this public. We're still here. You know, the police were actually talking about, quote, disappearing these people into a river somewhere there. Horrifying. And Fanny Lou said there was one holdout police officer that wouldn't let him do it. She didn't know his name, and he was as bad as the rest of them, but that was the one service he did for them, is to keep his colleagues from killing them outright. I guess that's the least you can do. Anyway, at one point, the police officers opened the jail cell doors and said, why don't you guys, why don't y'all just go? And Fannie Lou, who had been trained in the SNCC school of what might happen to you, said, no, sir, we won't. Because the second we leave, you'll put about that we escaped and you'll shoot us. We're going to stay right here, thank you very much, and not leave a jail in the middle of the night. So that was smart, but horrible. While they were all still lying on the jailhouse floor In Winona on June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy gave his famous civil rights address. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public schools available, if he cannot vote for the public official who represents him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would be content with the counsels of patience, patience and delay. 100 years of delay have passed since Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, and yet their heirs are not fully free. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all. Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing both right and reality. Whoa. Martin Luther King marveled at this white man stepping up and frankly, hitting it out of the park. The next day, Fanny Lou's friend and colleague, Medgar Evers, was assassinated in his yard in Jackson, Mississippi.
- [69:27]
Susan
Foreign. It's believed that the attention of the assassination of Medgar Evers nationally was getting a lot of press, that that was the reason why the police officers let the group go. They did not want that kind of attention directed towards them.
- [69:47]
Bea
So the man who killed Medgar Evers was not convicted until 19. And the policeman who had tortured Fannie.
- [69:57]
Susan
Lou and her colleagues there was an FBI investigation. They were brought into trial. Fannie gave her testimony in court in front of a jury, an all white jury that acquitted the officers.
- [70:10]
Bea
All Fannie could really say at this point was it is going to be miserable when you have to face God because you're going to have to ultimately face what you've done. The only thing she could say is like, maybe in the next life. It took Fannie Lou a month before she would even consent to her family seeing her because she looked so appalling. When she had come out of the jail cell and was able to go to the doctor, her hands were blue and would not work anyway. That's appalling that those men were acquitted in any time period in the world at large. 200,000 people marched on Washington D.C. to hear Martin Luther King give his famous I have a Dream speech, after which the FBI targeted Martin Luther King as, and I quote, the most dangerous Negro in the entire nation. See, he wasn't everybody's favorite. And in Birmingham, Alabama, four little African American girls died as a bomb exploded in the 16th Street State Baptist Church. That summer, Fannie Lou was able to gather £30,000 of clothes and food and started distributing them in a reward program. If you registered to vote, you know, you may shop in my warehouse kind of thing. And a local, it was more of the KKK and lipstick that, that she had said before, kept targeting her and sending like spies to see what was happening with these clothing. What is she doing with this? And he tried to flood her by basically putting around that she was just giving it away for free with no requirements. Well, you know what she got out of that? 400 new voters. So thanks, Mr. Inspector, you have done my work for me. And you know what? Fannie Lou Hamer decided that not only would she continue her work, recently energized with a big shot in the arm of hundreds of new voters. She was going to keep encouraging voter registration, but she was going to give them something to vote for when they got there.
- [72:18]
Susan
The next election coming up was in August of that year. It was going to be the first time that Fannie voted. She ran for office, a position in the House of Representatives, what, two years.
- [72:30]
Bea
Ago, she registered to vote for the first time. This is jumping in the deep end. I love this so much. It's like oh, this is what we do. I'm just gonna do the end of the. That's awesome. I love it. It was brave and it was bold. She was the first African American woman in Mississippi to run for Congress. And against a white incumbent who'd held his seat since before World War II. Fannie Lou ran on a platform of aiding the common man radical. Her opponent, the incumbent, worked on policies to keep his rich buddies rich. Never you mind about what this does to the poor people who can't survive after all these laws get passed. And so on June 2nd of 1964, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer voted for the very, very first time and cast her ballot for herself in the 2nd congressional district primary. Ha cha cha. I'm sorry to say that she did not win her election. And as a matter of fact, I think her name was left off the ballot in. In many counties. So they were giant pumpkin eaters. You know what I mean?
- [73:37]
Susan
Giant pumpkin eaters.
- [73:39]
Bea
That's something we say in my family. Like we say cheater, cheater, pumpkin eater. We don't need the cheater part. We know. It's just pumpkin eaters. There you go. A little bit of new vocabulary for the people that are tracking my vocabulary. Peccadillo's.
- [73:55]
Susan
Peccadillo, in and of itself, is a word that most people don't use.
- [73:59]
Bea
So I'm going to buy a book of obscure words and start sprinkling them in. Well, back though, to Fannie Lou Hamer and her unfortunate loss in her election. It did have an upside.
- [74:12]
Susan
As a candidate, she really didn't stand a chance. But what it did was bring a lot of attention to the new political party that she had helped form. She'd realized that the Democrats that were in office in the state were not in office and running on progressive platforms like in other parts of the country. They were Democrat in name only. So she and some friends formed a new party called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
- [74:40]
Bea
So over the course of the next few months, Fannie Lou Hamer and friends signed up 60,000 members. So the. The regular Democrats, as we should call them, were not that. Into cooperation with the upstart Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Very good. We have decided to challenge you standard Democrats for the right to represent Mississippi at the Democratic convention to elect the President of the United States. Because we actually have had town halls, we are actually representative of our state in a way that you are not.
- [75:21]
Susan
This newly energized party. This newly energized group of people, including Fannie, went right back to work. They had work to do. They needed to get even more people registered to vote. They started, just like she had done the clothing drives as a community service. They began to establish what they called freedom schools. And Freedom schools taught two subjects. Citizenship, which is how you can help your community, how you can be a good citizen, not how to become a citizen. And the other was a guide to Negro history.
- [75:53]
Bea
Fannie Lou later was so shocked. She said, I was 50 years old before I found out the first person killed in the American Revolution was a black man. How you know, dare everybody keep that from me? That is a part of my heritage and we need to share these things with the young people and make them aware of their own past.
- [76:19]
Susan
While Fannie was doing that down in Mississippi, up North, SNCC was recruiting even more students and training them to go back down south and continue this work. Join Fannie, get people registered to vote.
- [76:32]
Bea
So when the students arrived down south, they had to go through a little bit of a. A school of hard knocks training program. People in the North, Fanny Lou kept saying, just would not understand what they were going to face down here. The opposition they were going to meet. They thought we were making a humorous character out of this white man they might encounter with his gun and his attitude. No boys and girls. She would try to harden them and try to tell them, please listen to what I say to you. Be safe. Do the following things. Do not leave a jail after dark if the man tells you to leave. All these like safety classes. And I fear and Fanny fears that many times they viewed it as perhaps we do. Sorry, flight attendants. That safety message at the beginning of our flight. Sure, sure. Seat belts. Yep. Put on your own mask. Got it. Whatever. As you're reading the like in Flight magazine, she had to have faith that they paid attention. One thing she did with her motivational speeches which they did listen to, was to set a room on fire. I want to read a little bit from an article that was written by someone that was there during the Freedom Summer listening to Fannie Lou Hamer set her babies free into the world. You've never heard a room flying like one that Fannie Lou Hamer set afire. Her speeches had themes. They had less. They had principles. And then when you had heard all that said with such extraordinary brilliance, like, wow, that's what it is. She's put her finger on something truly important that all of us had felt. She'd actually said. You heard that all the time. What really gets you is that person somehow makes concrete an idea that you'd never been able in your own mind to fully form. And then she did it in this extraordinary ringing style and then ended up singing this Little Light of Mine. And. And you never in your life needed to hear anybody else speak again. That is a Yelp review. That is a.
- [78:40]
Susan
A church would like that Yelp review. And that's kind of how I was viewing all of her speeches. It's kind of like Fanny's church. She brought Jesus to them. Jesus, who, by the way, wasn't entirely a pacifist.
- [78:53]
Bea
I do seem to remember something about turning tables over in a temple that it doesn't seem like the well behaved.
- [79:00]
Susan
No. And the first busload of SNCC workers that came down from up north were three male students, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney. Now, two of them, Michael and Andrew, were white, and James was a black Mississippi native. Almost as soon as they hit the road after Vanny's teachings, they disappeared. No one knew where they were. Their bodies were later discovered in a shallow grave. They had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.
- [79:30]
Bea
So the success of freedom summer. Well, 17,000 African Americans tried to register. Only 1200 of those were successful. And there were so many arrests and so much violence, One poor worker was strung by her neck and dragged behind a car. She survived unbelievably. But, you know, the three victims of the Ku Klux Klan violence there did not. And on balance, SNCC was really wondering if the experiment had been a failure. More than just cold voting statistics, Freedom Summer highlighted the issues that were facing the south in a national forum. Jim Crow laws and voter suppression of black Americans became topics that captured the public's attention. Convention at last. And hundreds of young volunteers were set on their own personal journeys to put their marks on America for decades. So it was time for the Democratic Party convention. And our friends at the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party chose 68 representatives to go to Atlantic City to represent not only their party and Mississippi. They were going to try to argue that the existing Democratic delegation, all white and not representative of the people as a whole, needed to be unseated and replaced with their own party, who had followed all the rules and had the town halls and had voting and a system and documentation. They worked hard, hard, hard to gain support before they got there. And by the time the convention opened, they already had nine other states delegations supporting their bid to be Mississippi's delegation and 25 existing senators in their corner. A quarter of the Senate, that's not bad. And the powerful United Auto Workers union was on Their side.
- [81:33]
Susan
One of the ways that they were getting all these people at the convention on their side is they came armed and ready to present their cases wherever they were. They had photographs of the slain men from the Freedom Summer. They had a large banner that said, human Rights. No American can rest while any American is denied his rights. They demonstrated outside of the convention hall. They spoke to anybody that would stand in front of them. And when they did, Fannie was again giving her testimony. And I use that word because it's a religious word that Christians do. They share their testimony, how they came to Christ. This is exactly what Fannie was doing, and this is how she came to embrace the power that she believed that God gave her. They were getting all these people on their side, but the ones that were going to matter the Most, they needed 10% of a committee called the Credentials Committee to say, yes, let's seat the Mississippi Freedom Party.
- [82:28]
Bea
So they might have had certain people in their pockets, but you know who they did not have? President Johnson. Now, for those of you who've heard our Zephyr Wright episode, this will be bad Johnson, so we know who you're dealing with. He was infuriated at what he considered to be their. Like those brown peoples, for lack of the N word that he used quite freely. Ungratefulness. He'd passed the Civil Rights act of 1964. And now this disruption, this division in the party is going to weaken me against the Republicans in the general election. He was incensed. Well, sir, the weaknesses in that bill and the enforcement of that law are really. While we're all here on the road all the time, what do you think we do all day down here but try to make that a reality? You know, I appreciate that, et cetera. But like, oi, dude. Well, Johnson had privately thought he had personally delivered the south into Republican hands, by the way, he. He thought he'd sacrificed the entire south for the greater good. He felt that was a big enough sacrifice for one year. Okay, everybody. But no, they were not seeing it his way. No. He set the FBI to watch sncc. He set spies to watch the delegates of our Freedom Party. He threatened members of the deciding Committee with job loss. Or maybe we're not going to appoint your husband to judge. He told his potential VP candidate that if he wanted the job as vp, he had to stop the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in its tracks. And Johnson, has to be said, panicked when he heard that Mrs. Hamer was going to address the key committee on live tv.
- [84:15]
Susan
Fannie was just one of several delegates from her group that were allowed to speak, Martin Luther King spoke during their presentation and said that this party should be seated. And this is a big, big deal meeting. It's so big that it was being broadcast live to the nation. Three million people were gonna be watching, including of course President Johnson, who is just biting his nails and hoping that all this behind the scenes work was gonna play off. And these people, no one was gonna like them and they'll just go away. Martin Luther King spoke and Johnson was okay with that. But then it was Fannie's turn and she sat down and she got to the microphone and she said in her strong voice, My name is Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer. I live at 626 East Lafayette Street, Ruleville, Mississippi. And then she went into her testimony, beginning with her registering to vote. She said it was the 31st of August, 1962, that 18 of us traveled 26 miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try and become first class citizens. She didn't have to get far when Johnson, Johnson started freaking out. He's like, my gosh, I have to stop this somehow. And he's racing through the White House trying to come up with anything to say so he can interrupt the broadcast. And he gets to the press room and ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this broadcast to bring you the President of the United States. So if you're watching, you're like, oh my gosh, this is something big.
- [85:41]
Bea
The networks thought, oh, he's going to announce his VP candidate. This is big, fair enough. And they switched over. But he didn't.
- [85:50]
Susan
What he did was just recognize that it was the nine month anniversary of JFK's assassination. The ninth month, that's it, an anniversary. I mean, it was tragic what happened to Kennedy and it put him in that position. But interrupting national broadcasting, that's not the big news that people were expecting.
- [86:10]
Bea
And so Fannie Lou, she kept going about how Mississippians of color were kept cruelly out of the political process. And she then went up with that horrific tale of her beating by police officers as a result of registering black voters. And she wrapped up with, if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America, is this 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 are threatened daily, really, because we want to live as decent human beings in America? I have a theory about why he was so scared. Because, you know, listeners who listen to the Zephyr Wright episode, he understood the power of personal narrative to Move the dial, you know what I'm saying? Use Zephyr Wright's own stories to get that Civil Rights act passed. And here was someone else so good at public speaking that her story. It's almost like that scene in Ratatouille where the critic eats that one bite of Ratatouille and gets sucked back into his childhood on screen. That's what she was doing with an entire national audience. And he was very taken aback. I mean, at least he recognized genius when he saw it.
- [87:26]
Susan
While it wasn't broadcast live, it was recorded, and the network executives thought it was so compelling that they should show it in its entirety. That evening during prime time. Millions of Americans, more than would have been able to watch it during the day, were sitting down to their televisions and watching the testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer. They were also watching the face of the committee members, like their mouths were wide open, going astonished at what they were hearing. You could see tears forming in people's eyes. And as soon as it was done, the phone banks started. Started going crazy. This is where you'd have, like in a movie, you'd have a montage of the phones ringing and ringing and then telegrams just stacking up, stacking up, stacking up, all saying that the Mississippi Freedom Party should be seated. They had no idea the United States at large that were watching had no idea what people were going through in the South. And Fannie Lou Hamer put a fake and a voice to it.
- [89:04]
Bea
Well, unfortunately, politics being what they are, a sad compromise was offered. I tell you what. We will give you two at large seats for the Freedom Party with a promise that in the next election, I. E. 1968, four years away, we promise there won't be a segregated delegation. How about that? But also third request. Mrs. Hamer could not have one of those seats, though. So we're clear. Too scary. Okay, bye. What are we going to do? Said the delegation. Either we do represent over 800,000 African Americans in Mississippi or we do not. And Fannie Lou said, we did not come all this way for no two seats. We should not take the deal. And the regular all white delegation was seated the very next day. Johnson got the nomination and Fannie Lou Hamer got disillusioned. And I quote, we learned the hard way that even though we had the law and righteousness on our side, that the white man is not going to give his power up to us. And it caused a fracture in the civil rights movement similar to the one raging in the olden days between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. du Bois. Do we play along and go incrementally or do we assert ourselves and demand our power? Now, the same thing happened here in the 60s outside in the world at this time, race riots in Harlem, Chicago and Philadelphia. There was a move toward excluding white people from the civil rights movement. Fannie, of course, disagreed. How are we going to be for desegregation if we segregate ourselves? And I don't care whether he's white as a sheet or black as a skillet. Out of one blood, God made all nations. So she asked the white people in the civil rights movement, help us communicate with these white people, regardless of what they act like. There's got to be some good here. How can we say we love God and hate our brothers and sisters, leaders? We've got to reach them. So see, she was very inclusive. And others were tired, justifiably so. They were tired of the struggle and they were tired of convincing people, and they just wanted to assert themselves. Among all this turmoil stepped an unlikely hero. For a little bit of R and R. Dayo Deo, I am like, Harry Belafonte did what?
- [91:42]
Susan
Harry Belafonte scraped up money to send Fannie and 10 others to Africa. Here's this woman who had not been out of Mississippi until she learned how to vote. Now she is going to Africa. It's almost like, hey, Fannie, you just put a face to black oppression and made millions of Americans reexamine their feelings about race relations. Now what are you gonna do?
- [92:08]
Bea
I'm going to Ghana. Woo. Woo. Well, so the way he put it, though, was hilarious to me. I don't know too much about Harry Belafonte, but I can. I can see his sunglasses. You know, we're gonna do. We're gonna rest the body, we're gonna stretch out, we're just gonna go out to Africa for two or three weeks and just really cool out, man. Literally, in an interview, that's what he said. And I'm like, that is hilarious. Well, the thing more seriously, despite his public caricature of his own self, he thought it would be best to take some of the more stressed out members of the Civil rights movement to a place that was removed from what he called certain elements of white pressure.
- [92:52]
Susan
And it worked. When Fannie was on the plane, she saw her first black flight attendant, her first black pilot. And when they landed and were received like the VIPs that they are, she saw a sea of black people living their lives, holding jobs that she had never seen black Mississippians hold before. Just Working at a bank, just doing everything, making the community function. It was a community of black people, and she felt so at home.
- [93:23]
Bea
And Harry Belafonte later said that the person most affected by this trip, in his judgment, was Fannie Lou Hamer herself. One day, she was in the bathtub, and the President of Ghana came to talk to her. Well, I. I'm in. Are you kidding me? I'm in the bathtub and she's, like, hustling around. He. The President of Ghana waited politely downstairs until she could come down. He waited for her. He respected her as a human being. And she started to cry after her meeting with him. For so long, black people had been trying to convince the President of the United States that they were citizens, that they were. Were people at all worthy of respect. And. And she couldn't even get in to see him. And here's a black leader in a black country come to see her. Her Fannie Lou Hamer from Mississippi. And it affected her very, very much.
- [94:21]
Susan
She couldn't speak the language, obviously, but she was served foods that she recognized as foods that she had been eating her entire life. And she heard the people singing, and she couldn't understand what they were saying, but she sure knew that tune because her own grandmother had sung it. She realized that her connection to Africa was very deep. But she couldn't find out if she had any relatives. There was no way. She said, we just don't know any more about ourselves other than the names the slave owners gave us. And, you know, that was a real crime. At the time, black people were called Negroes are African American. But she called them black Americans. She felt that to call them African Americans would tie them to those slave owners again. And these were individual people with individual lives and individual rights. In the United States of America, if there's white Americans, then there's simply black Americans.
- [95:21]
Bea
And Harry Belafonte considered this trip money well spent, basically due to exactly what Susan just said. The people on this journey just thought of themselves differently after this trip, and perhaps by seeing their past, they were able to see the future in America. President Johnson signed the Voting Rights act of 1965 as a way to close the loopholes from the past laws. There was now a division of federal voting examiners to make sure everyone who was registered could actually vote. Also, it abolished the practice of having a literacy test. And the United States Attorney General could now bring lawsuits against illegal state poll taxes. That is some loophole closing that was personal. All of those things had affected Fannie Lou especially and personally. And A big step forward as far as Fannie Lou was concerned.
- [96:22]
Susan
Another thing that the Voting Rights act of 1965 did. Did that was not in Fannie's favor, is it amped up Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist activities all throughout the South. If you thought it was bad before, now it is very bad.
- [96:38]
Bea
Well, because they didn't have that simple reading test anymore. They had to rely on the old standby of intimidation. So that is definitely an unwanted side effect of some good intentions. That was good, Johnson, for those of you who've listened to the Zephyr Wright episode. So we just could not get him pinned down to his side. Okay, so in 1965, that same year, Fannie Lou Hamer and some colleagues. This is a Hail Mary, honestly. They decided to issue a challenge for all five of Mississippi's congressional seats. These people were only elected by a process of extreme discrimination that prevented the black people from voting. And what that means to you, Supreme Court is they are not representative in any fashion of the people at home. And that was shot down as, like, too much weeds to get into. And Fanny said, that's all right. We'll come back year after year until we're allowed our rights as citizens. Talk about aim high. That's kind of just like, you know, how she registered to vote and then suddenly was running for Congress. She won this one thing. She's like, you know what? I'm gonna get all y'all outta here. And it was a good effort, I thought, you know, calling attention to the fact that, you know, you're only here on sufferance until we can ramp up this voting effort. And the only reason you can win is because you stacked the deck in the first place. And point your two fingers at your eyeballs and point your one finger to them. That's what Fannie Lou was doing. So in that respect, I think that did what it was supposed to do.
- [98:12]
Susan
Mm, no, I agree. And she and SNCC and other organizations did continue to register black voters. There was a march across Mississippi where they were able to get 4,000 new voters registered.
- [98:27]
Bea
It was the man that had tried to integrate at Ole Miss that caused President Kennedy to issue his civil rights speech in the first place that Martin Luther King thought was so awesome, that man decided he was going to start a march. And then he was ambushed and attacked. And in order to continue his mission, Martin Luther King and Fannie Lou Hamer and many other civil rights activists through the south took up his torch. There wasn't an actual torch, but, like, you know, figuratively, and continued his march for him in a symbolic way. So good things and bad things happened in the personal department, personally. Her older daughter, Dorothy Jean, died after complications of childbirth. But what complicated it even further is she was refused service at a white hospital. You'll read that it was because of Fannie Lou's reputation that she was denied care. I'm not sure that's true. I think it was just not an integrated hospital. And they were forced to drive 127 miles to a hospital that would take her. And en route she died. And Fannie Lou and Pap were horrified and sad to realize that their son in law, her husband, had come back from Vietnam with such profound disabilities that he was not able to take care of his own children either. And of course they adopted their grandchildren, Jacqueline and Lenora. The next year she was seated as a delegate at the 1968 Democratic convention as part of a coalition, this time, time an integrated party. Hooray at last. Just like promised. At least they kept their promise. And she became an outspoken critic, as so many were, of the Vietnam War. This was also the year she published her autobiography. She worked to start Head Start programs all over the South. Head Start, for those of you that don't know, is a subsidized preschool program, early education that also provides nutrition, or at least did in her day. I don't know if it still does.
- [100:33]
Susan
And that's another good Johnson program. This is a national program that began during the Johnson administration. She was also creating things closer to home. She and her bestie, Harry Belafonte were able to Fundraise and get $10,000 mostly from an organization in Wisconsin to buy 40 acres and open Freedom Farm. It was a co op, it was in Ruleville. And her mission for this farm was to help feed the poor of Mississippi and to help them learn to feed themselves. She was disgusted with any federal programs for food stamps that were out there and available to her community. So she decided, well, we'll just grow our own food.
- [101:18]
Bea
So it started sort of small, where a family would, how shall I say, foster a pregnant pig. And then they could keep and raise the piglets. And the original pig went back to the, the initiative. And ultimately this grew into almost like a farm based settlement house, I don't know any other way to say it, type project with educational funding, financial assistance, counseling and a housing program they ran through the federal housing association that enabled black families to buy their own houses for the first time.
- [101:55]
Susan
She had also created jobs within this organization. There was a sewing Company that helped fund all the other operations. Unfortunately, it could not sustain self funding and it would fold. But while it was at its heyday, she was the largest employer in Sunflower County.
- [102:16]
Bea
Wow. See, you know what? Her mother would be so proud of her.
- [102:21]
Susan
Yeah, that blew my mind. And then when I realized she had only been active for eight years. That's it.
- [102:28]
Bea
At the age of 54, Fannie Lou helped to found the National Women's Political Caucus, which sought out and trained women to run for office at all levels of government. You might recognize some of her fellow founders, Shirley Chisholm, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, other prominent activists. This said, Fannie is a revolution free of sexism and racism. Women can be very powerful if we vote together.
- [102:59]
Susan
And she said that a white mother is no different from a black mother. The only thing is, they haven't had as many problems, but we cry the same tears. This is the organization. If you watch the Hulu series Mrs. America, the cast of that series, the real people, are organizing this group. This is the group that held the convention in that series.
- [103:20]
Bea
Is there a Fanny Lou character?
- [103:21]
Susan
There isn't. There isn't. Not that I could see. I looked to try and find one I had watched, just finished watching it when, Like a few days ago. Yeah, I did not find a Fannie Lou character. But that's okay. I was satisfied with the ending. I thought I was gonna come on and. And Cate Blanchett, she's an amazing actress. And if she's gonna make Phyllis Schlafly look good, I don't know if I wanna watch it, but I did, and I think it gave a very. I liked the portrayal. You know, there was good and bad on both sides of the feminist issue. Although in the end, even though the ERA wasn't ratified during the series, and it just was ratified just months ago, ago since recording this, although it hasn't passed to become law yet, that's how long these people have been working for. This blew my mind.
- [104:10]
Bea
I'm sorry to say that Fannie Lou began to be in poor health, in and out of hospitals for a few years. At 57, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, from which she did ultimately die decades too early for the world who needed her. At only 59 years old, on March 14, 1977, in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, nearly.
- [104:37]
Susan
2,000 mourners came to pay their respects for her funeral to a church that only held 350. So most people were waiting outside the church and listened to the speakers and sang her favorite hymns. Can you imagine a group, oh, my God, I'm going to cry. Can you imagine this funeral? A group of 2,000 people singing her favorite hymns.
- [104:59]
Bea
It was a good tribute. And one of the speakers was Andrew Young, who at the time was the US Ambassador to the United nations, who had been a fellow SNCC member and delivered a eulogy that included the words, the progress of the civil rights movement had been made through the sweat and blood of activists like Fanny Hamer. None of us would be here today had she not been here then. He later went on to become a member of Congress and the governor of Georgia. She shook the foundation of this nation, he said.
- [105:34]
Susan
She was buried on a piece of land that had been part of the freedom farm that she had started. On her headstone it reads, I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. Pap lived for a very long time. He died in 1992, but when he did, he was buried right next to her. Since then, then, the town of Ruleville has built a memorial park where those two graves are.
- [105:58]
Bea
She received several honorary degrees from assorted institutions in thankful recognition of her service toward civil rights.
- [106:08]
Susan
Also in her lifetime, she was awarded many things, including the Mary Church Terrell Award and the National Sojourner Truth Meritorious Service Award to tie it back to some other former subjects. Love that. In 1993, she was inducted into the National Women's hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York, and the Ruleville Post office is now named after her. She's still with us in 2019, which was the third annual Women's March in Atlantic City. It was dedicated in her memory.
- [106:39]
Bea
And it's amazing to me how little knowledge modern America has of Fanny Hamer. It's just someone that's. That's slipped away a little bit. So we thought we would just turn the spotlight a little bit, you know, back and edge her back onto the middle of the stage in these times. And that will bring us to the end of the life, but not the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer. And now it is time for media, Media, Media, Media. Okay, the book I think most people start, start with and in fact, what seems to be the world authority on Fannie Lou Hamer, Megan Parker Brooks has several books about Fannie Lou Hamer. Fannie Lou Hamer, America's Freedom Fighting Woman, which is, I think, the first one that comes up in a Google search and also a voice that could stir an army. Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rhetoric of the Black Freedom Movement. Same author.
- [107:37]
Susan
I like that one. I listened to it on Audio. Audiobook. There's singing in it. So you can hear. It's not Fanny, but you can hear songs. It was. I liked it.
- [107:45]
Bea
Full disclosure, and I'll probably say this again. The end song will be this Little Light of Mine. But as we did not do this soon enough to get official clearances, the person singing it is in fact not her, but someone we have previously obtained clearance for. So I'm sorry about that, but you know how it is. Okay. So also another book I liked even bigger than either of those other two. A book called this Little Light of Mine, the Life of Fanny Lou Hamer by Kate Mills. And I think this might be my favorite one.
- [108:16]
Susan
Yeah, I was gonna say that's the one. If you're gonna read one biography, read that one. Cause it's got the most detail in it, I think.
- [108:21]
Bea
There is a middle grade book. Fannie Lou Hamer From Sharecropping to Politics by David Rule with an introduction by Andrew Young, who had spoken at her funeral.
- [108:32]
Susan
There's a children's book called Voice of Freedom. Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement by Carol Boston Weatherford. And it's illustrated by Eukira Holmes. The illustrations are beautiful. I listened to it on audiobook and I really enjoyed it. It's a short 33 minutes as an audiobook. I think any kid that can read, maybe fourth or fifth grade, would enjoy it as a biography, even as an audiobook. But the actual book I thought was so beautiful that I bought a copy for my little friend Micah, who I like to buy books of, especially the black subjects that we cover, because she is a black child who lives in a very white town. So I bought this book for her. That's how much I liked it.
- [109:13]
Bea
So in concert with the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Smithsonian has issued a book that I would say, I don't know, fifth grade to high school, called Brave Black First 50 plus African American women who Changed Changed the World. On the back cover it says, Harriet Tubman Guided the way. Rosa Parks Sat for Equality. Aretha Franklin sang from the Soul. Serena Williams bested the Competition. Michelle Obama Transformed the White House. This illustrated biography compilation captures the iconic moments of more than 50 African American women whose heroism and bravery rewrote the American story for the better. They were fearless. They were bold, they were game changers. And if you're looking for an inspirational book for your children, each of these illustrations is accompanied by a one or two page biography. I really can't recommend this enough.
- [110:09]
Susan
There is another memoir it's called Stranger at the A Summer in Mississippi by Tracy Sugarman. He was a freedom writer on Freedom Summer and he worked with Fannie Lou. Fannie Lou wrote the foreword for this book. But what made this book really special, he's an artist and there's pen and ink drawings. Drawings through the whole thing.
- [110:30]
Bea
So given that this story is so very long, these links will be up on our website. We're not going to go into the exact addresses, but I fell down a rabbit hole of boll weevils. Gross. Don't like. Then also the Emmett Till case. Also don't like. But necessary, I think. I mean, boll weevils, you can take them or leave them. But I think everyone should read the Emmett Till case, especially since sense signs memorializing where the events happened are still getting shot at. So I think it's important to put those facts in your head. Someone wrote a. Let's call it an operetta of the Fanny Lou Hamer story. And I will provide you a link with the libretto which. Let's see how to translate that. That's like the transcript of what's happening.
- [111:18]
Susan
I'm sitting here going, I don't know what that means.
- [111:21]
Bea
A libretto is like the story of the opera without the music. It doesn't have any notes. It's just the story. There is an easy to follow timeline@encyclopedia.com it gets a little squirrely toward the end of her life with all the things she was doing. So it kind of puts them in order. There is a movie that is actually being produced by the author of several of these Fannie Lou Hamer books. And so you can find a link to the trailer trailer and an interview with Harry Belafonte.
- [111:53]
Susan
Does he sing in it?
- [111:55]
Bea
Well, it's a transcript too. I don't typically watch it because where I have to like look at all my media, I can't really turn on the sound. So yeah. And then Fannie Lou Hamer herself, of course, has many sound recordings and speeches you can Hear online via YouTube and other streaming services. But an album album should you be a either a hold over from olden days or a current purchaser of said turntables. They've issued an album called Songs My Mother Taught Me and it's all Fannie Lou Hamer singing some of her best known songs from the civil rights movement.
- [112:29]
Susan
We'll also put some YouTube videos of her singing and speaking in the show notes. The National Women's Political Caucus is still active. We'll link you to that. But Nick is no Longer, but they have a website with all kinds of information on it about the work they did and the people that did it. If you find yourself in Ruleville, Mississippi, you can go to the Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden, see her grave, and a statue that was put up about seven years ago of her. She's got a microphone in her hand, the wires coiled down to an amplifier at her feet. I think it's a great statue. I'm like, yeah, unlike the Lucille Ball one. I thought this was a. It was a great statue. So Ruleville also has Fannie Lou Hamer Day. So Ruleville is not the town that it used to be. The year that Fannie was born. 1917. The Bowery boys have a podcast on the 1917 Silent Parade, which is believed to be the first civil rights march. Large scale, entirely black people.
- [113:33]
Bea
And in closing, Fannie Lou Hamer had a bold message that each and every one of us has the responsibility to do our own part, whatever form that might take toward creating a just and equal society. She honestly is one of the strongest people we've ever covered on this show. The odds were never, not ever, in her favor, and she risked everything again and again for equality. Please share her story with others and also make sure to exercise your own right to vote. The future you save might just be your own. Thanks for listening.
- [114:09]
Susan
Bye.
- [114:09]
Bea
If you learned something today, please tell a few friends or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Links and photos for this episode can be found at our website thehistorychicks.com the songs in the middle are Cotton Fields by Mark Cottage Cook and Blind to Beauty by Ray Montford. And the end song is this Little Light of Mine by Mercy Ellen Kirk. Again, it's not Fannie Lou Hamer's version because of clearances, but I wanted to end with her most famous song. See you next time.
- [114:41]
Susan
This little light of mine I'm gonna.
- [114:45]
Bea
Let it shine.
- [114:49]
Susan
Shine I'm gonna let it shine this little light of mine I'm gonna let it shine Let it.
- [115:00]
Bea
Shine, let it shine, let it shine.
- [115:13]
Susan
Hold down the the room I'm going to let it shine all down the.
- [115:21]
Bea
Room I'm going to let it shine.
- [115:25]
Susan
Let it shine let it shine, let it shine Sa.