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- [00:10]
Progressive Insurance Advertiser
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- [00:37]
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- [01:21]
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- [02:07]
Katy Charlwood
Hello delicious friends and welcome to who did what Now. The history podcast. That is not your history class with me, your host, Katy Charlwood, history harlot and reader of books. So it has been a busy couple of weeks. Like I I've just been all over the show. I was in London for the Young Sherlock premiere. I had sponsored a women's football team like last year and like I was an official sponsor of a match this year and so I got to go to that. Like that was really fun. I really believe in investing in women's sports, especially in my area because 1 support local and 2 there's not a lot of funding up in rural Ireland. So like that's been a thing. And also like I got a little notification from a. Like it's a rural school in the Guildicht and they're trying to send their kids to this robotics competition in St. Louis, Missouri. And I'm like, okay, I'll. I'm gonna pop their GoFundMe in places because, you know, they don't get a lot of opportunities and they're working really hard and I really feel like we should be supporting children in every way we can. So I'm gonna try and scrabble stuff together. Like not a lot because I don't have a lot, but like a little something, just something. And I'll post the link in places so people can donate to and just give these kids, you know, the opportunity to see the world and to travel and actually build their stem robots and do stuff with them. I don't know what they do. Right. I'm just supportive. But yeah. And what else now? Oh, and my daughter was in the peace problems which was like a 4000 kid choir with a cross border orchestra. And I don't know what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting an orchestra to play Durude sandstorm or a mid 2000s Club Megamix. I was like, what the under 18's disco? Why do I know all these songs and they're all like an opera singer and an orchestra. It was a really good time, but I better get into this today because I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Katie, quit your jibble jabber. In fact me, in fact you. I will. But first we've got to get our sores on. Our Sources Are To Praise Our Bridges by Fannie Lou Hamer For Freedom's Sake, the Life of Fannie Lou Hamer by Shanna Kai Lee. Mississippi Movement by John Dittmer. Women of Colour and the Reproductive Rights Movement by Jennifer Nelson. Civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer Her Unstoppable War Against Jim Crow by Mark Elias Fannie Lou Hamer by Deborah Michaels. And of course we have our old favourites biography.com and history.com aisle sitting comfortably. Good. Then let's begin. Fannie Lou Hamer was born Fanny Oma Louise Dubois Townsend on 6 October 1917 in Montgomery County, Mississippi, United States of America. She was born to James Lee Townshend and Louella Townshend. So the Townsends were sharecroppers. I know I covered this before, but sharecroppers were basically a version of tenant farming after the American Civil War. Sharecropping was the South's attempt at reinventing labour relations without surrendering actual power. Landlords, I mean. Sorry, I mean, landowners allow tenants to farm on their land in exchange for a cut of the crops. And this sounds like a cooperative deal, but was more like agricultural feudalism. This may shock you, but the majority of sharecroppers were the formerly enslaved. This system kept poor farmers perpetually indebted with while preserving the planter class's comfort. So not only would they get a share of the crop that you worked and you reaped, right? Or they reaped what you sowed effectively. So not only would they get a cut of the crop, but, you know, you would rent a property on their land at a really high rate. You would buy the seeds from them at a really high rate. You would also lease or rent or purchase your machinery from them at a really high rate. And this whole thing was just a way to keep you indebted. And they would have these really high prices. You would get undercut. And even when they weighed, like, sometimes they would shortchange the scales so that you would get paid less for the volume or weight of crop that you produced. When Fanny was born, she was just two generations out of slavery, right? Her grandmother would have been enslaved. And when she was two years old, the family moved to Rowville, Mississippi, to work as sharecroppers on a plantation. So Fanny was the youngest of 20 siblings. She had 14 brothers and five sisters. Now, I could not find all of their names, but I could find Colisea, Arnold, Luther, Belle, Joe, Alan, Theodora, Frank, Noah, Nyoma, Laura, Mabel and Perlene. So there was more. I just. I couldn't find them. I couldn't find them. That being said, when a family has, like, such a high amount of people in it, when they go and they're renting, like, this one building and they're going to work on this plantation, the plantation owner's probably rubbing their hands going, oh, look at all this very cheap, practically free labor. Like that is a steady workforce. And the majority of it's quite young, so they're gonna last a long time. So the older children would go pick cotton, and the younger children would stay at home. Like it's a version of parentification, but it's out of necessity. So Fanny, she has a limp, and this is, like, throughout her life. Now, it was often blamed on polio, which she had, you know, as a kid, she did have polio. She had contracted. But the limp wasn't a result of polio. It was because of a childhood accident. So her Older brother who like these kids are between the ages of 6 and 10, like they are young. So he's trying to give her a bath, he's trying to do the right thing. And he drops her and breaks her leg, right? It's clear her leg is broken. And one of the, the sisters, like, they, like they, they try and like set it, but they don't quite do it because they're children and like they only really admit to this in their 40s. Like it takes them a long time to actually explain what happened, but yet nobody knew the severity of the damage at the time. And kids, they're scared, like you don't want to get in trouble and you think you're doing the right thing and that's, you know, I mean, it's an awful situation. And again, they're children, they don't know any better. So from the age of six though, because, yeah, Fanny's the youngest out of 20. She's out picking cotton. So she's in the fields with her family and she's picking like 30 pounds of cotton, which is probably more than what she weighs at that point because, you know, impoverished and young, during the summer months she worked. During the winter months she attended a one room schoolroom for the sharecroppers, children. So basically the sharecroppers got together and they sort of made a school because they wanted to ensure the children had some kind of education. They wanted to make sure they were literate, you know, that they could read and write. And so she was there from 1924 to 1930, so six years. And all the while she, she would spend just over half the year working, you know, sun up to sundown, April to October, sometimes November, you know, if the weather was on their side. And so for a little bit she'd be at school. Now I'm going to talk about her parents for a wee bit because they weren't just sharecroppers. Like, they weren't just in the system that was, you know, full of indignity and constantly pushing them down. So they had like second and third jobs. So James Lee, he was a Baptist minister, he instilled faith in his family, raising them on like Bible stories and the like, right? And Louella, well, she was always, she was always working, right? She was a housemaid for the landlord's family during the off season. She cooked for them, like I said, she did their laundry. She also processed pigs in the exchange for parts. So like intestines, trotters, the snoot, so like the snout. So they would get the off cuts and the remnants of the animal. You know, I think there's that quote of it being like, you know, their leftovers just was then creatively made into a cultural meal. So basically if they could use it, they did. Like this is a waste not, want, not necessary for survival situation. And they did their best to feed themselves as well as they could. But I mean, you're talking at this point, you're still going through like the Great Depression is going to be hitting like it's not an easy time for anybody. And Fanny Lou, she's at school December to March, right? That's a really short time. But she is bright, she absorbs information, she loves reading and poetry. And she would attend like not only this little shack school, but also a Sunday school. And also she had all these Babel stories at home. So this would be like reinforced. So they would read, they would write, they would engage. And the Townsends, they were really, really supportive of their children being educated. And the thing is, Fanny, she would have to leave school at around 13 years old. See, basically this incident occurs so she and her mother and a bunch of other people, they're clearing land. So in order for land to be planted, they have to clear the old like roots out till it. And then we plant the seeds. So everything is completely normal until Luella shrieks like they're just doing their clearing. She just gives this ungodly scream and her hands cover her face. Fanny Lou runs to her mother and discovers that there is a massive wood chip link lodged in the eyeball. And in a moment of panic she just pulls it out. The eye is then washed out because, well, it's mainly goo and blood, you know, like aqueous humour, vitreous humour, all that stuff. And yeah, blood. So that is a very scary sight for a 13 year old. It's then bandaged because what else could she do in that situation? She cleans it and she bandages it because she's a child, she's not a medical professional. Needless to say, this is not great for Louella's vision. But you know, at this point, like what else could they do? But they had been working towards trying to have a better future for a long time. And so the Townsends, like they're in their probably near their 60s at this point and they had saved money to get rent this cabin and they started fixing it up. And you know, there was like a little farmland area. They bought second hand equipment. They had three mules and, and a cow which were part livestock, part pet. So things were looking up. They were building a better life, and they were really excited about it. This was a chance to move out of sharecropping and start being able to support themselves and move out of poverty. However, white supremacists in the area weren't entirely happy with it at all. So one night they went to the lot and put poison into livestock food. Basically, it was a toxic roticide, you know, rat poison. Well, rodent poison to kill mice and rats. And the children arrived like, they would go every morning. They would pet the animals, they would feed them, and they would go on their way. And this morning, they arrive to find one mule dead and the other two mules and the cow dying in excruciating pain. And this really knocked the Townsends down. And it just. It's so disheartening to have everything you've worked for be destroyed by just evil. People like that is an objectively evil thing to do. You're mad that a family has worked hard enough that they are going to be able to support themselves, so you murder their animals in one of the more, like, cruel ways. Like, they could have just shot the mules. Right. But instead they poisoned them to ensure that they suffered and to ensure that they were in pain. So Fanny left school to work in the fields when she was 13. And she may not have had, you know, education anymore, but she still had her father's sermons and his passion from the pulpit. It certainly passed on to his children. Like some of his sons actually went on to become ministers themselves. Meanwhile, Fanny learned how to connect, like, not only just to like people, but to. To a captive audience. And what Fanny's teenage years were like, well, they're. They're lost to time, effectively. What we do know is that at 20 years old, she marries Charles Gray on the 6th of January, 1938. Right. And it's. Yeah, this marriage is never really brought up very much. It's just kind of like a blip in her life. And we don't know a lot about Charles Gray. We know that they got married and then later divorced in Sunflower County, Mississippi. And Charles filed for divorce in 1943, citing that Thanny had deserted him and took up with another man. Now, leaving your husband in the 19, like, 30s, 1940s, like, that's a big deal. Like, typically, especially if you're impoverished, like, there is a reason you're leaving. Yeah, there is a story there somewhere. But they divorced, and typically, it's easier for a man to get a divorce than a woman. So maybe it was just Maybe it was amicable and it was just their way of genuinely getting it split. So Fanny had been married for a year when she lost her father. So he dies of a stroke in 1939 and that really hit her and it wasn't just a loss to her, but to the community as a whole. And so a year after her divorce to Charles Gray, Fannie Lou married Perrie Hamer, known as Pap. That probably sounds a lot better in an American accent and not my voice, which I'm losing, which is why I haven't recorded up until now. So sorry, I'm doing my best. So Pop worked on the next plantation over. He drove a tractor and he maintained the farming equipment. So he was pretty high up on the chain. So he was a very necessary, like, component of this plantation. So he made sure that he was necessary. You know, he also on the side ran a juke joint, which is my favourite little tip, because, like, he made sure that there was community. Now sometimes, like, you'll see this credited to James Lee Townsend instead of Pat Hamer, but it was Pat Pamer. So the landowner, W.D. marlow, he noticed just how smart and bright Fanny Lou was. So he made her his timekeeper. So he was like, wow, you're literate, you can read, you can write, you can do math. Wow. I never knew a woman like you, let alone a person like you, could, could do it. And so he was just like, great, you're my timekeeper. And so she would go between, like workers and management and weigh everything, right? So. And she would keep all the logs. Now, remember when I said that a lot of landlords were like, sneaky and sleeker earlier? And because crops were paid in weight and so they calibrated their scales a little bit to be short and so, so what she would do is she would sneak in properly calibrated scales to ensure that people were paid fairly and properly, which I love that little, little. Just. Nope. I love that little sense of justice there. And like her mother before her, Fanny Lou worked in the homes of white families in the off season. Like she had a work ethic. She was continuously working. She was ensuring that, you know, in a system that was designed to keep them down, that she was going to keep working to move up just like her family wanted. Throughout this marriage, the Hamers would not have any biological children. However, when they were settled in, when they were settled in, in Marlow's plantation, a nine month old girl was brought to them, Dorothea Jean, the child of a single mother. And the pair took her in now there's a story that it's like a cousin's child or a sister's child, but she was unwed, and that was just a no, no. And so they adopted her, right? And when Fanny Lou was 36, Louella, her mother, moves in with them too. And not long after that, they were brought a baby girl, Virgie, who had been like badly burned. So she was one of like, literally, I think, 19 children. And the parents were struggling, like, and so it's just one of those things where the younger kids were looking after the babies. And so like, she's only a couple months old at this point. And so she is cared for them. She's nursed back to health, and then she's brought back to her parents because her mother, like, wants her back. Now. It wasn't long actually before her uncle brings baby Virgie back and the Hamers officially adopt her. Now, Fanny Lou wanted to ensure that for the remainder of her years that her mother was treated like a human being at last. Like, that's a direct quote, a human being at last. And so she worked every hour that she could. So she's working to support her mother and also these children that have been brought into her life because she's just this incredibly caring person. Like, she's compassionate and passionate and she's. And she just wants to do what's right. And Fanny had grown up raised around passionate ministers, and this made its mark on her. Goodness, compassion, basic human decency. She believed in basic human rights and dignity. So it's no surprise that the Hamers started attending annual conferences. In the early 1950s. The regional council of Negro Leadership held a conference in the all black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, to promote civil rights and education and business ownership. And the passion and optimism of this group really blew Fanny Lou away. They discussed everything from voting rights, community outreach, school integration. They even instituted a boycott. Basically, they would not buy fuel, so like any gas for their vehicles, they wouldn't buy gas from any business that they could not use the toilet. So, like the restroom, the bathroom, like, if they couldn't use that in that facility, in that business, they weren't buying from there. And civil rights movements were charging up through the 50s and into the 60s. Integrations in schools, settings, bus boycotts, Freedom riders, the whole shebang. And this was something that they were really involved in and they really cared about as well as on the grander scale. Fanny Lou was dealing with like, personal problems, like, Health wise. In 1961, Fanny Lou was dealing with some abdominal pain Naturally she went to the doctor. I say naturally she went to the doctor after Pap told her that she had to stop suffering and she should go to the doctor. And so he told her that she had to be seen. So she was complaining of a knot in her stomach. And there's a few different theories kicking about about this. So, like, she had suffered from polio as a child and so this would have effects later on in her life. She may have had polycystic ovary systems, so pcos, which would have affected her too. I mean, she'd also suffered several miscarriages, so it could be connected. Now, was it fibroids, was it tumors? Like. So she had suffered like four years. And this knot, at the time when she went to see this doctor, it was believed to be a uterine tumour. And the white doctor said that she would have to have surgery to remove the mass. So while she's undergoing surgery to. To remove cancer, or at least what they believe to be cancer, the doctor, for absolutely no medical reason, also decided to perform a hysterectomy without his patient's knowledge or consent. Like, oh, this is going to get worse, by the way. This is going to get just terrible. She wasn't even informed by the doctor that her womb had been removed. She found out through a game of telephone, right? The reason she found out that she had had a hysterectomy was because the doctor's wife told one of her white friends and her cook overheard it, and this cook passed the information on and the information about her own surgery made its way back to her because of a doctor's wife gossiping. And if you thought this gets worse, then congratulations, you're correct. Mississippi legislation gave doctors the right to perform hysterectomies or tie the tubes of women without their knowledge or permission. Nothing quite like a white man in a position of power asserting control over a woman's body when she's unconscious.
- [27:17]
Progressive Insurance Advertiser
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- [27:46]
Noom Advertiser
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- [28:33]
Katy Charlwood
The justification for this was if the doctor thought a woman might be too poor to raise a child, it's a bullshit excuse. And this act, this was known as a Mississippi appendectomy in black communities. And this was a tactic used to limit black population in the South. Involuntary sterilization and this, I'm going to say it fucking barbaric act had an official and official number, an estimation of 8,000. But as with everything, the number reported is often far lower right. Than unreported. Now we know that approximately over 60,000 people were sterilized in the US under programs of eugenics up until the 1970s. Now this is men, women and people of various races and and disabilities. So a number like 8,000 feels incredibly low in the grand scheme of things. The Mississippi Appendectomy where thousands of black women went to into doctor's office for gynecological health care and left without their reproductive organs. Unwillingly and unknowingly, the choice was was taken from them. Right? Oh, you're thinking, Katie, you're really fcking mad about this. Absolutely I am. That is medical abuse. That is violence. Okay. I don't care how you want to dress it up. And yes, things are just going to get worse from here. So if you're sensitive, you're probably going to want to exit and stage left and I'll see you and then no, you might not want to do the accepted because the next episode actually or on the podcast is it's so much worse. But anyway, and you're thinking how could it be worse than this? Oh, you'll see. So a year later when she is 45, right. Imagine being so concerned that a 44 year old woman was going to have children. Imagine that being your concern. Even though the likelihood is quite low. You just wanted to remove that. I'm Sorry. I'm not sorry. Actually, I'm mad. Right. When she's 45, a national coalition of civil rights groups had begun a voter registration drive. And so she's asked to, like, visit this church. So she goes in, and incidentally, this is actually the same church that her funeral will be held in, like, years later. But that church is where she learned that black people had the right to vote. They had the constitutional right to vote. So they. They kind of had the right to vote. Black citizens could vote in theory, but in the South, Jim Crow laws prevented them from being actually able to vote in practice. So there was this huge drive to get African American citizens to vote, particularly those who were educated. So, because they were doing, like, these, like, tests to get people, you know, just tricks, really, so that people couldn't vote. And so they wanted to try and garner as many people who could, like, pass these tests and, you know, tip the scales a wee bit. Because, like, In Mississippi, only 5% of the eligible black voters were registered. So even if they were able to cast their votes, these votes didn't really have much of an impact because it's such a small amount. And what is wild is that many counties in the state had a majority black population. So the fact that there was such low voter registration, right, It's. It's wild. And with Jim Crow, they were intimidation tactics. You had lynching, violence. You had all these bloody loopholes, and, of course, the grandfather clause, right? And throughout the years, they, like, added hurdle after hurdle tests like, how many bubbles are in a bar of soap, right? And they have literacy tests, and that was one such test. So hence why the drive to get educated black citizens to register to vote. Now, Fanny Lou, growing up in the south, just existing, like, she was aware of the dangers if she tried to register. And her and 17 others decided to just try, right? Knowing what could happen to them if they did. And when she tried the first time, it was made as unpleasant and scary as possible. So when they arrive, like, there is just a group of white supremacist protestors outside, right? Protestors. Protesters, sorry. And she called them the KKK with lipstick. And so what they would do is they would only let two, like, people in at the time, making the rest wait outside with the white supremacist protestors, like. Like, that's just a massive intimidation tactic. And this literacy test involved, like, so for white people, they'd be like, this is a stop sign. What is it? And they'd be like, that's a stop sign. Like, congratulations, you can vote. And so that would be for them, for black citizens. However, this involved reading a section of the Mississippi Constitution, copying down what they had just read, and then interpreting it to the satisfaction of the registrar, right? And Fannie Louhima, she had to read a section on de facto law. And she said afterwards that she knew as much about de facto law as a horse knew about Christmas day, which is fair. So all 18 people who tried to register that day failed. Wow, what a crazy random happenstance. So instead of giving up, Fanny Lou said fuck this for a game of soldiers and decided she was going to try again. And she told them she was going to keep coming back until she passed that test. So after that first attempt, when she gets home, her boss, W.D. marlow, told her that if she was going to try and vote that she shouldn't work for him anymore. And I love this response because she just says to him, she's like, I didn't go to vote for you. Like, you tell him, like, do it, lady. So but this has also caused this whole situation. Like she's fired because she tried to vote, right? Or tried to register to vote. She hasn't even tried to vote yet, right? And so it gets to the point where like these threats are happening and so she has to leave Pap and the girls, like, she has to go, right? So she gets moved around. Like people are sheltering her, right? House to house. Like they are moving her because she's now a target. So you've got her and people that she's associated with, they're being intimidated or like they're trying to. She's being harassed, she's being shot at, there are drive bys, they go past the houses that, you know, they know that she's been like, her family actually has to evacuate to Tallahatchie for like. And she's more than just a person trying to vote. She was a symbol of the fight against power held by the privileged Southern white elites, right? And this was big news, right? This story is just spreading like wildfire. And she's moving around like 10 days here, five there, six here, so on and so forth. Like, and she's moving so, so around so much that like other people are being hurt because people are trying to get to her. So like the Klan and other white supremacists, like, they're shooting in buildings and other people are being shot. Like two girls get shot and they, they end up being like taken to a hospital. And was it, I think it's like the police chief tries to stop them going in and they're like, not a chance. And so they get in and the girls get deal with and they survive and everything's fine. I say everything's fine. But they're still in the south. And so, like, she's moving around. And so this. They managed to get a black activist to her, right? Because, like, nobody white is getting near this woman. And so this activist comes to her and tells her that she has to come to Nashville to talk about her community being attacked and people being shot because she tried to register to vote, right? And they're like, you got to talk to the news. And she's like, great. Packs her bags, off she goes, right? So like now she's getting known. And so after the harvest, like, Pap is also fired, he loses his job and they have to move. And so the sncc, like, they manage to like, cover the cost of getting them somewhere to go. So they end up moving to, I'm gonna say, like, it's a house with no running water, right? And the Hamers, they rent this house on 626 East Lafayette street in Rowville. So they're there and the sncc, known as sncc, like she. They get a job for, For Fanny Lee as, as a field secretary. So this is the student non Violent Coordinating Committee. Like, they don't have a lot of money at the best of times, but they're like, okay, we need to do something. And they need to support Fannie Lou because she's now a symbol of this. So they are paying her and they're covering the cost of this rent of this house. So she's earning $10 a week as a field secretary. And so she takes the literacy test two more, right? Two more times before she passes it. So when she does pass it, right, they still wouldn't let her vote. Basically, she was registered to vote, but her county required voters to have two poll tax receipts, right? So basically there was just another hurdle, right? And it was a way of stopping people who, like, were in poverty or weren't flush, like, to prevent them from voting. Eventually she did get those. She would get those poll tax receipts.
- [39:59]
Progressive Insurance Advertiser
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com, progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.
- [40:19]
Noom Advertiser
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- [41:09]
Katy Charlwood
As a SNCC field secretary for voter registration and welfare programs, she fought to grant federal resources to impoverished black families in the South. And she's gaining fame and momentum. She's traveling around doing talks like she's on the same talk circuit as Martin Luther King Jr. Right? She's giving speeches. She's like a minister at a pulpit again, passionate, compassionate. And as her fame grows, so does, I suppose, her notoriety and so does her harassment, right? This shows you like, how the whole system is out to get her because the house that she's staying in, right, Lafayette street, had no running water, and yet the hamels received a $9,000 water bill. Policemen would storm into their bedroom at night with their guns drawn and without a warrant. And they would just be like, we don't need a warrant, right? And it does not end there. On the 9th of June, 1963, Fanny Lou and other activists were returning from a voter registration workshop by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the sclc. So this was in South Carolina and they were on the Trailways bus and they were heading back home. So now they'd stopped in Winona, Mississippi, right? So they had, they tried to stop a few places before, but they were all like, whites only. No, you can't come in. And so they stop here and they are refused service. And a Mississippi state highway patrolman decides to start intimidating this group with his belly club. And so these activists being, you know, intelligent people, they're like, you can't do this. And so they start taking down the numbers of the officer's license plate, right? Because always, always have a body of evidence. And so this is, this is not taken well. And so the patrolman and the police chief who has arrived arrests them. So when Fanny Lou asks if they can just continue on to Greenwood, right? No need to do this, lads, can we just go? They're like, no, you're being arrested too, at the county jail. Things are going to get rough now. So if you're not okay with violence, you're going to want to Skip forward like 60 seconds. 60, yeah, just do that, right? At the county jail, the group were beaten. Fannie Lou was beaten with a baton and beatings got worse. When she screamed in pain, she was stripped and sexually assaulted by police officers. At the county jail. She talks about being groped and she does not mention anything other than being stripped and groped. But she was beaten so furiously, like in the booking room. This is even before we get into the actual, like the jail itself. She's just in booking and these people are beaten. They, they stomp and they beat. There's 15 year olds here and they are being stripped, beaten, stomped, right? Like, she was beaten so badly that it left her with a blood clot over her left eye. Severe permanent kidney damage, right? It is like for the rest of her life she suffered because of this unwarranted attack, racially charged abuse. And in the jail, they got an inmate to beat her with a blackjack. A blackjack, if you don't know, is a strip of leather with a metal weight sewn in, right? She is beaten with this so much that they say that her skin looks like wood or like the scales of a snake. She is swollen, she is beaten, she is scarred, right? So basically sncc, they try and send down an activist to get them out, like a member. He gets arrested and he gets beaten so badly that his eyes are swollen shut. So when the rest of SNCC realize that people aren't coming back from this, this area, the police, right, the station, it is flooded with calls, right? Sncc, the sclc, like they are going and going and going. And obviously now there's a lot of attention happening here, which is lucky because these officers were openly planning on disappearing them into a river. Like, direct quote. So they are released on 12 June, 1963, the day after President John F. Kennedy has his famous civil rights address, right? When she's released, her skin is swollen, you know, her hands are practically blue and like she couldn't move them and she needed a month to recuperate just to be able to move properly. Again, not even properly. When she returned to Mississippi, she organized voter registration projects like she was back on it. So these are things like the Freedom Summer Project. She encouraged people to vote and she wanted to give them something to vote for. So in June 1964, she was the first black woman in Mississippi to run for Congress against a white incumbent who'd held his seat since before the Second World War, right? And for the very first time she voted. And she voted for herself because. Absolutely. So in 1964, Fannie Lou Co founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The purpose of which was like, to make sure the all white Democratic Party to like to stop it from drowning out black voices and to make sure that there was a party that did not exploit or discriminate. Like, she's into equity and equality, right? And so she goes to the 1964 Democratic National Convention and Fannie Lou is giving this testimony, this televised testimony at the convention's credential committee. Now it's going out live, however, right? However. It's like she's talking about voter restrictions and things like that and the abuse that she suffered. And Lyndon B. Johnson, like, he did not want this going out. Like, so when she's doing this, you know, this very impassioned speech, this is cut off, right on live tv. This is cut off and interrupted by President Lyndon B. Johnson giving an impromptu press conference in the White House. And he's surrounded by like governors and stuff. And so he's doing this and he's. It's on the nine month anniversary of overshooting and he's like, oh, it's, you know, blah, blah, blah. And he does this completely to distract from this. Now this Siegfried and Roy trick didn't work quite well or any way that he intended because it wasn't just like live, it had been recorded. So the evening, the evening broadcast. So the news networks broadcast Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony in full later that evening. And she was very eloquently popping off about voter suppression. And this little trick by Johnson just backfires, right? But that man was an absolute prick. Like, he's a prick. We know what he did to Jackie Kennedy as well. Like he's a prick. Anyway, so she was such a powerful speaker that she commanded attention, some say even more so than Martin Luther King Jr. Did. Her activism, right? Continued to cause problems for her, right? And she would be harassed all her life, but she would also have personal problems at home and she would still be dealing with racial inequality at home. So Dorothea Jean, her daughter, when she's 20, 21, 22, she suffers an internal hemorrhage after giving birth to her second child in Fannyloo. She drives her to two separate hospitals and they're white only and they refuse to see her. And so she Ends up having to drive 127 miles to the nearest hospital. But she doesn't make it. And her daughter dies in her arms because the hospital would not treat her. And this is the 1960s. This is not that long ago. So here's the stats, right? Right. The approximate national maternal like mortality rate in the USA is 17 per 100,000. For black women, it's 43 per 100,000. That's more than double. That's fucking wild. So when she runs for office, when Fanny runs for office, like she loses, but she never stops fighting. Like, it's so sleek it. Because a bunch of counties didn't even put her name on the ballot, right? Because they're like, they just did not want her to even have the option of winning. And so she fights it and what do you know, it's dismissed. So she is just like working to try and get more voters. She's trying to do her best. And the Freedom Summer, it leads to 17,000 black citizens attempting to register to vote. Right. 1200 succeed. And this led to more racially aggravated attacks. Now, of course, cracks begin to show in the civil rights movements. And Fannie Lou championed an integrated culture of society and future. She was a good Christian woman. After all. They exist. They do, right? Some people, you know, take compassion and joy and love for all mankind from their faith. Some people use it to be abusive. Fannie Lou was not one of those people. She was kind and good and right. So she didn't believe in an abortion. She didn't believe in it. I mean, as someone whose rights were taken from her, I can understand. And because of her religious beliefs, like, again, feel right to her opinion. All your faves are problematic. I'm like, that's a thing. That's just who she was. And I respect her for her opinion. But that's. And people think it's some sort of catch all when you go, oh, well, they have this one thing that you disagree on. And I'm like, yeah, that's fine. To have one disagreement when you're doing all this. Good. Because people aren't 100% perfect. You know what I mean? You're allowed to have a little flaw, you know, like. And I think in the society that you grew up in, when things like choice are taken away from you, it's very easy to see something else, to have that perspective on it. So here's, here's my. Okay, I have to share this, actually. So she actually gets out to see the world and her eyes are opened up because Harry Belafonte right? He manages to raise like the funds to send Fanny Lou Hamer and a bunch of other people to Ghana in, in Africa for a few weeks. And this is a woman who lived a life of oppression and suppression under a white ruling class, right? And there she was seeing an entire nation of black people just living full lives. The president of Ghana personally visited her. When the president of her own nation actively avoided her right, she was consistently dismissed. And here was the president of an African nation coming to see her. And this trip really inspired her. Like it gave a connection to a community and heritage that she didn't know that she could feel or that she was going to be connected to. There were songs that reminded her of her grandmother. There were just these amazing connections for her. And like she didn't believe in the term African American because she felt that it kept black citizens like referenced as a subjugated group. She preferred black, right? So back home, the Voting Rights act had been passed in 1965 which removed a lot of legal loopholes of voter suppression. However, in a move that surprises absolutely no one, this triggered the KKK and other white supremacists into their old, plain old intimidation tactics and violence escalated again. It's clear that Fanny Lou, right, has this uphill battle and she needs to get eyes on the cause and make some noise. And so she and some other colleagues issued a challenge for all five of the missing Mississippi congressional seats because the claim was the only reason they were elected was as a direct result of voter suppression. It was what dismissed. It was dismissed. Shocking, I know. And they continue to register black voters across Mississippi, right. Eventually she is seated as a delegate of the 1968 Democratic convention as part of an integrated party. She became an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, a war in which her son in law returned from with a debilitating dead disability. So like in 1968 as well, she publishes her autobiography. So she also like, she keeps going. She's like pure grassroots, community based. She is helping initiate Head Start programs all over the south, subsidizing the subsidized preschool programs that also provided nutrition to the children. Attending with the Freedom Farm Cooperative, she helped raise $10,000 for, for 40 acres of farmland in Wisconsin. Yes. Of Cheese festival fame. The FFC attempted to redistribute economic power across groups and black farmers. With the National Council of Negro Women, she helped set up an interracial support program, the Pig Project, for people who could not afford meat. Right. She's all about inclusion and integration and equality. She's like, you're hungry, let's feed you. By 1971, Fanny Lou Co founded the National Women's Political Caucus. And like at this, this is where she makes this statement, this historic statement of nobody's free until everybody's free. Now, a year later, like, she is hospitalized because they say she's suffering from nervous exhaustion. Now this could easily be triggered from all of the, like, the attacks that she's suffered over the years. So in hospital, like, she's hospitalized again a few years later and this is where she's diagnosed with breast cancer and she has surgery. On the 14th of March, 1977, Fanny Lou Hamer died from complications of hypertension and cancer at the Taborian Hospital, Mound Bayou, Mississippi. She was 59 years old. She was laid to rest in her hometown of Ruleville in Sunflower County. Her epitaph read so like, on her tombstone, it reads, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. Her memorial service, by the way, was so packed, like it was packed to the rafters, that they had to have an overflow service in the Ruleville Central High School. So she was an inspiration to many, especially the disenfranchised in the South. And she's a civil rights member who, like, deserves to be spoken about more. And she does not deserve to be forgotten. Now, I, I wanted to talk about her. I wanted to bring her up and I wanted to talk about someone who had suffered medical abuse. Right? That was going to be my, my point of this week's episode. This week's theme for Women's History Month is medical abuse. And although I will be championing women throughout Women's History Month, I'm also going to be talking about everything women have had to go through. And I didn't want to just limit this to white women because I know that a few people were like. I had a few people who were like, are you going to stop talking about black history now that Black History Month's over? And I'm like, no, it's. I'm gonna try and cover as much as I can. Obviously I'm one person, so it's limited, but I'm gonna keep talking about different people and hopefully, hopefully you'll enjoy it. So please care and share. Share and care. And thank you for listening. Oh, and recommendation time. Oh, my goodness. I need to do recommendations for this week for watching.
- [58:41]
MeUndies Advertiser
You know what?
- [58:42]
Katy Charlwood
You should watch if you can. I was, I was like, thinking of something light and so I don't know if you remember the TV show Sister, Sister. It's two twins who were separated at birth and adopted. And anyway, I. I really, really loved that show growing up. So sister, sister, go watch that for listening. Oh, Kendria. Kendria has a new podcast out. It was recommended to me because I was told it was right up my alley and I haven't listened to it yet. But Keyandria has a new podcast out. It's about forgotten cold cases. It's meant to be really, really good. So I was recommended that. So I'm recommending that to you. And for reading. You know what? You should all read Bold, Brilliant and Bad by Dervla Broderick. It's just, it's also Irish Heritage Month, so read that. A vote. You know, interesting women. And with that, I'm going to bid you adieu. Adios. Au revoir. Au revoir des heires, my friends.
- [59:40]
Noom Advertiser
Bye.
- [59:40]
Katy Charlwood
Bye.
- [59:42]
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- [60:31]
Katy Charlwood
Acast powers the world's best podcasts.
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Katy Charlwood
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Katy Charlwood
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