Fannie Lou Hamer was a force to be reckoned with. Enduring intractable racism, police beatings, and even forced sterilization, she never stopped working for equal voting rights for all. This is the tragic real-life story of Fannie Lou Hamer.
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00:00Fannie Lou Hamer was a force to be reckoned with. Enduring intractable racism, police beatings,
00:06and even forced sterilization, she never stopped working for equal voting rights for all.
00:12This is the tragic real-life story of Fannie Lou Hamer.
00:17Born on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, Fannie Lou was the 20th and youngest
00:24child of Lou Ella and James Townsend. Both Lou Ella and James worked as sharecroppers their
00:29entire lives. When Fannie Lou was just 6 years old, she joined them despite having endured a
00:36bout of polio just a year earlier. Hamer was 8 years old in 1925 when she saw Joe Pullum,
00:43a local sharecropper, lynched. In an interview with Jack O'Dell in 1965, she said,
00:49"...I remember that until this day, and I won't forget it."
00:53Poverty forced Hamer to drop out of school at the age of 12, and by the age of 13,
00:58she was picking as much as 400 pounds of cotton in a day and receiving $1 for her work.
01:04Since Hamer had learned how to read and write during her brief time in school,
01:08she also worked as a record-keeper on the plantation, and soon discovered just how
01:13the owners would cook the books to cheat the poor sharecroppers out of their fair wages.
01:18To offset this, Hamer began secretly tilting the scales to ensure people weren't cheated.
01:23She later recalled,
01:25"...I didn't know what to do, and all I could do was rebel in the only way I could rebel."
01:30In 1944, Fannie Lou married Perry Papp Hamer, a tractor driver on a local plantation.
01:36Seventeen years later, in 1961, she underwent surgery to remove a small cyst in her stomach.
01:43When she woke, she discovered that she'd also been given a hysterectomy without her consent.
01:48According to PBS, this type of forced sterilization was so common at the time
01:53that it became referred to as a Mississippi appendectomy, a term coined by Hamer herself.
01:59On June 8th, 1964, Hamer testified before a panel in Washington, D.C.,
02:04that at the North Sunflower County Hospital,
02:07six out of the ten Negro women that go to the hospital are sterilized with the tubes tied.
02:13Forced sterilizations have a dark history and an equally dark present in the United States.
02:18Indiana passed the first forced sterilization law in 1907, and while they hit their peak in
02:23the 1930s and 1940s, targeting those deemed to be criminals or unfit by the 1950s,
02:30sterilization laws started targeting welfare recipients as well.
02:34Forced sterilizations were frequently racially motivated. This became abundantly clear when
02:39Mississippi proposed a bill that would make it a felony for a parent on welfare
02:43to have more than one child. Jail time could be avoided if the parent consented to sterilization.
02:50Ultimately, sterilization was removed from that bill,
02:52but untold women like Hamer still were sterilized without their consent.
02:57On August 31st, 1962, Hamer and 17 others went to the courthouse in Indianola, Mississippi,
03:04to register to vote. According to PBS, most of the group was blocked from even attempting
03:09to register. Only Hamer and one other man were allowed to fill out an application and take a
03:14literacy test. At the time, literacy tests were purposefully designed to keep Black people from
03:19voting, and when Hamer was asked to explain de facto laws, she later recalled that,
03:24"...I knowed as much about a facto law as a horse knows about Christmas Day."
03:29After failing the literacy test, the group was denied the right to register to vote.
03:33On the way home, their bus was stopped by police and fined $100 for being
03:38too yellow. Then the persecution got worse. The owner of the plantation where Hamer worked and
03:43lived demanded that she withdraw her application to vote.
03:47"...Mr. Marlowe told me that I would have to go down and withdraw my registration or leave,
03:53because they wasn't ready for that in Mississippi."
03:56Hamer refused, and was immediately thrown off the plantation where she had lived and
04:01worked for 18 years. She temporarily stayed with a friend before finding a new home,
04:06and just narrowly missed being murdered by those who were trying to suppress the Black vote.
04:11"...They shot in the house 15 times, thinking that I was there."
04:17On January 10th, 1963, Hamer was finally able to pass the literacy test. According to The Nation,
04:23after her second attempt on December 4th, she told the registrar, quote,
04:27"...you'll see me every 30 days till I pass."
04:30A month later, she passed. But despite now being registered to vote,
04:34she discovered that she still wasn't allowed to vote because she didn't have any poll tax receipts.
04:40In some parts of the United States, people were required to pay a tax in order to vote — a tax
04:45put in place to ensure that the poorest people, who were often people of color, didn't get a
04:49voice in the government. And they weren't subtle about this fact either. For instance, in 1939,
04:54Alabama's Tuscaloosa News published an editorial that read in part,
04:58"...this newspaper believes in white supremacy,
05:01and it believes that the poll tax is one of the essentials for the preservation of white supremacy."
05:06In 1962, the United States passed the 24th Amendment, which outlawed poll taxes for
05:11federal elections. Despite this, Hamer was still denied the right to vote a year later,
05:16because it wasn't really enforced until 1965. And to this day, eight states, including Mississippi,
05:23still haven't ratified the amendment.
05:26While PAP worked to pay off their sharecropping debt at the plantation,
05:30Hamer continued working toward voter registration and desegregation. On June 9th, 1963,
05:36Hamer and nine other activists were returning on a bus from a voter registration and civic
05:41education training session in Charleston, South Carolina. The activists had tried to
05:45integrate lunch counters at the various bus stations along their way home, and their protests
05:50had enraged their bus driver. According to Fannie Lou Hamer, America's Freedom Fighting
05:54Woman by Megan Parker Brooks, the driver began using the phone at every stop, reporting their
06:00location to Mississippi police. In Winona, Mississippi, police arrested at least six
06:05of the activists, even those who'd remained on the bus, and took them to jail. Hamer and
06:10her fellow activists weren't released from jail until June 12th, and in those three days,
06:15Hamer sustained such severe and prolonged beatings that she suffered from lifelong damage
06:20to her kidneys, eyes, and legs. In addition to beating the activists themselves, police also
06:26forced the other Black people who were also imprisoned in the jail at the time to beat
06:30the activists as well. While there was later a brief trial, the police were cleared for their
06:35actions.
06:37After several failed attempts to work with the all-white, pro-segregation Mississippi Democratic
06:42Party, Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and in 1964, she went to the
06:48Democratic National Convention in an attempt to get representation. As a result, she received
06:54death threats. When she reported them to the police, they told her, quote,
06:58"'Don't look to us for help.'"
06:59On August 22nd, 1964, Hamer testified before the Credentials Committee at the Democratic
07:05National Convention. She started by stating her full name and home address, defiantly
07:10signaling her fearlessness to every white supremacist. According to The Washington Post,
07:16President Johnson was terrified that her testimony at the convention would break up
07:20the coalition of white Southern delegates he needed to get elected. He tried to convince
07:24her not to speak, but when she did anyway, he abruptly called a pointless live press
07:29conference so the TV broadcast would have to cut away from Hamer's testimony. It backfired,
07:34bringing more media attention to Hamer's testimony than it otherwise might have gotten.
07:39With many evening news programs giving full coverage of the speech that Johnson had interrupted.
07:44"'Because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in America.'"
07:54As a result of pressure from President Johnson and vice presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey,
07:59the convention refused to accept Hamer as an official delegate.
08:02Instead, officials offered a farcical compromise to the MFDP. They'd be allowed two delegates,
08:08but they could neither sit in the Mississippi section nor would they be able to cast votes.
08:13Oh, and neither one of those seats were allowed to go to Hamer. Why? According to Humphrey,
08:18the president has said he will not let that illiterate woman speak on the floor of the
08:22Democratic convention. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party voted unanimously to reject
08:27the administration's compromise. In Hamer's words, quote,
08:30"'We didn't come all this way for no two seats.' They returned to Mississippi,
08:35shut out once again by a process meant to empower them."
08:38In 1964, Hamer also ran unsuccessfully for Congress. According to an interview with Jack
08:45O'Dell, Hamer recalled that it was harder for her to pass the literacy test in order to register to
08:50vote than it was for her to qualify to run for Congress. And despite being barred from the
08:54official ballot, the MFDP gave out freedom ballots that included candidates of all races.
09:00According to Smithsonian Magazine, after her first bid was unsuccessful,
09:05Hamer ran for office two more times, in 1967 and 1971. Unfortunately, her 1967 run was
09:12disqualified on a technicality, and she lost to the incumbent in 1971. She did have one moment
09:18of triumph, though. In 1968, the Democratic Party began requiring equal representation for state
09:25delegations, and she finally was recognized as an official delegate for Mississippi at the National
09:30Democratic Party Convention. She used her platform to protest the ongoing war in Vietnam.
09:36Seeing that not much progress was being made on the political front, Fannie Lou Hamer turned most
09:41of her attention toward economic justice as a way to fight for racial equality. In 1969,
09:47Hamer founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative in order to provide Black people with land that
09:51they could own and farm collectively. With the help of donors such as the Measure for Measure
09:56organization and Harry Belafonte, by 1970, the co-op had amassed 680 acres for cultivation.
10:03Membership for the co-op was $1 a month, and even though only 30 families could afford the dues,
10:09those who couldn't pay weren't excluded. Roughly an additional 1,500 families were also part of
10:14the Freedom Farm Cooperative in name. In 1970, the collective also started a pig bank for impoverished
10:20families. With help from the National Council of Negro Women, the collective purchased five
10:25male pigs and 35 female pigs, and over the next three years, thousands of pigs made their way to
10:31Black families. Hamer especially loved the pig bank, stating that, quote,
10:35"...I wouldn't take nothing for our golden pigs."
10:38Unfortunately, without institutional backing or resources, the Freedom Farm
10:42Collective only lasted a handful of years. But at its height, it was one of the largest
10:47employers in Sunflower County, Mississippi. According to the Center for Constitutional
10:52Rights, Hamer was actually partly responsible for the Voting Rights Act's passage thanks to
10:57her 1965 civil rights case, Hamer v. Campbell. Brought against the Circuit Clerk of Mississippi
11:03for restricting Black people's right to register and vote, Hamer's victory in court even allowed
11:08the elections to be overturned due to their discriminatory practices.
11:12Even after the Voting Rights Act was finally passed in 1965, Fannie Lou Hamer continued to
11:17focus on equal voting rights. Despite the federal protections that the Voting Rights Act claimed to
11:22guarantee, though, white people in power continued to try to prevent Black people from registering
11:27and voting. Still, she fought on. According to PBS, in 1970, Hamer organized plaintiffs for a
11:34class-action lawsuit regarding school desegregation in Sunflower County. This suit resulted in the
11:40district court ordering the county to merge its segregated schools into a single public school
11:45system. Fannie Lou Hamer's health suffered during her final years. In 1976, she was diagnosed with
11:52breast cancer and underwent a radical mastectomy. She continued her civil rights work as long as she
11:57could, but as her health worsened, fundraising and public speaking became more and more difficult.
12:03Hamer died on March 14th, 1977, her life cut tragically short at the age of 59.
12:09Hundreds of people came to pay their respects, but some regretted the media circus that transpired.
12:14According to Fannie Lou Hamer, The Life of a Civil Rights Icon by Ernest N. Bracey,
12:19some of her fellow activists believed that dignitaries looking for a photo op
12:23ended up overshadowing coverage of Hamer's life and work in the morning being done by her real
12:28friends, family, and neighbors. Hamer was buried at the Freedom Farm Cooperative,
12:32and her gravestone bears her famous motto,
12:35We are sick and tired of being sick and tired.