Imagine having to sit in the back of the bus because of the color of your skin. Imagine if you went to register to vote and you had to take a literacy test to prove your intelligence. Imagine fearing every day could be your last day because the police want you dead for fighting for your rights as an American citizen. Well, Fannie Lou Hamer didn’t have to imagine this twisted and backward world. She lived it. She lived it but refused to accept it. Like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and other male activists school history books teach us about, Fannie Lou Hamer was the most powerful voice of the civil rights movement. She endured the devil himself to stand for what she deserved as a functioning member of society. She was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” She said no more, and she marched to Congress in 1964 and asked on national television, “Is this America?” Jump in the time machine with me and let’s travel together back to the time we seem to forget about.
Fannie Lou Hamer, the youngest of twenty children, was born on October 6, 1917,
Montgomery County, Mississippi to sharecroppers Lou Ella and James Townsend. At that time, sharecropping among African Americans in Mississippi was common. They would work white plantation owner’s cotton fields and they would give half of their crop back to the land owner. They were a very poor family and Fannie frequently wondered why they were so poor. Her family worked like dogs all the time so this didn’t make sense to her. That’s because sharecroppers were paid in land and tools instead of actual money. So, sharecropping just became another name for slavery.
At age six, the land owner came to her three-room house and promised little Fannie that if she picked thirty pounds of cotton that week, he’d carry her to his store and let her buy any snacks she wanted. She went out to the fields and her mother asked her if she wanted to try. She agreed and her parents weren’t going to let her cheat. If she wanted to buy snacks, she was to pick thirty pounds of cotton. Even though she was small, she had more determination in her tiny little finger than most people will ever have in their whole body. She picked the cotton like her life depended on it and she did it. She succeeded in picking thirty pounds of cotton. The landowner kept the promise. He carried her to the store, buying her Crackerjacks, cheese, and Daddy Wide leg Sardines. Then, for the next week, if she wanted to buy Crackerjacks again, she would have to pick sixty pounds of cotton. That’s how, at six years old, Fannie Lou Hamer began her career as a sharecropper, picking up to two and three pounds a day when she got a little older despite living with polio.
By age 12, Hamer had already quit school to work in the fields. Since she had learned how to read and write before she left, the boss put her in charge of the books. In 1944, she married Perry “Pap” Hamer, a tractor driver who worked on her plantation. Fannie and her husband really wanted to start a family of their own. Unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse. The white man had other plans for her and unborn children. In 1961, after undergoing surgery to remove a uterine tumor, a white doctor performed a hysterectomy without her consent and took away her chances of ever having biological children. This cruel practice among white doctors was not uncommon for African American women living in the South. Hundreds, if not thousands of African American women were given hysterectomies without their consent or their permission.
Although Fannie was probably devastated and livid by the fact that she couldn’t have her own children due to the systemic racism in Mississippi, that didn’t stop her from becoming a mother. There was a way to get around this issue and that was adoption. Fannie and her husband could adopt children who needed a stable, supportive, and loving home. That’s just what they did. Fannie and her husband, Pap, ended up adopting four daughters, and they all described her as a very loving, caring mother. Fannie Lou Hamer might not have had her own biological children but she loved her adoptive ones as if she gave birth to them herself.
When Fannie Lou Hamer was younger, she asked her mother how come they weren’t white.
Even as a little girl, she saw the divide between whites and African Americans within the Mississippi Delta, the most southern place on earth. As an adult, this questioning turned into a willingness to speak up about the problems that the African American community faced. In 1962, she attended a meeting hosted by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) where she learned for the first time that African Americans had the ability to register to vote in Mississippi. After that very day, she was determined to exercise that privilege as a citizen of the United States of America.
She first attempted to register to vote on August 31, 1962 in Indianola Mississippi. She was among a group of seventeen other volunteers who wanted to be seen as first-class citizens in the eyes of their nation. Unfortunately, Hamer couldn’t pass the literacy test, which was carefully designed to stop certain people from voting in the elections. To make matters worse, the police stopped their bus and fined them one hundred dollars for the bus being too yellow. To add to this series of injustices that Hamer faced that day, the landowner of her plantation fired her after she refused to withdraw her application for her well overdue voting privileges.
Although all this happened to Fannie, she didn’t quit. She refused to quit. She was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” She wanted the world to be colorblind and dreamed of equal rights and freedoms for everyone. After failing the literacy test again, she told the person in charge of the voting process that he would see her every thirty days until I passed this stupid test. Funny enough, a month after she said that she passed the literacy test. She could vote now, right? Wrong. Fannie Lou Hamer couldn’t vote because she didn’t have any poll tax receipts with her. In the 1960s, African Americans had to pay a two-dollar tax if they wanted to vote. Those who couldn’t afford it couldn’t vote in the election.
Hamer continued her fight for equality despite the fact that people wanted to end her. While staying with a friend, someone associated with the KKK shot in the house nineteen times attempting to kill the leader of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. His attempts failed due to Fannie not being home that day. God may have saved her that time but he couldn’t save her from what was to come on June 9, 1963.
That day, Hamer traveled down to Winona, Mississippi, with her group of activists coming back from their work in South Carolina. The driver of the bus repeatedly promised to call the police on them. When they got to a restaurant, Hamer stayed on the bus while other activists went in to get something to eat only to be denied because of the color of their skin. Soon after, Hamer saw the Mississippi police department arresting some of the activists. This is where Fannie Lou Hamer made the huge mistake of getting off the bus to see what was going on. That’s when the police arrested her and dragged her to Winona, Mississippi jail, cussing her out all the way.
After intense questioning of Mrs. Hamer, they shoved her into a cell with a white officer along with two African American men. The two African men held loaded blackjacks given to them by the officers. They were instructed to do something to Hamer that would leave her with lifelong injuries to her kidneys, a blood clot in her eye, and leg damage. Before it happened, one of the smug officers said to Hamer that they were going to make her wish she was never born. Then, the African American men brutally beat Fannie Lou Hamer with those loaded blackjacks to the point where they almost killed her. By the grace of God, the poor woman survived the attack and refused to let this violence scare her away from pursuing her dream of becoming a first-class citizen.
Fannie Lou Hamer was the co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and In 1964, she marched to Congress and testified before the credential committee. Here’s where it gets a little sneaky because President Johnson thought that the world didn’t need to see her testimony. So what happened was he told the television crew to go to an emergency commercial in order to shield the world from her speaking the truth about the horrors within Mississippi walls. President Johnson’s little plan backfired on him because the whole world saw her testimony anyway. In her testimony, she asked the country, ” Is this America? 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 because we want to live as decent human beings in America.” After Hamer thanked the crowd for listening to her pour her heart out, she walked off stage with her powerful words echoing through America’s national ear.
Fannie Lou Hamer continued her work as an activist for many years. Unfortunately, due to cancer and heart disease, she tragically passed away at the age of fifty-nine. Her grief-stricken family may have buried Hamer’s body; her spirit lives on in Mississippi. Her legacy lives on to continue to inspire millions across America and across the globe to this day. Her determination and commitment to fighting for equality for all people is the reason why anyone can enter a grocery store freely, why we don’t give certain people the literacy tests to vote, and why the African American community is “their grandparent’s dream in 2025” as a YouTuber, Amir Odom, says in so many of his videos. If she were alive today, I am sure she’d be proud of how far some places have come in terms of equal rights and how we, as Americans, are colored blind now most of the time.
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