Why Fannie Lou Hamer Endures
She’s mostly remembered for one famous speech. Her actual legacy is far greater than that.
In a novel twist, today’s newsletter consists of a portion of a review essay I wrote for Democracy Journal, and if you don’t mind, I want you to head over to the site to read the rest of it. At the bottom of my excerpt is a button you can use to get there: if you want to head on over without trying it on for size, please do! And as usual, please:
Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America By Keisha N. Blain • Beacon Press • 2021 • 322 pages • $27.95
Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer By Kate Clifford Larson • Oxford University Press • 2021 • 322 pages • $33.95
Like many heroes and martyrs of the Black Freedom Struggle, Fannie Lou Hamer seems to be forever imprisoned in a single historical moment. On August 22, 1964, the 47-year-old sharecropper and Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activist bravely spoke her truth. She had done it before, but this time she was in a nationally televised meeting of the Democratic National Convention’s Credentials Committee, as she and the Mississippi Freedom Democrats sought to displace a state delegation chosen by, and exclusively made up of, whites.
Hamer’s nationally televised testimony in that sweltering Atlantic City hotel ballroom was electrifying. She spoke in detail about the lethal violence that ordinary white citizens, police, and state officials perpetrated to prevent Black voter registration. She spoke of her own brutal beating in the Winona County jail, an assault so severe that she never walked without pain again.
“Is this America?” Hamer asked. “The land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?” In that moment, Hamer briefly became the moral face of her movement.
An inspirational figure whose face adorns murals and whose words grace tee shirts, Hamer has not been lost. She co-authored an autobiography; there is a volume of her speeches and a record of her rich voice singing the freedom songs that gave comfort to activists who often did not know that they would live through the night. She has had four prior biographers, and several children’s books tell her story.
Yet synthetic histories of the civil rights movement may have obscured her central role in the Black Freedom Struggle. Historian Keisha N. Blain had never heard of Hamer when she first encountered her in a college history class. “I was blown away by what I read,” Blain writes in the introduction to Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America, “and I couldn’t help but wonder why it had taken me so long to encounter this fearless and extraordinary Black woman.”
Short takes:
At The Editorial Board, John Stoehr explains why sanctions against Russian oligarchs are so hard to enforce: the United States financial and legal system is built to hide money: “to find the yachts,” or the real estate, or any other place that money is laundered and secured, “you need to know who owns them.” And under our current laws, that is pretty hard to do. (March 9, 2022)
In September, 2020, Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows registered to vote in his home state of North Carolina, but he had no home, instead putting down the address of a trailer on a property he does not own and seems never to have lived. As Charles Bethea of The New Yorker reports, “This would not be the first time that Meadows seemed to mislead the public on the matters of his credentials or his real-estate holdings. For a long time, news outlets, apparently relying on his official House biography, reported that Meadows had earned a B.A. from the University of South Florida, though he actually received an associate’s degree.” (March 6, 2022)
Safe Streets, a credible messenger program in Baltimore that works at the grassroots to end gun violence, has been losing workers—to gun violence. According to J. Brian Charles at The Trace, three staffers have died this year, the most recent in a triple homicide. One possible solution is to put Safe Streets staff in bullet-proof vests, prohibited to people with felony convictions under current state laws. However, “Even if the city convinces the state to allow Safe Streets workers to wear bulletproof vests, there is some reluctance among the workers, who need to seem credible to the young people whose conflicts they try to resolve, Charles writes. “Wearing a bulletproof vest risks the appearance of no longer looking like a guy those young people can trust.” (March 3, 2022)