Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer (1917-1977)
Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer was born October 6, 1917 in Montgomery County, Mississippi to Lou Ella and James Townsend. She was the last of 20 children born to the couple. At the age of two, Hamer’s parents moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi, to work as sharecroppers on the land of a wealthy White man. Sharecropping was one of the only fields of employment for contemporary Southern Black folks, and typically resulted in a crippling cycle of hard labor and inescapable debt for working families. No different was the case for the Townsend family. By the age of six, Fannie Lou was working the land, chopping and picking cotton just as her older siblings and parents were.
She loved to read as a child, but education took the backseat to physical labor for impoverished youth of all ethnicities in the South. Hamer’s periods of schooling in Mississippi were specifically scheduled as to not interfere with harvest time, and Black individuals were almost never encouraged to pursue scholarship; especially not young, Black women. By the age of 12, Hamer was out of formal education for good and working in the field, where she was put to work as an adult. Unfortunately, this was more schooling than most Black youth received at the time - Hamer at least had enough time to gain and maintain her literacy.
Ms. Fannie Lou stayed in Sunflower County, where she continued to support herself through field work. She eventually married a local man by the name of Perry Hamer in 1944. Together, they were sharecroppers on the plantation of B.D. Marlow; Perry as a laborer and Fannie Lou as a laborer and timekeeper, due to her literacy. This came to a halt in the early 1960s, when Fannie Lou Hamer came in contact with members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC (pronounced Snick) for short. Members from SNCC, a grassroots political organization, went into Ruleville, Mississippi (small city in Sunflower County where the Hamer’s resided) with means to convince local Black residents to register to vote. Fannie Lou Hamer was one of the residents SNCC reached, and although she claimed to have never heard of voting & what it entailed before that day, she instantly became intrigued and followed their lead. Here is a quote from Fannie Lou Hamer, describing her efforts with SNCC to register herself and 17 other Black people to vote on August 31, 1961: “Well, when I first tried to register it was in Indianola. I went to Indianola on the thirty-first of August in 1962; that was to try to register. When we got there--there was eighteen of us went that day--so when we got there, there were people there with guns and just a lot of strange-looking people to us. We went on in the circuit clerk's office, and he asked us what did we want; and we told him what we wanted. We wanted to try to register. He told us that all of us would have to get out of there except two. So I was one of the two persons that remained inside, to try to register, [with] another young man named Mr. Ernest Davis. We stayed in to take the literacy test. So the registrar gave me the sixteenth section of the Constitution of Mississippi. He pointed it out in the book and told me to look at it and then copy it down just like I saw it in the book: Put a period where a period was supposed to be, a comma and all of that. After I copied it down he told me right below that to give a real reasonable interpretation then, interpret what I had read. That was impossible. I had tried to give it, but I didn't even know what it meant, much less to interpret it.”
This was not the whole incident. After leaving empty-handed, the run-down school-bus-turned-church-bus that carried the eighteen spirits was pulled over. One person was arrested, and the bus driver was fined $100 for driving a bus that was deemed “too yellow.” Hamer apparently broke into song, and her powerful voice brought much needed calm to the situation. After negotiating the fine down to $30, the bus passengers lobbied money together to pay the made-up fine and began their way back to Ruleville. Hamer arrived home to a furious plantation owner, who demanded Hamer to withdraw her name from the registrar (despite her failed attempt) or to be kicked off the plantation. “I didn’t go down there to register for you. I went down there to register for myself,” said Hamer. She was kicked off of the plantation after 18 years of living there. Her husband, Perry, was too blackmailed; Marlow threatened to withhold all of their belongings if Perry left the plantation to be with his wife.
Now homeless, Hamer went to live with acquaintances in Tallahatchie County, MS and was hired to do voter registration work for SNCC. There were meager wages, sometimes none, but it was the work that she cared about. The education, encouragement, and examples located within SNCC motivated her to work towards teaching every Black Mississippian about their rights as U.S. citizens. She helped lead mass events & civic-education series, led numerous adults in Mississippi to register to vote, and eventually helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to disrupt the discrimination found within Democratic Party representation. This work was extremely important, as more than 98% of eligible Mississippi adults were not registered to vote in 1960 (Anderson, White Rage p. 46).
Her commitment to the work reached national spotlight during the Democratic National Convention of 1964. The previous summer, SNCC workers like Fannie Lou were building the MFDP locally, to challenge the violence and exclusion experienced by Black Mississippians at the hands of Congress. By the time the convention came about, MFDP had 68 delegates, with Ms. Hamer as their Vice Chair. Though the party had verbal support from a few voices of the Democratic Party, and popular leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., President Lyndon Johnson was not a fan. This is why when Fannie Lou Hamer was given the stage to verbally challenge the all-white Mississippi Democratic delegates representing their state, Lyndon Johnson scheduled an impromptu press conference during Hamer’s allotted time. This explicit censorship of Hamer, an attempt to protect the feelings of Johnson’s conservative supporters, was quite emblematic of the conditions the MDFP was there to protest. Hamer once quoted Johnson saying, “Get the g*ddamn television off of those n****** from Mississippi.” Johnson’s tactic ultimately failed, because the speech that Fannie Lou Hamer delivered that night rang across the country for days following.
In her short but powerful speech, Ms. Hamer speaks on her disastrous attempt to register to vote. She mentioned the horrible aftermath of getting kicked off of her plantation, when White supremacists fired 16 shots into a Mississippi home attempting to kill Hamer, who had officially left the plantation the previous week. She then spoke of an incident in 1963, in which her and colleagues were arrested for sitting at a Whites-only lunch counter in Winona, Mississippi. Their White bus driver called the police, which led to the arrests of Hamer and five accompanying activists. Policemen then gathered already-convicted inmates, and told them to beat Hamer and her colleagues continuously. Hamer got it the worst as she suffered lifelong injuries from these beatings, which included hindered eyesight and permanent kidney damage. Her powerful testimony did what Martin Luther King Jr. 's could not, and that was to give an unfiltered testimony to the true horrors of Southern White supremacy. She ended her speech with a question we still have yet to answer: “I question America, is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?” After being offered a mere 2 congressional seats for their 68 members, Hamer declined on behalf of the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party. She felt that they did not work as hard as they did for two performative seats in the convention.
That same year year, Ms. Hamer ran for congress as a MDFP candidate against the Democratic incumbent, Jamie L. Whitten. She faced heavy ridicule from Black and White individuals, either because of her skin color or because she lacked formal education (society in the 1960’s had a hard enough time accepting extremely qualified women as it was.) Her, Victoria Gray, and Annie Devine ran for spots in Mississippi’s House of Representatives, but were easily defeated due to disfranchisement & and societal attitudes at the time. These three Black women challenged the election at the end of 1964 under that exact rationale, and even though their attempt to gain representation was shot down, the noise they made brought the political injustices to the forefront of politics, a feat much easier said than done.
Despite the failed resolution, Hamer did not stop her work. She traveled around the country delivering speeches and holding educational workshops. She founded and led an agricultural cooperative, Freedom Farms, in her hometown of Ruleville, Mississippi. With the help of donations from around the country, Hamer supplied at least 680 acres of land, farming supplies, and more to Black farmers in the area. This cooperative gave shelter to Black farmers stuck in the cyclic poverty of sharecropping, or who had been kicked off their plantations by overtly racist plantation owners for trying to vote (amongst other reasons). Much of the housing she was responsible for building through this cooperative still stands today.
By meshing economics, education, and politics, Hamer gave back to her community in a way she could have benefited from in her past. She passed away due to cancer on March 14, 1977, at the age of 59, but the damage done to her kidney when she was brutally beaten by police in 1963 were stated to play a part in her untimely death. Her tombstone, which lay in Ruleville, Mississippi, is inscribed with her famous quote, “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Hamer, like so many other Black Americans in the early-to-mid 20th century, had all odds stacked against her from birth. As a Black Woman, she was the recipient of unique, unwarranted, and yet entirely precedented violence throughout her entire life, from sharecropping at age six to being brutalized by police at age 45. Despite her circumstances, she rose to be one of the country's most important grassroots organizers in our history, and helped push the needle during a time where mainstream Black leaders were heavily focused on incremental gains. Beneath the surface of her work, Ms. Hamer fearlessly brought the humanity of Blackness to the forefront of politics, and for that, we must all be grateful. Thank you, Ms. Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer.
You can find my sources on Fannie Lou Hamer here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.