[Eoscstudents] Black History

[Levenia Carey]

Good Evening:

Today our spotlight is on Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer (1917-1977) - civil 
rights activist.  The youngest of 20 children, Fannie Lou Townsend was 
born in Mississippi and began working in the cotton fields at age six.  
As an infant, she suffered a serious leg injury, but her family could 
not afford medical care, and she limped for the rest of her life. Hamer 
dropped out of school after the sixth grade in order to help her family. 
Although she never received a formal educated Hamer went on to be a 
dynamic speaker and civil rights worker. At age six she joined the other 
family members working as a sharecropper picking cotton. By the time she 
was 13 she could pick between two and three hundred pounds of cotton a 
day. At one point, her father managed to save enough money to buy three 
mules that would allow him to work his own land, but the animals were 
poisoned by whites angry at the family's success.  In 1945, she married 
Perry "Pap" Hamer, a sharecropper, living in Ruleville, Sunflower County.

On August 31, 1962, a day after attending a voter registration meeting, 
Mrs. Hamer and 17 other African Americans rented a bus to go to 
Indianola, the county seat, to try to register to vote.  At that time, 
only 155 black people out of an eligible black population of 13,524 in 
Sunflower County were registered.  Mrs. Hamer's gorup was rejected, and 
on the way home, the driver of the bus was arrested on the charge that 
the yellow bus looked too much like a school bus.  When Mrs. Hamer 
finally returned home, she was ordered to leave the plantation where she 
lived and worked for 18 years.  Several nights later, shots were fired 
into the home of the woman with whom she had gone to stay.

In 1963 after many attempts Hamer final became registered to vote. To 
help others register to vote, she worked as a field secretary for for 
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).   In 1963, while 
returning from a voter education training session, Mrs. Hamer and 
several others, including 15-year-old June Johnson and Student 
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader lawrence Guyot, were 
arrested in Winona and jailed. All were beaten, and Mrs. Hamer sustained 
permanent kidney damage.  While they were in jail, Medgar Evers was 
murdered, and publicity surrounding his death persuaded officials to 
free Mrs. Hamer and the others.  In speaking of the b eating later, Mrs. 
Hamer said, "We're tired of all this beating, we're tired of taking 
this. It's been a hundred years and we're still being beaten and shot 
at, crosses are still being burned, because we want to vote.  But I'm 
going to stay in Mississippi, and if they shoot me down, I'll be buried 
here."

Mrs. Hamer became a leader in SNCC voter registration efforts, a 
position that cost her husband his job.  No one would hire him, and the 
family was forced to live on the $10 a week Mrs. hamer recieved from 
SNCC.  In 1964, Mrs. Hamer helped form the new Mississippi Freedom 
Democratic Party, which challenged the right of the regular all-white 
Mississippi delegation to be seated at the Democratic Party presidential 
convention being held in New Jersey."If the Freedom Democratic Party is 
not seated now, I question America," she said. "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 be threatened daily." 
Hamer discussed the abuse she had suffered in retaliation for attending 
a civil rights meeting. "They beat me and they beat me with the long, 
flat black-jack. I screamed to God in pain...." As a compromise measure 
the Democratic Party leadership offered the MFDP delegation two seats, 
which they refused. Hamer said, "We didn't come for no two seats when 
all of us is tired." And no MFDP member was seated.

In 1965 Hamer, Victoria Gray, and Annie Devine ran for Congress and 
challenged the seating of the regular Mississippi representatives before 
the U.S. House of Representatives. Though they were unsuccessful in 
their challenge, the 1965 elections were later overturned. Hamer 
continued to be politically active and from 1968 to 1971 was a member of 
the Democratic National Committee from Mississippi.

In 1966, she took in her two grandchildren after their mother bled to 
death when local hospitals would not accept her.  She also helped care 
for her son who has been disabled in Vietnam.  She organized grass-root 
antipoverty projects. In 1965 "Mississippi" magazine named Hamer one of 
six "women of influence" in the state. In 1968 she created a food 
cooperative to benefit the poor and in 1969 she founded the Freedom Farm 
Cooperative. In 1972 she help found National Women's Political caucus 
and later worked on issues such as school desegregation, child day care, 
and low income housing. Hamer was an inspiration in the struggle for 
civil rights. Hamer underwent a radical mastectomy in 1976 and died of 
cancer at the age of 59 on March 14, 1977 in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 
Hospital.

Mrs. Hamer's effectiveness stemmed from her oratory (some say her skills 
were second only to those of Martin Luther King, Jr.), her inspirational 
singing, and her tireless devotion to the cause of poor blacks.  She is 
famous for saying, "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."

Mrs. Hamer proved that even though life deals you lemons, you still have 
to keep up the fight and continue to move forward.  She never allowed 
her limp, her husband's inability to be employable, her beating/jail 
time or the death of a daughter or disability of a son, to prevent her 
from standing up for what is right.

Until Tomorrow.



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