LET’S TALK: “The African American and 159 Year Fight for Democracy”
In the summer of 1787, our Founder Fathers wrote the Constitution of the United States. It outlines our rights to vote, bear arms, trial by jury, freedom from slavery, equal protection, freedom of the press, speech, and religion, and due process. The African American fight for democracy began with the Civil War in 1861. On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation that ended slavery. The Civil War ended in 1865.
The battle flag was passed to men and women like Fannie Lou Hamer by the African American Civil War veterans. Fannie Lou Hamer was raised by sharecroppers and lived on a sharecropper farm with her husband, Perry Hamer, for eighteen years until she was kicked off the farm for trying to vote, she was in her forties. Born in 1917 in Mississippi, she began picking cotton at the age of six. She developed a love for reading and poetry but had to drop out of school at the age of twelve. President Lyndon B. Johnson once called her illiterate. But Tracy Sugarman a journalist wrote, “Her mounting, rolling battery of quotations and allusions from the Old and New Testaments stunned the audience with its thunder.” Hamer had a style of speaking, “telling it like it is,” that evoked strong emotions from her listeners.
The summer of 1962 changed her life forever when she attended a meeting held by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who encouraged African Americans to register to vote. Bob Moses, SNCC field secretary, saw a potential leader in Hamer and invited her to the 1962
SNCC conference at Fisk University, she became a community organizer. On August 31,1962, Hamer and seventeen others attempted to vote but failed the literacy test. After three attempts she passed only to discover she needed two poll tax receipts to vote, it was not until 1964 she cast her first vote.
In 1964, she co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and ran for Congress as a member of the MFDP. During that same year Dr. Martin Luther King Jr sat at the table with Hamer and vice president nominee Hubert Humphrey during negotiations for the MFDP right to have seats at the Democratic National Convention. King wrote, “her testimony educated a nation and brought the political powers to their knees in repentance, for the convention voted never again to seat a delegation that was racially segregated.” Hamer was later elected as a national party delegate in 1972.
During her short lifetime she led a lawsuit for eligible voters to vote, organized a desegregation lawsuit for a school, help found the Freedom Farm Corporation, involved in starting a Head Start program for low-income children, worked on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Poor People Campaign, and co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus.
Hamer died March 14, 1977, at the age of fifty-nine. The extraordinary life of Fannie Lou Hamer; her fight for social justice and civil rights did not start until she was in her forty’s. Hamer died from cancer, but her body was riddled with pain from a beating she took while in jail. She was left partially blind in one eye, walked with a limp, and suffered permanent kidney damage.
“I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared—but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember, Fannie Lou Hamer.”
159 years later, the African American continues to lead in the fight for social justice and civil rights. That is who we are.
