Transcript: "The Women and Men of American Religion. Story 3" with Maegan Parker Brooks
Interviewer: The Civil Rights Movement is important to America and it's important to Americans at this point in our national history. The story itself and the reception of the story is complex, nuanced, messy, profound, compelling, sad, joyful, hopeful, and despairing. The Civil Rights Movement story is inextricably linked to black slavery, what some call one of America's two our original sins. A good way to better understand any event or movement in history and what it importantly projects onto the present is to focus on individual actors on history stage.
Interviewer: The name Fannie Lou Hamer will most likely not be familiar to most of our listeners. She was one of these larger-than-life actors in the Civil Rights Movement whose story has slipped from the memory of the nation. For the purposes of this podcast series, we want to know about her religious thought and how it motivated and animated her fight for full civil rights for black Americans in the mid-20th century.
To do this, we have with us today Maegan Parker Brooks, associate professor in the Department of Civic Communication and Media at Willamette University and author of several books and other media about the life and times of Fannie Lou Hamer, including Fannie Lou Hamer: America's Freedom Fighting Woman, and the children's book Planting Seeds: The Life and Legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2009 and is a teacher-scholar working at the intersections of rhetoric, race, and public memory.
Today's episode will help us better understand what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion and we trust that as a result, listeners will see how indispensable the idea of religious freedom as a governing principle is to the United States and its ability to fulfill its purposes in the world.
We encourage our listeners to visit storyofamericanreligion.org and register for future podcasts notifications under the sign-up tab.
Maegan, thank you so much for being with us today.
Maegan: Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to talking with you about Mrs. Hamer.
Interviewer: Maegan, first, you write that Mrs. Hamer's life story is "vivid, inspirational, and harrowing". How did you become interested in Fannie Lou Hamer to the extent that you have become quite an expert and dedicated to preserving and sharing her life story, including her work which continues today?
Maegan: Yeah. Yeah. I, I can vividly remember the first uh time I learned about Fannie Lou Hamer and I maybe it won't come as a surprise to many of your listeners that it wasn't until I was well into my graduate program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I was taking a class on Gender and the Civil Rights Movement. We read Gianna Kylie's fantastic biography of Hamer and I couldn't believe that I had been studying communication, rhetoric, American public discourse for years at, at that point, and I didn't know anything about Fannie Lou Hamer, someone who you know, who's discourse was so powerful that the president of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson interrupted one of her most famous speeches. And so then and there, in that classroom, you know, on my way home that evening, I had this idea that you know, somebody should go around the United States and find these speeches, transcripts of these speeches, recordings, talk with people who had heard her speak as her biographers had chronicled and gather those into a collection of speeches. At that point, there were only three or four of Hamer's speeches published. And so that sort of seed of an idea became my dissertation project. And at that moment, I had no way of knowing that Fannie Lou Hamer often traveled to Madison, Wisconsin where I was studying. That there were people, they're well into their 80s who knew her, who listened to her, who actually taped and kept her recordings of speeches that she gave in, in small churches and classrooms there in Madison. So it turned out I was in a really great place to begin that research. But you know, that was really the moment for me uhm and, and really began this trajectory of Fannie Lou Hamer research that's now spanned about 15 years.
Interviewer: Okay. Well, that's a fantastic story. So you approached this not necessarily from the historical perspective, but from the communications and rhetoric perspective which is unique, I think. Well, before we, we talk more or in detail about Hamer, can you explain the "National Fable of the Civil Rights Movement" to us because you frame your book about Mrs. Hamer as one that attempts to address this fable.
Maegan: Absolutely. You know, I'll say that this idea is probably familiar to a lot of your listeners. But what I love about that phrase "National Fable of the Civil Rights Movement" that was coined by historian Jeanne Theoharis in her recent book it really puts language around what I think many of us suspect which is that the story of the Civil Rights Movement in the last 50 or 60 years has become largely flattened. Some would say it's been whitewashed. The radical nature of the activism has largely been papered over. It's become a tale that is situated in history and doesn't always draw out contemporary parallels and in fact, a lot of times it denies those contemporary parallels. So it, it's often told and then I'm thinking in, you know, large public remembrances as a story where a few larger-than-life leaders and I'm sure your listeners can sort of tick those people off, right? Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, you know, did extraordinary things and they made this progress and now we have moved past that, right? We are at this post-racial society.
Maegan: And I think for me, you know, one of the reasons why I was so motivated to travel around the country and gather Hamer's speeches and really listen to what she had to say is her story and the way that she tells her story challenges this Fable of the Civil Rights Movement. The issues that she was grappling with during her lifetime, you know, things like police brutality voter disenfranchisement, disparities in terms of health, income, these are things that we're still grappling with today, right? And so, a lot of Hamers words are just as relevant in our 2020 context as they were in 1964 and 5 when she first started, you know, speaking on the public stage. And so, yes, I, I used this frame of the Fable of the Civil Rights Movement and I argue much like you did in the introduction that if we focus on telling complex, fuller, robust histories of individuals who, who contributed to change but who are also relatable, right? There's a lot about Fannie Lou Hamer's life story that I think many of your listeners, you know, myself included, can identify with and relate to. She doesn't seem so larger than life that we couldn't imagine ourselves also contributing to change in our communities in, in the, in the many of the creative ways that she did. I'm very humbled by her accomplishments but I also see the way in which she could empower people in our contemporary context. And so, I believe stories like that really puncture uhm trouble this convenient history that, you know, makes us feel good about ourselves and denies the work that remains in our culture.
Interviewer: All right. Thank you. That's helpful. We move forward and move through these questions. As I said in the introduction, for our purposes what we want to draw out along the road of understanding, who, who she was and what she did is her religious motivations, which as I read the book, were very profound for her. And I think it will be, are, are definitely an integral part of her story and she was very open about that. So I'm excited to talk about those things. Hamer's mother, Luella - so now we're going to start in on the questions about her and her life, told her once, her mother told her once when she was young, a young in response to Fannie Lou Hamer's complaining about the inequality she saw as a young person between whites and blacks in her small town. Her mother said, "Be grateful that you are black. If God had wanted you to be white, you would have been white. So you accept yourself for what you are and you respect yourself as a black child." Maegan, can you give us a short biography of Hamer, her growing up and her early adult years bringing us up to just before that mass meeting in August of 1962. This will be helpful to our listeners.
Maegan: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, you know, Fannie Lou Hamer was born the 20th child to sharecropper parents, James Lee and Luella Townsend. She was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi and the family moved when she was about two years old to a plantation outside of Ruleville, Mississippi in the Delta. At the time, Ruleville was the epicenter of the worldwide cotton industry. It was one of the most productive regions of the country and our country was one of the most productive regions in the world in terms of producing cotton. So her family became sharecroppers on E.W. Brandon's plantation out about four miles east of the city center of Ruleville. She herself was uh tricked into the plantation owner's debt through treats that he enabled her to get from his commissary, commissary stores. So she actually started picking cotton at the age of six, six years old to pay off those debts from, you know, candy and things that he let her take from the store. So really you know, heart-wrenching story about her early you know, en-- enlistment into sharecropping. She did attend school. She learned to read very well. She had uhm a teacher she called Professor Thornton Layne uhm who was a bit of a character. She remembered him fondly. She learned to, to read and write and recite poetry in the one-room schoolhouse that he led.
Maegan: But she did have to leave school at the age of 12 uhm to help her aging parents and help earn money for the family to make ends meet in this really exploitative sharecropping system. As she went, grew up in age, so into her twenties, many of her brothers and sisters, her older brothers and sisters left the Mississippi Delta as part of the Great Migration. So they left to Northern cities in search of, you know, better jobs, a better life. She stayed and she cared for her aging parents. Her mother, Luella was blinded by an accident where she was clearing brush. And so she really required Fannie Lou Hamer's help. Hamer met Perry Hamer who was a tractor driver and a sharecropper at a neighboring plantation and she and her mother moved from E.W. Brandon's plantation W.D. Marlow's plantation and she earned a position of privilege on that plantation. She, she was recognized for her leadership abilities her reading and writing skills. And so, she became the timekeeper on the plantation. So she worked with the landowner but in her you know, resistive capacity that she had at that point in her life, she would work to give sharecroppers a fair uh accounting, a fair earning for their harvest. Whereas when the plantation owner was weighing the cotton that they brought in, he would use a weighted scale to cheat them out of money for their work.
Maegan: And so, she was, you know, trying to balance the scales there on the plantation far before she became invested in the movement. Into the 1960s, she and Perry Hamer were entrusted with two daughters from their community whose families were not able to raise them. I think that's really a testament to the respect that people in the community had for the Hamers. And so, Fannie Lou Hamer was raising two young children, caring for her mother, working as a sharecropper. She also, as I said, was the timekeeper. She would commonly be called on to clean the plantation owner's home. And then it was in that post that she learned about the fact that she'd been given a forced hysterectomy without her consent or knowledge. So she had a uterine tumor that she went in to get removed and the doctor sterilized her without her consent or knowledge. And she found out about that through rumors that were floating around the plantation owner's house. And she actually confronted that doctor and this happened in 1961. It was so common in the state of Mississippi in fact, to forcibly sterilize poor women, women of color that it was called a Mississippi Appendectomy. But she knew she had no recourse and this really frustrated her and she started to say things to those around her. Really anyone who would listen that if she could just find a way to change things like she recognized how unjust these systems were and if she could just find a way to really speak out against them she would jump at that opportunity. And then that opportunity came in the form of this mass meeting in 1962.
Interviewer: That's, that's super helpful. Maegan, you write about Mrs. Hamer's father, Reverend Townsend, and his Stranger's Home Baptist Church becoming her "sole source of formal learning" and that the church "provided a training ground for her eventual activism". Can you elaborate a bit on this, including where the song fits in that made her famous?
Maegan: Yeah, absolutely. So this was something that was very generative for me to learn about through the interviews that I did with Hamer's friends and family and, and many fellow activists. So I, I learned that the church really became the place where Hamer honed her activist skills that she would then transfer to the movement. So being the daughter of a black Baptist Minister hearing her father deliver the word from the pulpit, you know, puts Hamer in a relatively common category with many civil rights activists, right? So this was King's story, right? This is John Lewis's a story and others. And she learned from her father how to connect Biblical stories, right? Like the Exodus narrative, the story of the Israelites' bondage in Egypt and in the resistance of that becoming a chosen people. She learned about that parallel as her father would connect it to the experience of black people in America from, from the pulpit. So she learned about that. She learned about scripture uhm that connected to the ag-- agrarian experience, experience of sharecropping, thinking about, you know, herbs withering and, you know, do not fret evildoers, they will be cut down and wither as the, the herb, right? So she would, she would learn about these Biblical parallels from her father, you know, in terms of content. She was also learning about style. How to deliver a message in this call in response format that really enlisted the audience into the learning, the sort of co-learning that they were doing during the church experience.
Maegan: She talked about the black church as one of the few places, if, if not the only place that black people in her community had that they could really call their own, right? It was a place where they could exercise, you know, their freedom of thought, their freedom of expression. And so, you know, she learned about how to deliver an engaging sermon which served her very well when she started working for the movement. And, and last I'll say that she also learned the power of song. She really found her beautiful contra-alto voice singing in the church. Her father would commonly call upon her to sing songs. And so, when she transferred these, these ideas to the movement, she would take hymns like Go Tell It on the Mountain and This Little Light of Mine and she would change some of the verses to reflect the contemporary situation that Black people were struggling with in Mississippi or in other areas of the United States, depending where she was speaking to give them renewed significance and salience. So I'd like to play the This Little Light of Mine, her version of it. And just it would be great if your listeners could think about that how the common response is even working within this song, right? So like how she's functioning as a song leader and inviting the participation, you know, kind of think about this as like empowerment, right, through the very nature of, of the way that she's leading the song itself. So I'll just play a, a clip of her version of This Little Light of Mine.
[song clip playing]
Maegan: Okay, so I'll, I'll stop there and just you know, point out the way in which she's inviting, you know, participation along with her through that repetition and changing the lyrics from you know, I've Got a Light of Freedom, I'm Gonna Let it Shine, okay. And I think that really speaks to the way she saw herself as called by God to do this work, right? Feeling like voter registration, advocacy, you know, was akin to proselytizing, a form of doing God's work and, and as you would say fulfilling God's word wonderfully.
Interviewer: Okay, great. That was wonderful to hear that. Thank you for sharing that.
Interviewer: Maegan, tell us the story of the August 27, 1962 mass meeting at Williams Chapel Baptist Church, including the sermon and why 44 year old Fannie Lou Hamer was moved by all this?
Maegan: Yeah you know, this is one of those defining moments in Hamer's life, right? So when I was sharing a bit about her biography and sort of ending with this meeting it, it was this confluence of events that led to Hamer's activist career, really the origin of her activist career. So she was becoming, you know, increasingly dissatisfied with her experiences in the Mississippi Delta. She wanted to speak out about things like the forced sterilization, right? Like the economic exploitation that she was seeing uhm happened day in and day out on the plantation. But she didn't see any, you know, mechanism or way to speak out about this. So about that time the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was traveling throughout the South and they were probably getting or encouraging this new form of civic activism among the masses of black people. In places like the Mississippi Delta where black people outnumbered whites by a considerable margin. So rather than as the NAACP had for generations or going into the black middle and upper classes and encouraging voters among, you know, teachers and preachers and people who were you know, well-established in their communities, that was a bit more of the NAACP strategy for black civic engagement.
Maegan: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee led by Bob Moses and others in the state had this idea that they wanted to go into churches and pool halls and juke joints and empower the masses of black people uhm who had been left out of a lot of these previous campaigns. So it was part of that strategy coming into rural Mississippi, coming into the Mississippi Delta, coming into her church for a mass meeting that brought Hamer into the fold of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. So she was even skeptical going into this meeting. One of her friends who she really loved and respected encouraged her to try to come. So she came and she listened to the messages and James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was a trained black Baptist theologian and Mississippi native and he delivered a sermon called Discerning the Signs of the Time. And he was riffing on the section of the Bible where you know, Jesus says to the scribes and the Pharisees, you know, how is it that you don't recognize me as the Messiah, right? So how do you not see what is before you and recognize these signs. And Bevel took that idea and transferred it to contemporary United States pointing out things like Freedom Rides, right? And sit-ins and, you know, Brown versus Board of Education decision.
Maegan: The things that were happening around Mississippi and around the country that signaled a change in the times, right? And he invited the people seated before him to become a part of that change, to recognize the signs of the time. He even, you know, used references to the clouds. You can see the change in weather and predict that there will be rain, how can you not see these signs of the time, right? So, so pulling that those, those ideas through from the Bible. And so, this really resonated with Hamer, right? So this was, you know, speaking her language and it, and it really resonated with her. And then James Foreman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee followed up Bevel's sermon with a brief civic education lesson, you know, telling people seated before him, black people, you know, day labor, sharecroppers, that they had a constitutionally protected right to vote. That they had this right and that they could exercise it. And, and this is how we'll go down to, you know, the county seat and we'll register at the courthouse on Friday. And it was followed up with this altar call, right? You know, “who would like to come do this on Friday?” And Hamer was one of the first people to raise her hand and say, yep, she was gonna try to vote on that Friday along with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. You know, some of your listeners might be thinking like, oh, okay, you know, go down to the, that county courthouse and register to vote.
Maegan: You know, why did it require a sermon? Why did it require a civic education lesson. And the context here is really key, right? So Hamer from, you know, generations back, she's the granddaughter of an enslaved person. She'd been living in this tightly-controlled plantation environment where people who tried to speak up, people who tried to challenge the exploitative nature of sharecropping were lynched, right? There, Joe Pullum is someone she often references who is a person who stood up to the landowner who demanded pay for, adequate pay for his labor. And a lynch mob came after him and they, you know, not only through a, a drawn-out altercation kill Joe Pullum but then they the, the lynchers did horrific things like preserve his earlobe in a drugstore that black people frequented as this intimidating sign. They, they dragged his body through the town, right? I mean, there, there were horrific examples made of people who stood up against white supremacy. So the idea of going down to the courthouse and demanding one's right to vote was frightening, it was frightening to the people that get that, that were gathered there. And Foreman and Bevel knew this and they knew that they needed to not only persuade people to try this but support them along the way. So, you know, Hamer's act of raising her hand and indicating her willingness was a very brave act uhm in 1962 in the Mississippi Delta.
Interviewer: Right. Well, why don't you tell us the story of what happened on Friday and I'll, I'll just let me quote something you wrote that Fannie Lou Hamer did when she was so fearful? But then in that sometime in, in the, the latter part of the story, but I want to read this and then have you tell us what happened that day. On the way home from registering to vote unsuccessfully you write that Fannie Lou Hamer's "strong voice belied her tangled stomach, but she summoned the power of gospel music and sang all the way home". Maegan, tell us what happened that day and the ramifications.
Maegan: Yeah. Yeah, so Bevel and Foreman were not expecting that 18 people would have come down for the, you know, their version of an altar call, raise their hand, indicate their willingness to vote. So they actually weren't prepared to transport, you know, 18 black Deltans to Indianola, which is about 26 miles away. So they had to find an old bus that was used to transport migrant workers to and from Mississippi to Florida. So they actually, they used this old bus from someone in the community who is supportive of their efforts and they drove 18 people from Ruleville to Indianola. And, you know, on the way there you know, Hamer reflects a bit about being hopeful. One of the things that Foreman talked about in his address at, at the church was that through the vote, black Deltans could change the power structure of their community, right? They can vote out racist sheriffs, for example. So, you know, it's, it's likely that Hamer was hopeful. She also packed a, a pair of comfortable shoes. She remembers and writes because she thought and, and she was told that they could be arrested for this. And so she, you know, wanted to make sure she was prepared uhm in that case. So they drove to Indianola. When they arrived at the courthouse was lined with Citizens Council members. So white men with shotguns and dogs. And, and initially, they didn't understand you.
Maegan: Who are all these people standing outside the courthouse and till they realized that that act of a bus full of black people had got the word out to the community? They've been followed there by Citizens Council members and the Citizens Council if some of your readers or, or listeners, excuse me, are unfamiliar uhm was commonly referred to as the “Klan in suits, not sheets”. So this was the "respectable Klan in Mississippi". And they were there to intimidate the would-be voters who were scared now to even get off the bus, right? To go into the courthouse. Hamer was one of the first people who went into the courthouse and sort of summoned that strength and she was, you know, flanked and supported by members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Southern Christian Leadership Conference. When they arrived into the courthouse the registrar told them that they had to, you know, come back in, two at a time and they had to take this test that was designed to bar their civic assertion, right? It wasn't a test that was, you know, going to reward their competence. They couldn't study for it. She had interpreted an obscure passage from the Mississippi State Constitution to the satisfaction of the registrar. So all 18 of the would-be registrants failed their registration test and it took all day.
Maegan: So by late afternoon, they filed back onto the bus and they were headed home and everyone was discouraged, dem-- demoralized, frightened, right? Because they feared what would happen to them once they got home if this many, you know, citizens counselors knew about their attempt to vote, would the plantation owners know about their attempt to vote, right? And what would that mean for their lives and their livelihood? So they were scared. And then, you know, a couple of miles down the road, they got pulled over by a state highway patrolman. And the state highway patrolman went to arrest the bus driver and his crime was driving a bus that was too yellow. A bus that too closely resembled a school bus. And the rest of the people on the bus said, "If you're going arrest him, you'll have to arrest all of us." and so this was more than the highway patrolman was prepared for, so he said, "Well, I'll fine you $100." And they couldn't gather $100. No one had, you know, $100 between all of them, but they did manage to gather $30 which he took and they headed home. And Hamer during this time really emerges as the community leader because she starts singing gospel songs, Walk With Me O Lord, right? As I'm on this Jesus journey” to help comfort the people on the bus, right? To help remind them of the importance of what they were doing even in light of their failed attempt and to help and strengthen their resolve to go home and face whatever awaited them once they returned.
Interviewer: Okay. Thank you. Is it, is that when, if I remember correctly, she had to leave her home that night?
Maegan: Okay. So by the time Hamer returned to her the plantation where she lived and worked at W.D. Marlow's plantation she heard right away from her daughter and her daughter's cousin, pap's cousin that she, that the landowner had been "raising Cain all day". He had got a call from the Citizens Council that she was down there trying to register and he came storming up to her and said, you know with-- you must withdraw your registration attempt or you're gonna have to leave this plantation. And he said, "Even if you do withdraw, it's just how I feel you might have to leave anyway. I'll come back in the morning for your answer." But Hamer did not wait until the morning. She told him that she didn't go down there to register for him. She went down there to register for herself and she knew that uh she was now in danger and she needed to leave that night. And so she left that evening. She left her home where she lived with her husband, her mother, her daughters for 18 years where she served in this important role as a timekeeper where she had, you know, baked goods for the plantation owner's son when he was away at war, right?
Maegan: I mean, this was a hard decision to make that evening, but she was fearful because of what she said, because of what she did and how the landowner and other citizens counselors might respond. So she moved in with a friend who had encouraged her to come to the initial mass meeting in the first place. She moved in with Mary and Robert Tucker and she stayed there for a week or so and till Perry Hamer, who was forced to stay on the plantation and finish the harvest or forfeit all the family's belongings. So he was, he and, and her daughters were still on W.D. Marlow's plantation and he noticed buckshot shells in the machinery house. And he was worried that those shells were intended for his wife and not any sort of hunting at that point in the season, right? This is August. And so, he encouraged Hamer to take their children to a faraway cabin. A, a cousin of Perry Hamer lived in uh the neighboring town of Cascilla in Tallahatchie County. And so Hamer escaped uhm from uh the house where she was staying. And days later, in fact, 16 shots were fired into the bedroom where she had been sleeping just inches above her bed.
Interviewer: Okay. Thank you.
Maegan: I think Ben McMorran comes and finds her in Tallahatchie County where she sought refuge. And they go and do a speaking and singing tour. And then, yeah, when she returns to uhm Ruleville, by then the harvest is past and, and they uh SNCC helps them rent a house in town.
Interviewer: Without a home people pooled their money and rented a home in Ruleville for the Hamers, which Fannie Lou Hamer took as a "sign from God". The first time she had not lived on a plantation. Maegan, you write this, "It's a funny thing since I started working for Christ, which is how Fannie Lou Hamer characterized her civil rights advocacy". Can you paint the full portrait of Mrs. Hamer and her religious motivations as she entered the realm of civil rights advocate here at age 44? Just give us a brief description of her sort of religious, the portrait of her religiously she has embarked on this that will define her life for the rest of her life.
Maegan: Yeah. Yeah, so I want to play a quote from her here. This is from her first sermon that we have on record. So this was her telling this uh you know, in response to your question, you know, telling the audience gathered before her about how she'd been called from God to do this civil rights work. And so, we'll, we'll just take a listen to that and I'll expand a little bit.
Sound clip:
Maegan: So you can hear there this conviction, right? That she casts in Biblical terms. She really felt that, you know, the sign of SNCC and SCLC coming into her community, the fact that she narrowly escaped death at the Tucker's home. The fact that then SNCC goes and finds her at this remote cabin and brings her into the Civil Rights work. And then when she returns from a, a speaking and singing tour in the fall of 1962, SNCC is able to get her family a, a modest home in town. So the first time that our family lives off of a plantation uhm she knows the work is hard, right? She knows that firsthand, but she also feels like God is providing for her and that's assigned to her that she should continue doing this work and encouraging others to do so as well.
Interviewer: Okay, profoundly moving. Maegan, let's, let's move on to Sunday, June 9th, 1963: "And the voices of 10 black passengers, including that of Fannie Lou Hamer rose above the other bus travelers' chatter as they sang Go Tell It On The Mountain, over the hills and everywhere. Go tell it on the mountain to let my people go. Who's that yonder dressed in red? Let my people go, must be the children Bob Moses led. Let my people go". Maegan, can you give us a detailed description of who these people were? Where they were going? And then what happened to them? This being so critical to Fannie Lou Hamer's future advocacy.
Maegan: Yeah. Yes, you know, and I will just warn your listeners that this is a very traumatic story about what Hamer and her fellow civil rights workers endured on their way home from the Civil Rights Workshop in South Carolina. So, they were returning from one of these workshops that was molded in the Highlander Folk School model of empowering local people through these sort of center people organize first, right? So they were chosen from their communities as Leaders to attend the civil rights training session to help train other people to register and go out and vote. And the idea is that this could have a ripple effect within their communities, right? So they were returning from this. They, you know, had learned and shared in many of these hymns turned movement anthems like the “Go Tell it on the Mountain” that you quote from there. So they were singing these songs on the bus and this was aggravating the white bus driver. And all along the way at each sort of Continental Trailways stop that they made, they saw him get off the bus and make phone calls, right? So they started to get suspicious that he would, he was communicating with perhaps the Citizens Council or perhaps local police who often were one and the same. A couple stops from their final Greenwood, Mississippi destination, they get off in Montgomery County.
Maegan: They stopped at a place called Staley's Cafe. Hamer actually decides to stay on the bus. A few people go into the counter and they try to be served uhm right? So they, they know that they have a right because of the Interstate Commerce Commission ruling in 1961 that they should be served as black people at this counter but the white waitress refused to serve them. There starts to be a bit of a commotion and a police person, a policeman who I believe was called by the bus driver is there and suddenly there are many more policemen that kind of swarmed this cafe. So the civil rights workers decide to just leave, try to get back on the bus on the way and now ponder who was one of the organizers starts to copy down the license plate tags of the police officers as they were trained to do so and they were reporting these to the justice department. The police officer sees her doing that and, and starts to arrest her and all the people with them. Hamer sees this commotion from the bus, she comes off and she asks like, "What should I do? Should I go on to Greenwood right and get help or you know, like what, what do I do here?" She's asking Anell Ponder and Anell Ponder is trying to get her to go back on the bus.
Maegan: But she's spotted by one of the policemen and she's, you know, roughly handled, kicked, handcuffed, thrown into the back of a car. They're all bought, brought to the Montgomery County Jail in Winona, Mississippi. They're all uhm put into cells. And then over the course of that evening, they're subjected to horrific beatings and they can hear these beatings from their own cells. They, you know, are anticipating what's going to happen to them. When Hamer endures this beating from a, a blackjack, so a, a loaded you know, both sides instrument that uh the police officers in the cell ordered other black prisoners who were there to, to beat Hamer with or else they would be, you know, shot. The police officer sort of pointed to their guns when the black prisoners refused to beat this elderly, you know, to them elder black woman. Hamer, in telling the story, often alludes to sexual abuse that she endured during this beating. She was trying to smooth her dress down. Her dress kept getting worked up. She was laying on a cot. She was forced to lay face down and her dress would work up and she would try and pull it down. And that was angering the police officers who were forcing the prisoners, one to sit on her legs. They were holding her hands back and she felt one of the police officers, she couldn't see who because her dress was over her face feeling underneath her clothes during this time. And eventually, she passed out from the abuse.
Maegan: Uh and when she came to, she was being dragged back to her cell. Her cellmate Ben was taken in and just before the cellmate started to receive similar treatment a phone call came into the jail. And they believe that phone call was from someone who the SNCC workers had contacted when the civil rights workers didn't return. And what ensued was you know, the FBI came to the jail to interview the civil rights workers. There was coordination between Julian Bond of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Martin Luther King Jr. of SCLC, and this went all the way up to attorney general at the time, Robert F. Kennedy and on to J. Edgar Hoover. There was a, the awareness that there were 9 civil rights workers being held in this Winona, Mississippi jail cell and that they were fearful that they would be killed. And they were there for several days, four or five days and Hamer believes the only reason why they were able to eventually secure their release, Ambassador Andrew Young, he was not an ambassador then, Andrew Young, the civil rights worker Andrew Young uh Dorothy Cort-- Cotton and James Bevel came to secure their release.
Maegan: And, and they had the bail money sent from Martin Luther King, Jr. and the SCLC to do so. But Hamer believes the only reason why they were able to be released to those civil rights workers was because uhm uh Governor Wallace did his famous stand in the schoolhouse door in Alabama days before while they were in prison. And then Medgar Evers had just been assassinated on his front porch that or, or front lawn early that morning. And so, they believed that Robert F. Kennedy, perhaps John F. Kennedy ordered them to be released. It was just this horrific confluence of events that were demonstrating the horrors of white supremacy across the nation and they didn't want an additional horrific event like the killing of you know, 9 civil rights workers in a Mississippi jail cell to precipitate that even further. So they were released. Hamer and now Allene Ponder and others spent months uhm healing first in Mississippi in a hospital and then later transferred to Atlanta. And she also flew to Washington, D.C. not long after she met with King in Atlanta. And the FBI investigated the case and, and brought a trial against uh the white police officers. And that was one of the first times where white police officers were being held accountable for this. They, they were found not guilty in, in Oxford, Mississippi months later. But there was a, a trial brought against them.
Interviewer: Hard to hear. Before we leave this, I'm just going to read something you write, you write, and this is about Fannie Lou Hamer's regaining of, of her health." As you say, she did have months of, of medical assistance. But, but here you write when they were leaving "Sometime after midnight, Hamer's fever broke and she regained consciousness. Parting her cracked lips and breathing deeply in and out of her bruised diaphragm, a fellow activist remembered Hamer's low voice singing out, 'Walk with me now, Lord. Walk with me while I'm on this Jesus journey. I want Jesus to walk with me by my friend now, Lord, by my friend. Make a way from me now, Lord, make away from me. While I'm on this Jesus journey, I want Jesus to walk with me.'"
I think that is just indicative of, of sort of how she saw herself as a civil rights activist as sort of working for Jesus himself.
Maegan, you write that Hamer had come to see black political activism as divinely inspired and you quote a Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party chair describing it this way later, "Fannie Lou Hamer was a religious fanatic in the most positive sense. I heard her say, 'If I hate white people, I can't see the face of Jesus.' So she was very anti-hate, very pro-nonviolent, and she took her religious beliefs and she parlayed them into politics." And you've commented on this so we're not, we're not going stay here and discuss. But I just wanted to bring that out of something you wrote for our listeners to sort of continue to grasp, to try to understand who Fannie Lou Hamer was and what motivated her in what she did which that, that experience in Winona really scarred her for life and as she often would refer to it and it is, as I said, very difficult to hear.
Interviewer: We are talking with Maegan Parker Brooks, associate professor in the Department of Civic Communication and Media at Willamette University and author of several books and other media about the life and times of Fannie Lou Hamer, including Fannie Lou Hamer: America's Freedom Fighting Woman, and the children's book Planting Seeds: The Life and Legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer.
Maegan uh we have about fifteen minutes uh plus or minus. We need you to tell us the story about the 1964 speech to the credentials committee and I think you have something to play from that. But if you can give us a little bit of background here what she's doing and then we'll hear that, that excerpt.
Maegan: Sure. So the, if your listeners do know about Fannie Lou Hamer, odds are they learned about her through this speech, right? This is her most famous address. It was a speech that she gave to the credentials committee at the Democratic National Convention in 1964. And it was part of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's larger strategy to unseat the Mississippi regulars, as they were called. The Mississippi delegates who were sent from their state. So the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was formed out of Freedom Summer. So the larger SNCC, SCLC, COFO Initiative that had taken throughout the summer of 1964 and it culminated in the, this creation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. They were they, they had followed all of the rules for organizing a political party. They had sworn their allegiance to the Democratic Party and they had a loud, you know, people of all races to join. So they were contrasting that inclusive, inclusivity with exclusivity of the Mississippi regular party who was, which was an all-white delegation. They did not represent the state of Mississippi's constituents. And so, they took this fight to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.
Maegan: And there was a, you know, multiple-prong lobbying effort. There were it was a 24-hour vigil on the Atlantic City Boardwalk in which Hamer was singing. There were pictures of the civil rights workers: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner who had been murdered by Klansmen in Philadelphia, Mississippi for their civil rights worker, work. And there was lobbying efforts sort of behind the scenes trying to lobby credentials committee members. But the culminating event of this culmination was a, a, eight-person testimonies including the widow of uh Michael Schwerner, Rita Schwerner Bender, Martin Luther King Jr. uhm Roy Wilkins of the NAACP. They were really notable speakers on this panel. It was testifying about the white supremacists terror in Mississippi that was keeping black people from voting. But the most memorable of those speeches and those testimonies was Fannie Lou Hamer's. So she spoke for about eight minutes. She shared the story that I shared with you all of her first registration attempt and what happened as a result. She shared the story of the beating in Winona, Mississippi, and that led to this climactic conclusion that I'll play for you here and then I'll talk about the interruption that she endured. But let's, let's listen to the conclusion of her testimony before the DNC.
Sound clip:.
Maegan: So not long after Hamer started delivering that address before the credentials committee, 108-person committee, but also before the press, CBS, ABC, NBC were all there rolling, right? It is about two o'clock in the afternoon. President Johnson uh had heard about Hamer. He had heard about this challenge and he didn't want, not want anything interrupting what he saw as essentially his inauguration to this whole second ter-- term that he was going to have. So he called an impromptu press conference to call the press tension away and it was rumored that he was going to announce his running mate in this press conference. So the cameras followed him. And so, we went from Atlantic City. Hamer's beginning of her address to the White House, to LBJ and what news reporters thought was going to be an announcement of his running mate. Instead, it was like a known, a known announcement. He announced it was the nine-month anniversary of the assassination of JFK. So a nine-month anniversary of something is what he called the reporters there to announce. And so, they realized that they've been duped and they decided to replay Hamer's testimony on their nightly news program in prime time. And so, this way Hamer was in-- introduced to the American public, right? People seated, you know, in TV trays eating dinner, you know, watching the convention saw Fannie Lou Hamer that night and telegrams of support poured into the DNC for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and really forced Johnson to negotiate with the MFDP and offer them a compromise which, you know, Hamer rejected outright. It was a really offensive compromise but this was really the introduction of Hamer to the nation and has had long-lasting effects.
Interviewer: Okay, thank you. And thank you for playing that. I want to jump forward a little bit to Malcolm X and Fannie Lou Hamer and, and sort of their interaction. Malcolm X called her "America's number one freedom fighting woman". And you write that “Hamer nodded her head and raised her arms to the heavens when Malcolm talked about an enraged Jesus driving out the money changers, turning the tables over in the temple. And by the time it got to the Revolutionary Jesus of Revelations, the Jesus whose patience ran out, Hamer was back on her feet shouting, 'Tell it'". Maegan, can you talk to us about her relationship with this "radical view of Christianity," that's in quotes from your book, that Malcolm espoused and how it animated her work?
Maegan: Absolutely. So I, I am glad you asked this question because I think that part of that National Fable of the Civil Rights Movement maybe is a thinking that you know, Christianity informed and infused this sort of Kumbaya, let's all come together. Let's all love one another. Let's love our enemies. And certainly, yes, there was a part of that, right? And Hamer was a warm, loving person. She was a person who forgave uhm all manner of transgressions against her and who really believed in the power of moral suasion, and she believed this throughout her career. So she did not waver when SNCC activists did by the mid-1960s and they, and expelled white people from their organization. She never wavered in believing that white people had a soul, that they could be redeemed. She, she didn't, she kept that, she held fast to that. But that's not to say that she didn't believe that, as she would often say, Jesus was a revolutionary person. Jesus was out there with the poor and the disenfranchised and he was on the side of the oppressed. That Jesus was radical in nature. Like that's the, that's the Jesus that she also exemplified in her activism and she believed not in the turn the other cheek ideology, but as she would say you know, there came a time in the Bible when David had to slay Goliath. And, and she would, you know, draw that parallel that there was a time for self-defense and there was a time for standing up for your rights. And she, you know, had loaded guns in her house because her house was, you know, often firebombed and there were, you know, citizen counselors and Klan people who would drive by her house. So she believed in armed self-defense and she believed in the radical power of black activism, even as she was a devout Christian.
Interviewer: Right. Thank you. And that, I think that it is important to, to see and to understand. We don't have too much time. But let, let, let me ask a, a question or two about Fannie Lou Hamer's involvement in the National Women's Political Caucus which participation you wrote Fannie Lou Hamer cast in Biblical terms with an allusion to the Book of Esther. I'm going to quote here from her, "So I'm saying to you today, who knows but that I have come as to the Kingdom for such a time as this." Can you share with us what she did in that caucus, what her influence was, including her approach to reproductive control, which she called the Great Sin and why? This is fascinating piece of American history and American religious history, I think, that we don't really know about.
Maegan: Yeah, I agree and, you know, in, in feminist history too, right? So Hamer was a founding member of the National Women's Political Caucus. She participated in the inaugural meeting. She spoke at that inaugural meeting and she called white feminists to task for trying to bring together women from different backgrounds under this banner of sisterhood before they dealt with the real divisions between women of different races, different classes, different life experiences, right? And so, that's where we get that Ruth parallel that she's thinking about or excuse me, that Esther parallel that you quoted from, right? So she's thinking about herself at this meeting, in this precipitous moment, right? This important moment, the founding of the National Women's Political Caucus. But she's not identifying wholeheartedly with the second wave feminist, right? And in some ways, she's thinking about the need to protect her people, right? And acknowledge uhm the lived experiences that they've endured, right?
Maegan: So, well, you know, part of what she talks about with reproductive control and why she can't be 100% on board in terms of pro-choice is because of the Mississippi Appendectomy experiences that I mentioned earlier with, in our discussion, right? Because your reproductive justice as reproductive freedom, I guess, would be the, the more precise phrase at that point. Reproductive freedom for Hamer was really concerning. She worried that it would devolve into reproductive control in places like Mississippi. And so, she spoke that kind of truth to power during that meeting. And she also, you know, brought with her to that founding meeting Gussie Mae Love who was the mother of a young teen in the Mississippi Delta. A young black woman who was carelessly murdered outside of a grocery store on her graduation day by drunken white teens who were driving by. It was this horrific event that had happened and she brought Gussie Mae Love with her to the founding of the National Women's Political Caucus and said, "Your oppression has never been like ours." And she pointed out that you know, Gussie Mae Love was there as a living example of the white supremacist terror that black people were living through in the South in 1971.
Interviewer: All right. Well, thank you for that description of sort of some of her work with, with that caucus. Maegan, her final years were difficult for her and her family, I read. She seemed well, they were often without enough funds to live comfortably. I sort of got the sense that they were, they were sad, somewhat sad, her, her later years, although she kept doing things to help people congregated to her to get help and she offered what she could. I just got a sense of she was tired, worn out for good reason. And it was just you know, in the lower class of Americans that tho-- those times in your life are hard and I got that sense. Her death on March 14th, 1977 well, her, her funeral drew a large crowd and she was eulogized by Jimmy Carter's ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, who has appeared in this story before. And he said this at the end, "Thank you for the inspiration. Thank you for the example. Thank you for so strengthening our lives that we might live so God can use us anytime, anywhere." That phrase "so God can use us", that seems like a, a very good description of, of Fannie Lou Hamer and what she did as she saw it. I think she would agree that she did she did things as an instrument in, in God's hands.
I think that's probably an accurate way of how she might put it. Can as we conclude, Maegan do you want to share with us any lessons or takeaways from the book, either in terms of important historical transformations you have charted or in terms of helping us understand our present moment? And I should say we could go on and on with this interview. There's much that we've missed and skipped but I would just encourage listeners to go check out a book on uh Fannie Lou Hamer. Look at uh some of which were written by Maegan uhm and, and get to know her, listen to her speeches and songs. You can find them on the Internet and get to know this woman who did much with little to affect the American narrative. So Maegan.
Maegan: Okay. Uhm yeah, I mean, I, I think that Hamer, the lesson of, lessons from Hamer's life are manifold, but I think thinking about this idea that there are wells of wisdom upon which to draw, right? That Hamer's creative approaches to problem-solving. Her view that freedom was a constant struggle, right? And after the victories like the 1965 Voting Rights Act, for example, she was still working to build a poverty program in her community, Freedom Farm Cooperative, with something that she invested so much time, money, energy and creative problem-solving thought into. So there are many stories from her life that I think could inform our approaches to activism in our contemporary context activism and organizing. And then certainly, the way that her faith informed her approach to activism, it was complex, right? She really drew upon her astounding in-depth knowledge of the Bible and connected that with her lived experiences in profound ways that I think your listeners would, could learn a lot more from. So yes, I will just second your, your encouragement that readers, the listeners continue to learn about Fannie Lou Hamer through, through books uhm through websites, through other sources that are available.
Interviewer: Thank you.
We have been talking with Maegan Parker Brooks, associate professor in the Department of Civic Communication and Media uh at Willamette University and author of several books and other media about the life and times of Fannie Lou Hamer, including Fannie Lou Hamer: America's Freedom Fighting Woman and the children's book Planting Seeds: The Life and Legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer.
Here at the conclusion of this episode, we trust that listeners now understand more about what, what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion and have a deeper appreciation of religious freedom as a governing principle in the United States, seeing too its protection as an indispensable part of the fragile American experiment in self-government. Don't forget to visit storyofamericanreligion.org and register for future podcast notifications under the sign up tab.
Maegan, thank you so much for being with us and thank you even more than that for doing all the hard work that you did and understanding this person, Fannie Lou Hamer, and getting the word out to us via books and other, other sources. It's been very enlightening and I hope you've enjoyed the time with us as well.
Maegan: Thank you for having me.
Interviewer: The name Fannie Lou Hamer will most likely not be familiar to most of our listeners. She was one of these larger-than-life actors in the Civil Rights Movement whose story has slipped from the memory of the nation. For the purposes of this podcast series, we want to know about her religious thought and how it motivated and animated her fight for full civil rights for black Americans in the mid-20th century.
To do this, we have with us today Maegan Parker Brooks, associate professor in the Department of Civic Communication and Media at Willamette University and author of several books and other media about the life and times of Fannie Lou Hamer, including Fannie Lou Hamer: America's Freedom Fighting Woman, and the children's book Planting Seeds: The Life and Legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2009 and is a teacher-scholar working at the intersections of rhetoric, race, and public memory.
Today's episode will help us better understand what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion and we trust that as a result, listeners will see how indispensable the idea of religious freedom as a governing principle is to the United States and its ability to fulfill its purposes in the world.
We encourage our listeners to visit storyofamericanreligion.org and register for future podcasts notifications under the sign-up tab.
Maegan, thank you so much for being with us today.
Maegan: Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to talking with you about Mrs. Hamer.
Interviewer: Maegan, first, you write that Mrs. Hamer's life story is "vivid, inspirational, and harrowing". How did you become interested in Fannie Lou Hamer to the extent that you have become quite an expert and dedicated to preserving and sharing her life story, including her work which continues today?
Maegan: Yeah. Yeah. I, I can vividly remember the first uh time I learned about Fannie Lou Hamer and I maybe it won't come as a surprise to many of your listeners that it wasn't until I was well into my graduate program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I was taking a class on Gender and the Civil Rights Movement. We read Gianna Kylie's fantastic biography of Hamer and I couldn't believe that I had been studying communication, rhetoric, American public discourse for years at, at that point, and I didn't know anything about Fannie Lou Hamer, someone who you know, who's discourse was so powerful that the president of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson interrupted one of her most famous speeches. And so then and there, in that classroom, you know, on my way home that evening, I had this idea that you know, somebody should go around the United States and find these speeches, transcripts of these speeches, recordings, talk with people who had heard her speak as her biographers had chronicled and gather those into a collection of speeches. At that point, there were only three or four of Hamer's speeches published. And so that sort of seed of an idea became my dissertation project. And at that moment, I had no way of knowing that Fannie Lou Hamer often traveled to Madison, Wisconsin where I was studying. That there were people, they're well into their 80s who knew her, who listened to her, who actually taped and kept her recordings of speeches that she gave in, in small churches and classrooms there in Madison. So it turned out I was in a really great place to begin that research. But you know, that was really the moment for me uhm and, and really began this trajectory of Fannie Lou Hamer research that's now spanned about 15 years.
Interviewer: Okay. Well, that's a fantastic story. So you approached this not necessarily from the historical perspective, but from the communications and rhetoric perspective which is unique, I think. Well, before we, we talk more or in detail about Hamer, can you explain the "National Fable of the Civil Rights Movement" to us because you frame your book about Mrs. Hamer as one that attempts to address this fable.
Maegan: Absolutely. You know, I'll say that this idea is probably familiar to a lot of your listeners. But what I love about that phrase "National Fable of the Civil Rights Movement" that was coined by historian Jeanne Theoharis in her recent book it really puts language around what I think many of us suspect which is that the story of the Civil Rights Movement in the last 50 or 60 years has become largely flattened. Some would say it's been whitewashed. The radical nature of the activism has largely been papered over. It's become a tale that is situated in history and doesn't always draw out contemporary parallels and in fact, a lot of times it denies those contemporary parallels. So it, it's often told and then I'm thinking in, you know, large public remembrances as a story where a few larger-than-life leaders and I'm sure your listeners can sort of tick those people off, right? Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, you know, did extraordinary things and they made this progress and now we have moved past that, right? We are at this post-racial society.
Maegan: And I think for me, you know, one of the reasons why I was so motivated to travel around the country and gather Hamer's speeches and really listen to what she had to say is her story and the way that she tells her story challenges this Fable of the Civil Rights Movement. The issues that she was grappling with during her lifetime, you know, things like police brutality voter disenfranchisement, disparities in terms of health, income, these are things that we're still grappling with today, right? And so, a lot of Hamers words are just as relevant in our 2020 context as they were in 1964 and 5 when she first started, you know, speaking on the public stage. And so, yes, I, I used this frame of the Fable of the Civil Rights Movement and I argue much like you did in the introduction that if we focus on telling complex, fuller, robust histories of individuals who, who contributed to change but who are also relatable, right? There's a lot about Fannie Lou Hamer's life story that I think many of your listeners, you know, myself included, can identify with and relate to. She doesn't seem so larger than life that we couldn't imagine ourselves also contributing to change in our communities in, in the, in the many of the creative ways that she did. I'm very humbled by her accomplishments but I also see the way in which she could empower people in our contemporary context. And so, I believe stories like that really puncture uhm trouble this convenient history that, you know, makes us feel good about ourselves and denies the work that remains in our culture.
Interviewer: All right. Thank you. That's helpful. We move forward and move through these questions. As I said in the introduction, for our purposes what we want to draw out along the road of understanding, who, who she was and what she did is her religious motivations, which as I read the book, were very profound for her. And I think it will be, are, are definitely an integral part of her story and she was very open about that. So I'm excited to talk about those things. Hamer's mother, Luella - so now we're going to start in on the questions about her and her life, told her once, her mother told her once when she was young, a young in response to Fannie Lou Hamer's complaining about the inequality she saw as a young person between whites and blacks in her small town. Her mother said, "Be grateful that you are black. If God had wanted you to be white, you would have been white. So you accept yourself for what you are and you respect yourself as a black child." Maegan, can you give us a short biography of Hamer, her growing up and her early adult years bringing us up to just before that mass meeting in August of 1962. This will be helpful to our listeners.
Maegan: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, you know, Fannie Lou Hamer was born the 20th child to sharecropper parents, James Lee and Luella Townsend. She was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi and the family moved when she was about two years old to a plantation outside of Ruleville, Mississippi in the Delta. At the time, Ruleville was the epicenter of the worldwide cotton industry. It was one of the most productive regions of the country and our country was one of the most productive regions in the world in terms of producing cotton. So her family became sharecroppers on E.W. Brandon's plantation out about four miles east of the city center of Ruleville. She herself was uh tricked into the plantation owner's debt through treats that he enabled her to get from his commissary, commissary stores. So she actually started picking cotton at the age of six, six years old to pay off those debts from, you know, candy and things that he let her take from the store. So really you know, heart-wrenching story about her early you know, en-- enlistment into sharecropping. She did attend school. She learned to read very well. She had uhm a teacher she called Professor Thornton Layne uhm who was a bit of a character. She remembered him fondly. She learned to, to read and write and recite poetry in the one-room schoolhouse that he led.
Maegan: But she did have to leave school at the age of 12 uhm to help her aging parents and help earn money for the family to make ends meet in this really exploitative sharecropping system. As she went, grew up in age, so into her twenties, many of her brothers and sisters, her older brothers and sisters left the Mississippi Delta as part of the Great Migration. So they left to Northern cities in search of, you know, better jobs, a better life. She stayed and she cared for her aging parents. Her mother, Luella was blinded by an accident where she was clearing brush. And so she really required Fannie Lou Hamer's help. Hamer met Perry Hamer who was a tractor driver and a sharecropper at a neighboring plantation and she and her mother moved from E.W. Brandon's plantation W.D. Marlow's plantation and she earned a position of privilege on that plantation. She, she was recognized for her leadership abilities her reading and writing skills. And so, she became the timekeeper on the plantation. So she worked with the landowner but in her you know, resistive capacity that she had at that point in her life, she would work to give sharecroppers a fair uh accounting, a fair earning for their harvest. Whereas when the plantation owner was weighing the cotton that they brought in, he would use a weighted scale to cheat them out of money for their work.
Maegan: And so, she was, you know, trying to balance the scales there on the plantation far before she became invested in the movement. Into the 1960s, she and Perry Hamer were entrusted with two daughters from their community whose families were not able to raise them. I think that's really a testament to the respect that people in the community had for the Hamers. And so, Fannie Lou Hamer was raising two young children, caring for her mother, working as a sharecropper. She also, as I said, was the timekeeper. She would commonly be called on to clean the plantation owner's home. And then it was in that post that she learned about the fact that she'd been given a forced hysterectomy without her consent or knowledge. So she had a uterine tumor that she went in to get removed and the doctor sterilized her without her consent or knowledge. And she found out about that through rumors that were floating around the plantation owner's house. And she actually confronted that doctor and this happened in 1961. It was so common in the state of Mississippi in fact, to forcibly sterilize poor women, women of color that it was called a Mississippi Appendectomy. But she knew she had no recourse and this really frustrated her and she started to say things to those around her. Really anyone who would listen that if she could just find a way to change things like she recognized how unjust these systems were and if she could just find a way to really speak out against them she would jump at that opportunity. And then that opportunity came in the form of this mass meeting in 1962.
Interviewer: That's, that's super helpful. Maegan, you write about Mrs. Hamer's father, Reverend Townsend, and his Stranger's Home Baptist Church becoming her "sole source of formal learning" and that the church "provided a training ground for her eventual activism". Can you elaborate a bit on this, including where the song fits in that made her famous?
Maegan: Yeah, absolutely. So this was something that was very generative for me to learn about through the interviews that I did with Hamer's friends and family and, and many fellow activists. So I, I learned that the church really became the place where Hamer honed her activist skills that she would then transfer to the movement. So being the daughter of a black Baptist Minister hearing her father deliver the word from the pulpit, you know, puts Hamer in a relatively common category with many civil rights activists, right? So this was King's story, right? This is John Lewis's a story and others. And she learned from her father how to connect Biblical stories, right? Like the Exodus narrative, the story of the Israelites' bondage in Egypt and in the resistance of that becoming a chosen people. She learned about that parallel as her father would connect it to the experience of black people in America from, from the pulpit. So she learned about that. She learned about scripture uhm that connected to the ag-- agrarian experience, experience of sharecropping, thinking about, you know, herbs withering and, you know, do not fret evildoers, they will be cut down and wither as the, the herb, right? So she would, she would learn about these Biblical parallels from her father, you know, in terms of content. She was also learning about style. How to deliver a message in this call in response format that really enlisted the audience into the learning, the sort of co-learning that they were doing during the church experience.
Maegan: She talked about the black church as one of the few places, if, if not the only place that black people in her community had that they could really call their own, right? It was a place where they could exercise, you know, their freedom of thought, their freedom of expression. And so, you know, she learned about how to deliver an engaging sermon which served her very well when she started working for the movement. And, and last I'll say that she also learned the power of song. She really found her beautiful contra-alto voice singing in the church. Her father would commonly call upon her to sing songs. And so, when she transferred these, these ideas to the movement, she would take hymns like Go Tell It on the Mountain and This Little Light of Mine and she would change some of the verses to reflect the contemporary situation that Black people were struggling with in Mississippi or in other areas of the United States, depending where she was speaking to give them renewed significance and salience. So I'd like to play the This Little Light of Mine, her version of it. And just it would be great if your listeners could think about that how the common response is even working within this song, right? So like how she's functioning as a song leader and inviting the participation, you know, kind of think about this as like empowerment, right, through the very nature of, of the way that she's leading the song itself. So I'll just play a, a clip of her version of This Little Light of Mine.
[song clip playing]
Maegan: Okay, so I'll, I'll stop there and just you know, point out the way in which she's inviting, you know, participation along with her through that repetition and changing the lyrics from you know, I've Got a Light of Freedom, I'm Gonna Let it Shine, okay. And I think that really speaks to the way she saw herself as called by God to do this work, right? Feeling like voter registration, advocacy, you know, was akin to proselytizing, a form of doing God's work and, and as you would say fulfilling God's word wonderfully.
Interviewer: Okay, great. That was wonderful to hear that. Thank you for sharing that.
Interviewer: Maegan, tell us the story of the August 27, 1962 mass meeting at Williams Chapel Baptist Church, including the sermon and why 44 year old Fannie Lou Hamer was moved by all this?
Maegan: Yeah you know, this is one of those defining moments in Hamer's life, right? So when I was sharing a bit about her biography and sort of ending with this meeting it, it was this confluence of events that led to Hamer's activist career, really the origin of her activist career. So she was becoming, you know, increasingly dissatisfied with her experiences in the Mississippi Delta. She wanted to speak out about things like the forced sterilization, right? Like the economic exploitation that she was seeing uhm happened day in and day out on the plantation. But she didn't see any, you know, mechanism or way to speak out about this. So about that time the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was traveling throughout the South and they were probably getting or encouraging this new form of civic activism among the masses of black people. In places like the Mississippi Delta where black people outnumbered whites by a considerable margin. So rather than as the NAACP had for generations or going into the black middle and upper classes and encouraging voters among, you know, teachers and preachers and people who were you know, well-established in their communities, that was a bit more of the NAACP strategy for black civic engagement.
Maegan: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee led by Bob Moses and others in the state had this idea that they wanted to go into churches and pool halls and juke joints and empower the masses of black people uhm who had been left out of a lot of these previous campaigns. So it was part of that strategy coming into rural Mississippi, coming into the Mississippi Delta, coming into her church for a mass meeting that brought Hamer into the fold of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. So she was even skeptical going into this meeting. One of her friends who she really loved and respected encouraged her to try to come. So she came and she listened to the messages and James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was a trained black Baptist theologian and Mississippi native and he delivered a sermon called Discerning the Signs of the Time. And he was riffing on the section of the Bible where you know, Jesus says to the scribes and the Pharisees, you know, how is it that you don't recognize me as the Messiah, right? So how do you not see what is before you and recognize these signs. And Bevel took that idea and transferred it to contemporary United States pointing out things like Freedom Rides, right? And sit-ins and, you know, Brown versus Board of Education decision.
Maegan: The things that were happening around Mississippi and around the country that signaled a change in the times, right? And he invited the people seated before him to become a part of that change, to recognize the signs of the time. He even, you know, used references to the clouds. You can see the change in weather and predict that there will be rain, how can you not see these signs of the time, right? So, so pulling that those, those ideas through from the Bible. And so, this really resonated with Hamer, right? So this was, you know, speaking her language and it, and it really resonated with her. And then James Foreman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee followed up Bevel's sermon with a brief civic education lesson, you know, telling people seated before him, black people, you know, day labor, sharecroppers, that they had a constitutionally protected right to vote. That they had this right and that they could exercise it. And, and this is how we'll go down to, you know, the county seat and we'll register at the courthouse on Friday. And it was followed up with this altar call, right? You know, “who would like to come do this on Friday?” And Hamer was one of the first people to raise her hand and say, yep, she was gonna try to vote on that Friday along with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. You know, some of your listeners might be thinking like, oh, okay, you know, go down to the, that county courthouse and register to vote.
Maegan: You know, why did it require a sermon? Why did it require a civic education lesson. And the context here is really key, right? So Hamer from, you know, generations back, she's the granddaughter of an enslaved person. She'd been living in this tightly-controlled plantation environment where people who tried to speak up, people who tried to challenge the exploitative nature of sharecropping were lynched, right? There, Joe Pullum is someone she often references who is a person who stood up to the landowner who demanded pay for, adequate pay for his labor. And a lynch mob came after him and they, you know, not only through a, a drawn-out altercation kill Joe Pullum but then they the, the lynchers did horrific things like preserve his earlobe in a drugstore that black people frequented as this intimidating sign. They, they dragged his body through the town, right? I mean, there, there were horrific examples made of people who stood up against white supremacy. So the idea of going down to the courthouse and demanding one's right to vote was frightening, it was frightening to the people that get that, that were gathered there. And Foreman and Bevel knew this and they knew that they needed to not only persuade people to try this but support them along the way. So, you know, Hamer's act of raising her hand and indicating her willingness was a very brave act uhm in 1962 in the Mississippi Delta.
Interviewer: Right. Well, why don't you tell us the story of what happened on Friday and I'll, I'll just let me quote something you wrote that Fannie Lou Hamer did when she was so fearful? But then in that sometime in, in the, the latter part of the story, but I want to read this and then have you tell us what happened that day. On the way home from registering to vote unsuccessfully you write that Fannie Lou Hamer's "strong voice belied her tangled stomach, but she summoned the power of gospel music and sang all the way home". Maegan, tell us what happened that day and the ramifications.
Maegan: Yeah. Yeah, so Bevel and Foreman were not expecting that 18 people would have come down for the, you know, their version of an altar call, raise their hand, indicate their willingness to vote. So they actually weren't prepared to transport, you know, 18 black Deltans to Indianola, which is about 26 miles away. So they had to find an old bus that was used to transport migrant workers to and from Mississippi to Florida. So they actually, they used this old bus from someone in the community who is supportive of their efforts and they drove 18 people from Ruleville to Indianola. And, you know, on the way there you know, Hamer reflects a bit about being hopeful. One of the things that Foreman talked about in his address at, at the church was that through the vote, black Deltans could change the power structure of their community, right? They can vote out racist sheriffs, for example. So, you know, it's, it's likely that Hamer was hopeful. She also packed a, a pair of comfortable shoes. She remembers and writes because she thought and, and she was told that they could be arrested for this. And so she, you know, wanted to make sure she was prepared uhm in that case. So they drove to Indianola. When they arrived at the courthouse was lined with Citizens Council members. So white men with shotguns and dogs. And, and initially, they didn't understand you.
Maegan: Who are all these people standing outside the courthouse and till they realized that that act of a bus full of black people had got the word out to the community? They've been followed there by Citizens Council members and the Citizens Council if some of your readers or, or listeners, excuse me, are unfamiliar uhm was commonly referred to as the “Klan in suits, not sheets”. So this was the "respectable Klan in Mississippi". And they were there to intimidate the would-be voters who were scared now to even get off the bus, right? To go into the courthouse. Hamer was one of the first people who went into the courthouse and sort of summoned that strength and she was, you know, flanked and supported by members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Southern Christian Leadership Conference. When they arrived into the courthouse the registrar told them that they had to, you know, come back in, two at a time and they had to take this test that was designed to bar their civic assertion, right? It wasn't a test that was, you know, going to reward their competence. They couldn't study for it. She had interpreted an obscure passage from the Mississippi State Constitution to the satisfaction of the registrar. So all 18 of the would-be registrants failed their registration test and it took all day.
Maegan: So by late afternoon, they filed back onto the bus and they were headed home and everyone was discouraged, dem-- demoralized, frightened, right? Because they feared what would happen to them once they got home if this many, you know, citizens counselors knew about their attempt to vote, would the plantation owners know about their attempt to vote, right? And what would that mean for their lives and their livelihood? So they were scared. And then, you know, a couple of miles down the road, they got pulled over by a state highway patrolman. And the state highway patrolman went to arrest the bus driver and his crime was driving a bus that was too yellow. A bus that too closely resembled a school bus. And the rest of the people on the bus said, "If you're going arrest him, you'll have to arrest all of us." and so this was more than the highway patrolman was prepared for, so he said, "Well, I'll fine you $100." And they couldn't gather $100. No one had, you know, $100 between all of them, but they did manage to gather $30 which he took and they headed home. And Hamer during this time really emerges as the community leader because she starts singing gospel songs, Walk With Me O Lord, right? As I'm on this Jesus journey” to help comfort the people on the bus, right? To help remind them of the importance of what they were doing even in light of their failed attempt and to help and strengthen their resolve to go home and face whatever awaited them once they returned.
Interviewer: Okay. Thank you. Is it, is that when, if I remember correctly, she had to leave her home that night?
Maegan: Okay. So by the time Hamer returned to her the plantation where she lived and worked at W.D. Marlow's plantation she heard right away from her daughter and her daughter's cousin, pap's cousin that she, that the landowner had been "raising Cain all day". He had got a call from the Citizens Council that she was down there trying to register and he came storming up to her and said, you know with-- you must withdraw your registration attempt or you're gonna have to leave this plantation. And he said, "Even if you do withdraw, it's just how I feel you might have to leave anyway. I'll come back in the morning for your answer." But Hamer did not wait until the morning. She told him that she didn't go down there to register for him. She went down there to register for herself and she knew that uh she was now in danger and she needed to leave that night. And so she left that evening. She left her home where she lived with her husband, her mother, her daughters for 18 years where she served in this important role as a timekeeper where she had, you know, baked goods for the plantation owner's son when he was away at war, right?
Maegan: I mean, this was a hard decision to make that evening, but she was fearful because of what she said, because of what she did and how the landowner and other citizens counselors might respond. So she moved in with a friend who had encouraged her to come to the initial mass meeting in the first place. She moved in with Mary and Robert Tucker and she stayed there for a week or so and till Perry Hamer, who was forced to stay on the plantation and finish the harvest or forfeit all the family's belongings. So he was, he and, and her daughters were still on W.D. Marlow's plantation and he noticed buckshot shells in the machinery house. And he was worried that those shells were intended for his wife and not any sort of hunting at that point in the season, right? This is August. And so, he encouraged Hamer to take their children to a faraway cabin. A, a cousin of Perry Hamer lived in uh the neighboring town of Cascilla in Tallahatchie County. And so Hamer escaped uhm from uh the house where she was staying. And days later, in fact, 16 shots were fired into the bedroom where she had been sleeping just inches above her bed.
Interviewer: Okay. Thank you.
Maegan: I think Ben McMorran comes and finds her in Tallahatchie County where she sought refuge. And they go and do a speaking and singing tour. And then, yeah, when she returns to uhm Ruleville, by then the harvest is past and, and they uh SNCC helps them rent a house in town.
Interviewer: Without a home people pooled their money and rented a home in Ruleville for the Hamers, which Fannie Lou Hamer took as a "sign from God". The first time she had not lived on a plantation. Maegan, you write this, "It's a funny thing since I started working for Christ, which is how Fannie Lou Hamer characterized her civil rights advocacy". Can you paint the full portrait of Mrs. Hamer and her religious motivations as she entered the realm of civil rights advocate here at age 44? Just give us a brief description of her sort of religious, the portrait of her religiously she has embarked on this that will define her life for the rest of her life.
Maegan: Yeah. Yeah, so I want to play a quote from her here. This is from her first sermon that we have on record. So this was her telling this uh you know, in response to your question, you know, telling the audience gathered before her about how she'd been called from God to do this civil rights work. And so, we'll, we'll just take a listen to that and I'll expand a little bit.
Sound clip:
Maegan: So you can hear there this conviction, right? That she casts in Biblical terms. She really felt that, you know, the sign of SNCC and SCLC coming into her community, the fact that she narrowly escaped death at the Tucker's home. The fact that then SNCC goes and finds her at this remote cabin and brings her into the Civil Rights work. And then when she returns from a, a speaking and singing tour in the fall of 1962, SNCC is able to get her family a, a modest home in town. So the first time that our family lives off of a plantation uhm she knows the work is hard, right? She knows that firsthand, but she also feels like God is providing for her and that's assigned to her that she should continue doing this work and encouraging others to do so as well.
Interviewer: Okay, profoundly moving. Maegan, let's, let's move on to Sunday, June 9th, 1963: "And the voices of 10 black passengers, including that of Fannie Lou Hamer rose above the other bus travelers' chatter as they sang Go Tell It On The Mountain, over the hills and everywhere. Go tell it on the mountain to let my people go. Who's that yonder dressed in red? Let my people go, must be the children Bob Moses led. Let my people go". Maegan, can you give us a detailed description of who these people were? Where they were going? And then what happened to them? This being so critical to Fannie Lou Hamer's future advocacy.
Maegan: Yeah. Yes, you know, and I will just warn your listeners that this is a very traumatic story about what Hamer and her fellow civil rights workers endured on their way home from the Civil Rights Workshop in South Carolina. So, they were returning from one of these workshops that was molded in the Highlander Folk School model of empowering local people through these sort of center people organize first, right? So they were chosen from their communities as Leaders to attend the civil rights training session to help train other people to register and go out and vote. And the idea is that this could have a ripple effect within their communities, right? So they were returning from this. They, you know, had learned and shared in many of these hymns turned movement anthems like the “Go Tell it on the Mountain” that you quote from there. So they were singing these songs on the bus and this was aggravating the white bus driver. And all along the way at each sort of Continental Trailways stop that they made, they saw him get off the bus and make phone calls, right? So they started to get suspicious that he would, he was communicating with perhaps the Citizens Council or perhaps local police who often were one and the same. A couple stops from their final Greenwood, Mississippi destination, they get off in Montgomery County.
Maegan: They stopped at a place called Staley's Cafe. Hamer actually decides to stay on the bus. A few people go into the counter and they try to be served uhm right? So they, they know that they have a right because of the Interstate Commerce Commission ruling in 1961 that they should be served as black people at this counter but the white waitress refused to serve them. There starts to be a bit of a commotion and a police person, a policeman who I believe was called by the bus driver is there and suddenly there are many more policemen that kind of swarmed this cafe. So the civil rights workers decide to just leave, try to get back on the bus on the way and now ponder who was one of the organizers starts to copy down the license plate tags of the police officers as they were trained to do so and they were reporting these to the justice department. The police officer sees her doing that and, and starts to arrest her and all the people with them. Hamer sees this commotion from the bus, she comes off and she asks like, "What should I do? Should I go on to Greenwood right and get help or you know, like what, what do I do here?" She's asking Anell Ponder and Anell Ponder is trying to get her to go back on the bus.
Maegan: But she's spotted by one of the policemen and she's, you know, roughly handled, kicked, handcuffed, thrown into the back of a car. They're all bought, brought to the Montgomery County Jail in Winona, Mississippi. They're all uhm put into cells. And then over the course of that evening, they're subjected to horrific beatings and they can hear these beatings from their own cells. They, you know, are anticipating what's going to happen to them. When Hamer endures this beating from a, a blackjack, so a, a loaded you know, both sides instrument that uh the police officers in the cell ordered other black prisoners who were there to, to beat Hamer with or else they would be, you know, shot. The police officer sort of pointed to their guns when the black prisoners refused to beat this elderly, you know, to them elder black woman. Hamer, in telling the story, often alludes to sexual abuse that she endured during this beating. She was trying to smooth her dress down. Her dress kept getting worked up. She was laying on a cot. She was forced to lay face down and her dress would work up and she would try and pull it down. And that was angering the police officers who were forcing the prisoners, one to sit on her legs. They were holding her hands back and she felt one of the police officers, she couldn't see who because her dress was over her face feeling underneath her clothes during this time. And eventually, she passed out from the abuse.
Maegan: Uh and when she came to, she was being dragged back to her cell. Her cellmate Ben was taken in and just before the cellmate started to receive similar treatment a phone call came into the jail. And they believe that phone call was from someone who the SNCC workers had contacted when the civil rights workers didn't return. And what ensued was you know, the FBI came to the jail to interview the civil rights workers. There was coordination between Julian Bond of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Martin Luther King Jr. of SCLC, and this went all the way up to attorney general at the time, Robert F. Kennedy and on to J. Edgar Hoover. There was a, the awareness that there were 9 civil rights workers being held in this Winona, Mississippi jail cell and that they were fearful that they would be killed. And they were there for several days, four or five days and Hamer believes the only reason why they were able to eventually secure their release, Ambassador Andrew Young, he was not an ambassador then, Andrew Young, the civil rights worker Andrew Young uh Dorothy Cort-- Cotton and James Bevel came to secure their release.
Maegan: And, and they had the bail money sent from Martin Luther King, Jr. and the SCLC to do so. But Hamer believes the only reason why they were able to be released to those civil rights workers was because uhm uh Governor Wallace did his famous stand in the schoolhouse door in Alabama days before while they were in prison. And then Medgar Evers had just been assassinated on his front porch that or, or front lawn early that morning. And so, they believed that Robert F. Kennedy, perhaps John F. Kennedy ordered them to be released. It was just this horrific confluence of events that were demonstrating the horrors of white supremacy across the nation and they didn't want an additional horrific event like the killing of you know, 9 civil rights workers in a Mississippi jail cell to precipitate that even further. So they were released. Hamer and now Allene Ponder and others spent months uhm healing first in Mississippi in a hospital and then later transferred to Atlanta. And she also flew to Washington, D.C. not long after she met with King in Atlanta. And the FBI investigated the case and, and brought a trial against uh the white police officers. And that was one of the first times where white police officers were being held accountable for this. They, they were found not guilty in, in Oxford, Mississippi months later. But there was a, a trial brought against them.
Interviewer: Hard to hear. Before we leave this, I'm just going to read something you write, you write, and this is about Fannie Lou Hamer's regaining of, of her health." As you say, she did have months of, of medical assistance. But, but here you write when they were leaving "Sometime after midnight, Hamer's fever broke and she regained consciousness. Parting her cracked lips and breathing deeply in and out of her bruised diaphragm, a fellow activist remembered Hamer's low voice singing out, 'Walk with me now, Lord. Walk with me while I'm on this Jesus journey. I want Jesus to walk with me by my friend now, Lord, by my friend. Make a way from me now, Lord, make away from me. While I'm on this Jesus journey, I want Jesus to walk with me.'"
I think that is just indicative of, of sort of how she saw herself as a civil rights activist as sort of working for Jesus himself.
Maegan, you write that Hamer had come to see black political activism as divinely inspired and you quote a Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party chair describing it this way later, "Fannie Lou Hamer was a religious fanatic in the most positive sense. I heard her say, 'If I hate white people, I can't see the face of Jesus.' So she was very anti-hate, very pro-nonviolent, and she took her religious beliefs and she parlayed them into politics." And you've commented on this so we're not, we're not going stay here and discuss. But I just wanted to bring that out of something you wrote for our listeners to sort of continue to grasp, to try to understand who Fannie Lou Hamer was and what motivated her in what she did which that, that experience in Winona really scarred her for life and as she often would refer to it and it is, as I said, very difficult to hear.
Interviewer: We are talking with Maegan Parker Brooks, associate professor in the Department of Civic Communication and Media at Willamette University and author of several books and other media about the life and times of Fannie Lou Hamer, including Fannie Lou Hamer: America's Freedom Fighting Woman, and the children's book Planting Seeds: The Life and Legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer.
Maegan uh we have about fifteen minutes uh plus or minus. We need you to tell us the story about the 1964 speech to the credentials committee and I think you have something to play from that. But if you can give us a little bit of background here what she's doing and then we'll hear that, that excerpt.
Maegan: Sure. So the, if your listeners do know about Fannie Lou Hamer, odds are they learned about her through this speech, right? This is her most famous address. It was a speech that she gave to the credentials committee at the Democratic National Convention in 1964. And it was part of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's larger strategy to unseat the Mississippi regulars, as they were called. The Mississippi delegates who were sent from their state. So the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was formed out of Freedom Summer. So the larger SNCC, SCLC, COFO Initiative that had taken throughout the summer of 1964 and it culminated in the, this creation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. They were they, they had followed all of the rules for organizing a political party. They had sworn their allegiance to the Democratic Party and they had a loud, you know, people of all races to join. So they were contrasting that inclusive, inclusivity with exclusivity of the Mississippi regular party who was, which was an all-white delegation. They did not represent the state of Mississippi's constituents. And so, they took this fight to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.
Maegan: And there was a, you know, multiple-prong lobbying effort. There were it was a 24-hour vigil on the Atlantic City Boardwalk in which Hamer was singing. There were pictures of the civil rights workers: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner who had been murdered by Klansmen in Philadelphia, Mississippi for their civil rights worker, work. And there was lobbying efforts sort of behind the scenes trying to lobby credentials committee members. But the culminating event of this culmination was a, a, eight-person testimonies including the widow of uh Michael Schwerner, Rita Schwerner Bender, Martin Luther King Jr. uhm Roy Wilkins of the NAACP. They were really notable speakers on this panel. It was testifying about the white supremacists terror in Mississippi that was keeping black people from voting. But the most memorable of those speeches and those testimonies was Fannie Lou Hamer's. So she spoke for about eight minutes. She shared the story that I shared with you all of her first registration attempt and what happened as a result. She shared the story of the beating in Winona, Mississippi, and that led to this climactic conclusion that I'll play for you here and then I'll talk about the interruption that she endured. But let's, let's listen to the conclusion of her testimony before the DNC.
Sound clip:.
Maegan: So not long after Hamer started delivering that address before the credentials committee, 108-person committee, but also before the press, CBS, ABC, NBC were all there rolling, right? It is about two o'clock in the afternoon. President Johnson uh had heard about Hamer. He had heard about this challenge and he didn't want, not want anything interrupting what he saw as essentially his inauguration to this whole second ter-- term that he was going to have. So he called an impromptu press conference to call the press tension away and it was rumored that he was going to announce his running mate in this press conference. So the cameras followed him. And so, we went from Atlantic City. Hamer's beginning of her address to the White House, to LBJ and what news reporters thought was going to be an announcement of his running mate. Instead, it was like a known, a known announcement. He announced it was the nine-month anniversary of the assassination of JFK. So a nine-month anniversary of something is what he called the reporters there to announce. And so, they realized that they've been duped and they decided to replay Hamer's testimony on their nightly news program in prime time. And so, this way Hamer was in-- introduced to the American public, right? People seated, you know, in TV trays eating dinner, you know, watching the convention saw Fannie Lou Hamer that night and telegrams of support poured into the DNC for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and really forced Johnson to negotiate with the MFDP and offer them a compromise which, you know, Hamer rejected outright. It was a really offensive compromise but this was really the introduction of Hamer to the nation and has had long-lasting effects.
Interviewer: Okay, thank you. And thank you for playing that. I want to jump forward a little bit to Malcolm X and Fannie Lou Hamer and, and sort of their interaction. Malcolm X called her "America's number one freedom fighting woman". And you write that “Hamer nodded her head and raised her arms to the heavens when Malcolm talked about an enraged Jesus driving out the money changers, turning the tables over in the temple. And by the time it got to the Revolutionary Jesus of Revelations, the Jesus whose patience ran out, Hamer was back on her feet shouting, 'Tell it'". Maegan, can you talk to us about her relationship with this "radical view of Christianity," that's in quotes from your book, that Malcolm espoused and how it animated her work?
Maegan: Absolutely. So I, I am glad you asked this question because I think that part of that National Fable of the Civil Rights Movement maybe is a thinking that you know, Christianity informed and infused this sort of Kumbaya, let's all come together. Let's all love one another. Let's love our enemies. And certainly, yes, there was a part of that, right? And Hamer was a warm, loving person. She was a person who forgave uhm all manner of transgressions against her and who really believed in the power of moral suasion, and she believed this throughout her career. So she did not waver when SNCC activists did by the mid-1960s and they, and expelled white people from their organization. She never wavered in believing that white people had a soul, that they could be redeemed. She, she didn't, she kept that, she held fast to that. But that's not to say that she didn't believe that, as she would often say, Jesus was a revolutionary person. Jesus was out there with the poor and the disenfranchised and he was on the side of the oppressed. That Jesus was radical in nature. Like that's the, that's the Jesus that she also exemplified in her activism and she believed not in the turn the other cheek ideology, but as she would say you know, there came a time in the Bible when David had to slay Goliath. And, and she would, you know, draw that parallel that there was a time for self-defense and there was a time for standing up for your rights. And she, you know, had loaded guns in her house because her house was, you know, often firebombed and there were, you know, citizen counselors and Klan people who would drive by her house. So she believed in armed self-defense and she believed in the radical power of black activism, even as she was a devout Christian.
Interviewer: Right. Thank you. And that, I think that it is important to, to see and to understand. We don't have too much time. But let, let, let me ask a, a question or two about Fannie Lou Hamer's involvement in the National Women's Political Caucus which participation you wrote Fannie Lou Hamer cast in Biblical terms with an allusion to the Book of Esther. I'm going to quote here from her, "So I'm saying to you today, who knows but that I have come as to the Kingdom for such a time as this." Can you share with us what she did in that caucus, what her influence was, including her approach to reproductive control, which she called the Great Sin and why? This is fascinating piece of American history and American religious history, I think, that we don't really know about.
Maegan: Yeah, I agree and, you know, in, in feminist history too, right? So Hamer was a founding member of the National Women's Political Caucus. She participated in the inaugural meeting. She spoke at that inaugural meeting and she called white feminists to task for trying to bring together women from different backgrounds under this banner of sisterhood before they dealt with the real divisions between women of different races, different classes, different life experiences, right? And so, that's where we get that Ruth parallel that she's thinking about or excuse me, that Esther parallel that you quoted from, right? So she's thinking about herself at this meeting, in this precipitous moment, right? This important moment, the founding of the National Women's Political Caucus. But she's not identifying wholeheartedly with the second wave feminist, right? And in some ways, she's thinking about the need to protect her people, right? And acknowledge uhm the lived experiences that they've endured, right?
Maegan: So, well, you know, part of what she talks about with reproductive control and why she can't be 100% on board in terms of pro-choice is because of the Mississippi Appendectomy experiences that I mentioned earlier with, in our discussion, right? Because your reproductive justice as reproductive freedom, I guess, would be the, the more precise phrase at that point. Reproductive freedom for Hamer was really concerning. She worried that it would devolve into reproductive control in places like Mississippi. And so, she spoke that kind of truth to power during that meeting. And she also, you know, brought with her to that founding meeting Gussie Mae Love who was the mother of a young teen in the Mississippi Delta. A young black woman who was carelessly murdered outside of a grocery store on her graduation day by drunken white teens who were driving by. It was this horrific event that had happened and she brought Gussie Mae Love with her to the founding of the National Women's Political Caucus and said, "Your oppression has never been like ours." And she pointed out that you know, Gussie Mae Love was there as a living example of the white supremacist terror that black people were living through in the South in 1971.
Interviewer: All right. Well, thank you for that description of sort of some of her work with, with that caucus. Maegan, her final years were difficult for her and her family, I read. She seemed well, they were often without enough funds to live comfortably. I sort of got the sense that they were, they were sad, somewhat sad, her, her later years, although she kept doing things to help people congregated to her to get help and she offered what she could. I just got a sense of she was tired, worn out for good reason. And it was just you know, in the lower class of Americans that tho-- those times in your life are hard and I got that sense. Her death on March 14th, 1977 well, her, her funeral drew a large crowd and she was eulogized by Jimmy Carter's ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, who has appeared in this story before. And he said this at the end, "Thank you for the inspiration. Thank you for the example. Thank you for so strengthening our lives that we might live so God can use us anytime, anywhere." That phrase "so God can use us", that seems like a, a very good description of, of Fannie Lou Hamer and what she did as she saw it. I think she would agree that she did she did things as an instrument in, in God's hands.
I think that's probably an accurate way of how she might put it. Can as we conclude, Maegan do you want to share with us any lessons or takeaways from the book, either in terms of important historical transformations you have charted or in terms of helping us understand our present moment? And I should say we could go on and on with this interview. There's much that we've missed and skipped but I would just encourage listeners to go check out a book on uh Fannie Lou Hamer. Look at uh some of which were written by Maegan uhm and, and get to know her, listen to her speeches and songs. You can find them on the Internet and get to know this woman who did much with little to affect the American narrative. So Maegan.
Maegan: Okay. Uhm yeah, I mean, I, I think that Hamer, the lesson of, lessons from Hamer's life are manifold, but I think thinking about this idea that there are wells of wisdom upon which to draw, right? That Hamer's creative approaches to problem-solving. Her view that freedom was a constant struggle, right? And after the victories like the 1965 Voting Rights Act, for example, she was still working to build a poverty program in her community, Freedom Farm Cooperative, with something that she invested so much time, money, energy and creative problem-solving thought into. So there are many stories from her life that I think could inform our approaches to activism in our contemporary context activism and organizing. And then certainly, the way that her faith informed her approach to activism, it was complex, right? She really drew upon her astounding in-depth knowledge of the Bible and connected that with her lived experiences in profound ways that I think your listeners would, could learn a lot more from. So yes, I will just second your, your encouragement that readers, the listeners continue to learn about Fannie Lou Hamer through, through books uhm through websites, through other sources that are available.
Interviewer: Thank you.
We have been talking with Maegan Parker Brooks, associate professor in the Department of Civic Communication and Media uh at Willamette University and author of several books and other media about the life and times of Fannie Lou Hamer, including Fannie Lou Hamer: America's Freedom Fighting Woman and the children's book Planting Seeds: The Life and Legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer.
Here at the conclusion of this episode, we trust that listeners now understand more about what, what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion and have a deeper appreciation of religious freedom as a governing principle in the United States, seeing too its protection as an indispensable part of the fragile American experiment in self-government. Don't forget to visit storyofamericanreligion.org and register for future podcast notifications under the sign up tab.
Maegan, thank you so much for being with us and thank you even more than that for doing all the hard work that you did and understanding this person, Fannie Lou Hamer, and getting the word out to us via books and other, other sources. It's been very enlightening and I hope you've enjoyed the time with us as well.
Maegan: Thank you for having me.
