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Fannie Lou Hamer spent most of her life as a sharecropper in rural Mississippi.
In 1962 civil rights workers came to the town of Ruleville to encourage African Americans to vote. On August 31, Hamer and 17 others traveled by bus to the country courthouse and attempted to vote. “That was the day I saw more policemens with guns than I’d ever seen in my life,” she later recalled.
Because she failed a literacy test, Hamer and the others were turned away. She was harassed, fired from her job, attacked, shot at, and forced to leave her home for safety.
You can read her description of what happened that day in a thundering speech she delivered two years later at a mass meeting at the Negro Baptist School in Indianola.
Finally, on January 10, 1963, Hamer took the literacy test a third time. That time she was successful, and was informed that she was now a registered voter in the state of Mississippi. But when she tried to vote, she was told the county also required voters to have two poll tax receipts.
The state of Mississippi was doing everything it could to keep African Americans from voting.
Now this is ’64 and they still trying to keep us away from the ballot. But we are determined today, we are determined that one day we’ll have the power of the ballot.
The denial of her rights changed Hamer’s life. She became involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and taught workshops. She attended Southern Christian Leadership Conferences.
For the remainder of her 15 years, Hamer served as one of the nation’s most compelling activists for voting and civil rights.
Now a new book by historian Keisha N. Blain, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America puts the spotlight on Hamer’s remarkable life, leadership, and voice.
Hamer’s words still speak truth to power, exposing the failings and inequities that still plague American society.
You can hear her tell her story in her historic testimony to the credential committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, in Atlantic City here.
I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?
“I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave . . . because we want to live as decent human beings?”
The 2013 volume The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is collects 21 of her speeches from 1963 to 1976. And you can find links to several of her speeches on the Speaking While Female Speech Bank, including a recording of her speech before a mass meeting speech here.
Hamer died in March 1977 at the age of 59. She is buried in Ruleville, Sunflower County, Mississippi.
The fight for equal voting rights in this country goes on. As Hamer said in her 1964 speech in Indianola:
“Eighteen hundred and seventy, the Fifteenth Amendment was added on to the Constitution of the United States that gave every man a chance to vote for what he think to be the right way. And now this is ’64 and they still trying to keep us away from the ballot. But we are determined today, we are determined that one day we’ll have the power of the ballot.”
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