Learning about justice and love from a grassroots leader of the Southern civil rights movement.
In the summer of 1964, I sat on the dark blue fabric of the couch in our living room with its knotty pine paneling in Millington, Tennessee watching the Democratic convention and conducting my own personal Republican celebration of what I imagined to be the impending demise of a party in disarray, with a repulsive and criminal leader named Lyndon Johnson, sure to lead his party to defeat by the intrepid and noble Goldwater.
But as I watched our little black-and-white television, right next to where our black maid Mary Smith came every week to set up her ironing board and do the mopping and sweeping and cleaning for our poor white minister’s family, I saw an amazing sight. There in Atlantic City, New Jersey, amidst several thousand white men representing Democratic Party caucuses and precincts from across the country and fifty different states, a lone black woman testified before the Credentials Committee and stared down those white men until they hushed up and turned toward her and quieted down so they and several million more Americans could hear what she had the nerve to say when her speech was broadcast in its entirety on all three networks that night.
The woman’s name was Fannie Lou Hamer. She was a sharecropper from Sunflower County, Mississippi, and that day in New Jersey she told of being beaten, insulted and evicted. She said, “All of this is on account of us wanting to register, to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”
Half a decade later, in the summer of 1969, Fannie Lou was fifty-one years old, and she came to visit Madison on a sweltering day that in its heat and heaviness reminded me of my old home town in Tennessee, 140 miles due north from Fannie Lou’s home in Ruleville, Mississippi, a day when the trees and the people wilted in an unrelenting downpour of sunshine and the grass on the library lawn sat brown and lifeless and the surface of Lake Mendota lay mirrorlike and undisturbed by any errant breeze from the surrounding farmlands where cows and corn and soybeans lazed in shimmering fields.
I put up scores of leaflets and posters on bulletin boards all around campus, focusing in on the humanities classroom buildings and the student union and various leftwing delis and beer halls, bratwurst parlors and underground poetry venues where I might be able to snare students of history, English, political science, and creative writing, while avoiding the engineering hall and the business school, considering them a lost cause from the point of view of recruitment as it was well known that most engineers lacked a certain gene required for a highly developed consciousness of social justice. A bare handful of students and teachers showed up to hear her in a small room in the Student Union that had perhaps fifty stackable chairs, ten of which were occupied by summer school students along with a few townsfolk. Fannie Lou arrived a few minutes before her talk was to begin, which made me a little nervous because as a member of the organizing committee I was assigned to introduce her.
Fannie Lou was a heavyset woman in a flower print polyester dress, with her thick black hair pulled back behind her head in a scarf. She was 51 years old at the time, which meant she was more than twice as old as I was and possessed a great deal more gravity than I had. She had a serious expression on her face and leaned forward to take my hand as we were introduced. She looked right at me with her black eyes, and held my hand for a moment, squeezing it between hers, and she said, “Yes, Mr. Himes, I’m proud to know you.” Remembering Mary, our household maid in Tennessee, one of the few black adults I had met previously, I felt an obscure sense of shame that emanated from somewhere behind my ears. “Yes, ma’am,” I said, lapsing back into a Tennessee drawl that I had spent the previous few years trying to leave behind me. “I’m honored to meet you.”
I had read up a bit on Fannie Lou. I introduced her as a woman who had grown up as a sharecropper, illiterate and unskilled, with no way to earn a living other than by endless hours of picking cotton. She was famous as a co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964, I said. She was first introduced to the civil rights movement in 1962 when organizers for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee called a voter registration meeting.
“That’s right,” said Fannie Lou when she stood up to speak. “That’s when I was surprised to learn for the first time that black people had a constitutional right to vote. That sounded interesting enough to me that I wanted to try it. When those organizers asked for volunteers to go down to the courthouse and register to vote, I was the first person with my hand up.” She told how her landlord immediately evicted her from her home and her husband refused to take the same stand she took. She then devoted herself to changing the conditions of life for black people in Mississippi and across the South.
Fannie Lou talked about being arrested in 1962 by a Mississippi state highway patrolman, and dragged into a jail cell. “That man pulled down the back of my dress and he had two Negro prisoners beat me with a blackjack until I was black and blue and I was screaming. He said, ‘Fannie Lou, you better get the hell out of Mississippi, because we don’t cotton to upstart niggers that don’t know their place and get big ideas.’ And I said, ‘I will leave Sunflower County, Mississippi when God tells me to and not before.’”
Fannie Lou looked at me and looked at the few others in the room with me. She said, “You know, every single morning of every single day, I wake up in the morning and I look at the ceiling and I repeat these words, ‘I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.’ And I will tell you that I will spend every second of every minute of every day of my life to bring justice to Mississippi. I will have my freedom, or I will have my grave.”
In Fannie Lou Hamer’s words I heard a nobility and selflessness I had been looking for, and a cause much greater than myself. I resolved I would find a way to go back down South and join in the struggle that Fannie Lou had articulated. I wanted to devote my life to something as big and important as the dream she had been drawn to.
Fannie Lou Hamer
In the summer of 1964, I sat on the dark blue fabric of the couch in our living room with its knotty pine paneling in Millington, Tennessee watching the Democratic convention and conducting my own personal Republican celebration of what I imagined to be the impending demise of a party in disarray, with a repulsive and criminal leader named Lyndon Johnson, sure to lead his party to defeat by the intrepid and noble Goldwater.
But as I watched our little black-and-white television, right next to where our black maid Mary Smith came every week to set up her ironing board and do the mopping and sweeping and cleaning for our poor white minister’s family, I saw an amazing sight. There in Atlantic City, New Jersey, amidst several thousand white men representing Democratic Party caucuses and precincts from across the country and fifty different states, a lone black woman testified before the Credentials Committee and stared down those white men until they hushed up and turned toward her and quieted down so they and several million more Americans could hear what she had the nerve to say when her speech was broadcast in its entirety on all three networks that night.
The woman’s name was Fannie Lou Hamer. She was a sharecropper from Sunflower County, Mississippi, and that day in New Jersey she told of being beaten, insulted and evicted. She said, “All of this is on account of us wanting to register, to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”
Half a decade later, in the summer of 1969, Fannie Lou was fifty-one years old, and she came to visit Madison on a sweltering day that in its heat and heaviness reminded me of my old home town in Tennessee, 140 miles due north from Fannie Lou’s home in Ruleville, Mississippi, a day when the trees and the people wilted in an unrelenting downpour of sunshine and the grass on the library lawn sat brown and lifeless and the surface of Lake Mendota lay mirrorlike and undisturbed by any errant breeze from the surrounding farmlands where cows and corn and soybeans lazed in shimmering fields.
I put up scores of leaflets and posters on bulletin boards all around campus, focusing in on the humanities classroom buildings and the student union and various leftwing delis and beer halls, bratwurst parlors and underground poetry venues where I might be able to snare students of history, English, political science, and creative writing, while avoiding the engineering hall and the business school, considering them a lost cause from the point of view of recruitment as it was well known that most engineers lacked a certain gene required for a highly developed consciousness of social justice. A bare handful of students and teachers showed up to hear her in a small room in the Student Union that had perhaps fifty stackable chairs, ten of which were occupied by summer school students along with a few townsfolk. Fannie Lou arrived a few minutes before her talk was to begin, which made me a little nervous because as a member of the organizing committee I was assigned to introduce her.
Fannie Lou was a heavyset woman in a flower print polyester dress, with her thick black hair pulled back behind her head in a scarf. She was 51 years old at the time, which meant she was more than twice as old as I was and possessed a great deal more gravity than I had. She had a serious expression on her face and leaned forward to take my hand as we were introduced. She looked right at me with her black eyes, and held my hand for a moment, squeezing it between hers, and she said, “Yes, Mr. Himes, I’m proud to know you.” Remembering Mary, our household maid in Tennessee, one of the few black adults I had met previously, I felt an obscure sense of shame that emanated from somewhere behind my ears. “Yes, ma’am,” I said, lapsing back into a Tennessee drawl that I had spent the previous few years trying to leave behind me. “I’m honored to meet you.”
I had read up a bit on Fannie Lou. I introduced her as a woman who had grown up as a sharecropper, illiterate and unskilled, with no way to earn a living other than by endless hours of picking cotton. She was famous as a co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964, I said. She was first introduced to the civil rights movement in 1962 when organizers for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee called a voter registration meeting.
“That’s right,” said Fannie Lou when she stood up to speak. “That’s when I was surprised to learn for the first time that black people had a constitutional right to vote. That sounded interesting enough to me that I wanted to try it. When those organizers asked for volunteers to go down to the courthouse and register to vote, I was the first person with my hand up.” She told how her landlord immediately evicted her from her home and her husband refused to take the same stand she took. She then devoted herself to changing the conditions of life for black people in Mississippi and across the South.
Fannie Lou talked about being arrested in 1962 by a Mississippi state highway patrolman, and dragged into a jail cell. “That man pulled down the back of my dress and he had two Negro prisoners beat me with a blackjack until I was black and blue and I was screaming. He said, ‘Fannie Lou, you better get the hell out of Mississippi, because we don’t cotton to upstart niggers that don’t know their place and get big ideas.’ And I said, ‘I will leave Sunflower County, Mississippi when God tells me to and not before.’”
Fannie Lou looked at me and looked at the few others in the room with me. She said, “You know, every single morning of every single day, I wake up in the morning and I look at the ceiling and I repeat these words, ‘I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.’ And I will tell you that I will spend every second of every minute of every day of my life to bring justice to Mississippi. I will have my freedom, or I will have my grave.”
In Fannie Lou Hamer’s words I heard a nobility and selflessness I had been looking for, and a cause much greater than myself. I resolved I would find a way to go back down South and join in the struggle that Fannie Lou had articulated. I wanted to devote my life to something as big and important as the dream she had been drawn to.
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