Stepping Out Into Freedom

In the late 1950s, something happened among black people in the South, something for which there is no simple explanation. Suddenly all the faith, courage, and endurance accumulated during 400 years of slavery and exploitation welled up into a massive nonviolent movement for human rights that, for a time, shook the country to its foundations.

The explosion was touched off by several circumstances. First, the long and tedious courtroom battles fought by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had begun to eat away at the legal basis for segregation and culminated finally in the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision. Second, the struggles for self-determination of former colonies in Africa provided new pride and inspiration for many, especially younger blacks. Third, since 1947 small cadres of committed nonviolent activists had been experimenting with Gandhian tactics against segregation in the North and South. And, of course, the emergence of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as a leader who could move a broad cross section of the black community helped galvanize the movement. But even these factors fail to explain the depth and magnitude of what began to happen.

Recently I asked a long-time activist in Mississippi how she had become involved in the movement. She replied, "I don't really know how I or any of us got involved. I just know that in Shelby, Mississippi, when we heard that the Freedom Riders were coming, we walked around for days asking each other, 'Are they here yet?' We were like soldiers waiting for somebody's army to join us." This grassroots, almost spontaneous character of the freedom movement was significant and mystifying.

Certainly the movement would never have had coherence and direction without the work and strategy of its organizers, lawyers, educators, and preachers. But the movement's primary impetus came from unlikely and ordinary sources, such as a seamstress in Montgomery who one day decided she was too tired to yield her seat on the bus; or a few young people at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College who read a Fellowship of Reconciliation booklet about nonviolence and decided to eat lunch at the Woolworth's in Greensboro; or a young man named James Meredith who decided he should complete his education at the University of Mississippi; or a plantation worker named Fannie Lou Hamer who one day walked into the Sunflower County courthouse to register to vote.

Those most intense years of the civil rights movement perhaps can only be sufficiently explained as one of those times when the spirit of God blew like a mighty wind, and those who had faith in the most unexpected circumstances answered the call to step out into freedom. Fannie Lou Hamer of Ruleville, Mississippi, was one who answered the call without hesitation. When she did, the world saw powers of leadership, courage, and inspiration that it had thought were far beyond the reach of a poorly educated female farm worker. In the 15 years after she stepped out to register, Hamer became a nationally recognized leader of the civil rights movement, a tireless servant to the poor people of Mississippi, and a beacon of hope to people struggling for justice all over the world.

Until 1962 Hamer's life was like that of most rural, poor, black women. She grew up the youngest of 20 children in the Mississippi Delta, then the poorest section of the poorest state in the union. The Delta, a triangle of rich flatland between the Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers, has always had cotton grown mostly on large plantations as its economic base.

Since slavery days the majority population in the Delta has been black, and when Hamer was born the white minority controlled all the political power and virtually all the wealth. The detailed Jim Crow segregation code daily reminded blacks of their place. All public facilities, including cafes, bus stations, and movie theaters were either segregated or reserved for whites only. Public buildings had "White" and "Colored" water fountains. Gas stations often had three restrooms marked "Men," and "Women," and "Colored." Public schools were segregated by law; black schools, woefully underfunded, were closed in the fall and spring so that the children would be available for field work. Blacks were kept from voting by an outlandishly complex literacy test, which only they were required to take, and a poll tax.

Like most Delta blacks, the members of Hamer's family were sharecroppers. The sharecropping system was the economic strand of the iron net that surrounded southern blacks. Devised to replace slavery as a source of cheap labor, sharecropping was a system under which poor tenant farmers were each assigned a piece of plantation land to work. The tenant was provided with a house and food, seed, fertilizer, and farm equipment on credit from the plantation owner's company store. At harvest time the landowner supposedly was due half the crop and the sharecropper half, though the sharecropper was required to pay for his supplies out of his earnings.

Somehow the bill at the company store always seemed to exceed what the sharecropper could get for his half of the crop. As a result, sharecroppers were kept in grinding poverty, enslaved by debt. The sharecropping system was not only cheap for the landowners, it provided a means to control the work force. Sharecroppers who rebelled or tried to move to another farm had their personal property confiscated as payment for their debt.

Hamer's family, through the hard work both of her parents and the whole brood of children, became one of the very few to work their way out of this cycle. Her father was able eventually to rent some land outright, buy his own animals, equipment, and even a car as well as fix up their house.

But the family's efforts and dreams were destroyed when a white man poisoned the feed and killed their stock, forcing the family back to sharecropping.

The sharecropper's daughter grew up and married Perry "Pap" Hamer, a tractor driver on a neighboring plantation. The couple was unable to have children of their own, and adopted two daughters. The first, Dorothy, was given to them at birth by a single mother, and the second, Virgie, they took in when she was five months old. She had been badly burned, and her natural parents were unable to give her medical care. For 20 years the Hamers worked on various plantations around Sunflower County.

Looking back on her years of farm work, Hamer said, "Sometimes I be working in the fields and I get so tired, I say to the people picking cotton with us, 'Hard as we have to work for nothing, there must be some way we can change this.' "

No way came into view until August 1962, when at the urging of a friend, Hamer attended a rally sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She later recalled that at the rally, "Rev. James Bevel [of SCLC] preached a sermon from the 16th chapter of Matthew, the third verse, 'discerning the signs of the times,' tying it to voter registration. Then Jim Forman [of SNCC] talked; about how it was our constitutional right...to register and to vote in Mississippi." At the end of the rally the call went out for blacks to go to the county seat the next week and register. Hamer answered the call, and at age 45 began a new life neither she nor anyone else could ever have imagined.

When she went to register, Hamer was confronted with the infamous Mississippi literacy test, in which she and other blacks were required to copy and interpret an arcane section of the Mississippi state constitution to the satisfaction of the county examiner. Not surprisingly, Hamer failed the test the first time. But she returned to try again, telling the clerk he would see her every 30 days for the rest of her life until she passed. She was finally registered to vote in January of 1963.

By that time Hamer had already been evicted from her plantation home as a result of her attempts to register, and had plunged full time into the movement as a SNCC field secretary. When her husband and daughters moved off the plantation to join Hamer in town, the owner confiscated all the family property, claiming that they owed him money.

The persecution that attended Hamer's first attempt to register set a pattern for the rest of her life. She received death threats by phone and mail, was wiretapped and kept under surveillance. The harassment came first from the Mississippi authorities and their allies in the Klan and the White Citizens' Council. Later these groups were joined by the FBI. The agency had set out to investigate the Klan but turned its attention to people like Hamer after the federal establishment came to consider the civil rights movement radical and uncontainable.

In her work for SNCC, Hamer traveled the cotton fields by day and spoke at churches by night, recruiting others to register to vote. In addition, she soon became one of SNCC's most effective communicators to northern white audiences, describing the desperation of blacks' situation in Mississippi and their determination to change it.

Less than nine months after she became a full-time SNCC worker, Hamer experienced her worst confrontation with white law and order. She and a group of SNCC and SCLC activists were returning by bus from a voter education workshop in Charleston, South Carolina. When they arrived at the Trailways station in Winona, they entered the white side of the terminal and were arrested. They were held for three days and brutally beaten. Hamer suffered kidney damage and developed a blood clot in her left eye that permanently impaired her vision.

The group was released only after intervention by movement representatives and the Justice Department. Hamer later reported that as she had sat bleeding in her cell she heard the officers "plotting to kill us, maybe to throw our bodies in the Big Black River, where nobody would ever find us." She said, "They offered to let us go one night, but I knew it was just so they could kill us and say we was trying to escape. I told 'em they'd have to kill me in my cell." Despite the beatings, Hamer refused to give in to hatred or revenge: "It wouldn't solve any problem for me to hate whites just because they hate me. Oh, there's so much hate, only God has kept the Negro sane."

Hamer was back in the thick of movement activity as soon as her wounds began to heal. The campaign for black voting rights picked up after the passage of the 1964 Public Accommodations desegregation law, and the right to vote became the symbol of black aspirations in Mississippi. Few in the movement, especially among the SNCC activists, had any illusions about the efficacy of the vote in the U.S. system. But the right to vote was a tangible goal. And since many of Mississippi's towns and counties had majority black populations, the black vote could make some cracks in the system and whet the people's appetite for bigger changes.

The civil rights forces planned to use the upcoming 1964 national election and its accompanying media attention to force home the demand for the vote. In the summer of 1964, Mississippi was flooded with thousands of mostly white student volunteers from all over the country. The volunteers were set to work helping black people in their attempts to register. When in early August two of these northern volunteers and a young black Mississippian were killed in Neshoba County, the nation was made grimly aware of the severity of the situation in Mississippi.

Shortly after the Neshoba County murders, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) presented its challenge to the Democratic national convention in Atlantic City. Republicans in Mississippi were remembered as the party of Reconstruction, so whites voted solidly Democratic, making the Democratic primary the only election worth noting; the general elections were so sparsely attended they were considered a joke.

But the Democratic Party was a "Whites Only" club. Blacks who had been able to run the gauntlet of the literacy test, the poll tax, and white harassment to become registered voters found they were still locked out of the Mississippi Democratic Party and thus effectively locked out of the political process. Ironically, liberal Democrats like the Kennedys and later Lyndon Johnson were getting great political mileage in the North out of their apparent support for black rights in the South. The freedom forces in Mississippi intended to exploit that irony to the hilt at Atlantic City.

In 1964 Lyndon Johnson was unopposed for the Democratic nomination and assured of victory over Barry Goldwater in November, so he had devoted much. personal attention to carefully arranging every detail of the convention to make it his own week-long nationally televised coronation ceremony. But one factor Johnson didn't allow for was a grassroots uprising from the cotton fields and piney woods of Mississippi. Specifically, he neglected to allow for Hamer and the MFDP.

The MFDP had been formed in the spring of 1964 after blacks were excluded from Democratic precinct meetings. When Hamer had tried to attend a precinct meeting in Ruleville, her husband was fired from his job the next day. The MFDP constituted itself as a counterparty and set up its own delegate selection process, culminating in a state convention in which Hamer was elected vice-chair of the delegation. The MFDP delegates then went to Atlantic City and presented their documented evidence that the white delegation had been chosen in a fraudulent process. They asked the convention credentials committee to refuse to seat the "regular" Democrats and instead recognize the biracial MFDP delegation as Mississippi's representatives.

The MFDP was represented by the nationally famous civil rights lawyer Joseph Rauh, and presented the committee with a string of distinguished witnesses, including Martin Luther King Jr., who testified regarding the undemocratic character of Mississippi politics. But Hamer grabbed the attention and conscience of the nation as she powerfully and dramatically told her story: the harshness of plantation life, the harassment she faced after trying to register, and how she had been shot at and beaten almost to death all for attempting to exercise fundamental legal rights.

We are told in Matthew's gospel that when Jesus finished the Sermon on the Mount, "the crowds were astonished...for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes." When Hamer finished her testimony at Atlantic City, the whole country recognized that she spoke with authority, in marked contrast to the many "scribes" assembled there. And like Jesus, the source of her authority was the potent combination of suffering and faith.

The attention of the nation was now fixed on the decision of the credentials committee; the liberal pronouncements of the Democrats were clearly on trial. As Edwin King wrote, the liberals failed the test miserably, and the MFDP challenge was rejected.

After Atlantic City, Hamer and the rest of the MFDP did not give up their battle for black voting rights. They went back to work preparing to take their case to the U.S. Congress. Since blacks in Mississippi had been prevented from nominating and voting for their own candidates, the MFDP ran a counter-election for Congress with a ballot listing the white incumbent and the MFDP challenger. Hamer was on the freedom ballot for the second district and received 33,000 votes against 49 for the incumbent, Jamie Whitten. Statewide, 70,000 blacks voted in the freedom election, and when the new Congress convened in January, 1965, the MFDP's elected representatives went to Washington, intending to claim that Mississippi's five congressmen had been chosen in a rigged election and should not be seated in the House.

Not until September did the subcommittee on elections hear their case. Fifteen thousand pages of evidence were presented, proving legally what was obvious to the naked eye: 40 percent of Mississippi's people were being denied their constitutional right to vote. But again liberal northern politicians declined to rock the boat. Hamer wrote later:

Racial progress? Almost a hundred years ago [during Reconstruction] John R. Lynch placed this same kind of challenge before the House of Representatives. He was a black man from Mississippi, and he succeeded with Yankee white help. But we failed a hundred years late with native white Mississippi help and Yankee opposition....So you see this is not Mississippi's problem, it is America's problem.

Though the MFDP challenges failed, they played a major role in generating the pressure that finally forced Congress to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which opened the way for blacks to gain their right to vote. By the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, a somewhat more moderate biracial delegation, called the Mississippi Loyalist Democrats, again challenged the old guard and succeeded in replacing them. Hamer was a member of that delegation and served three years as committeewoman for Mississippi's Democratic National Committee.

The defeat of the MFDP challenges marked a turning point in the development of the freedom movement. Until then the movement had been at the same time working in an uneasy partnership with the federal establishment and working against it. A choice had to be made between partnership and opposition, a choice made even more stark by the 1965 escalation of the Vietnam War.

Hamer was foremost of those who considered the federal government part of the problem. While she remained willing to work with anyone through any channels, she was never willing to compromise the just demands of her people.

As Hamer gained political experience, she grew aware of the broader dimensions of the illness that infected the American system. She became an early opponent of the Vietnam War, attending and speaking at numerous antiwar demonstrations. She saw the movement's struggle as not solely for black legal rights but as a fight for human rights in conflict with a system whose leaders were "more interested in more profits and power for the rich and powerful people...and have no interest in helping the poor people." She helped to organize for Martin Luther King's last dream, the Poor People's Campaign, which sought to mobilize a multiracial coalition of the dispossessed to demand basic economic reforms.

While Hamer's political understanding grew, it remained firmly rooted in biblical faith. In 1968 she wrote:

We have to realize just how grave the problem is in the United States today, and I think the sixth chapter of Ephesians, the eleventh and twelfth verses helps us to know...what it is we are up against. It says: "Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." This is what I think about when I think of my own work in the fight for freedom.

She was unceasing in her service to the poor people of Ruleville and surrounding Sunflower County. She helped lead the battle to get the Head Start program into Mississippi. Head Start was finally brought in under the auspices of Mary Holmes College, an independent black school, in order to avoid the governor's veto of poverty programs and to keep their control away from white politicians. The Head Start effort was one of the few success stories of the War on Poverty, and the low-income children of Mississippi still reap its benefits.

Deeply suspicious of the way politicians were using the poverty programs as a way to make blacks dependent, the bulk of her efforts in Ruleville were oriented toward helping the people become self-reliant. Hamer organized the Freedom Farm Cooperative to obtain land for plantation workers who were left unemployed by farm mechanization, Freedom Farm eventually grew to 680 acres. She raised money for the construction of 200 units of low-income housing in Ruleville and helped start a low-cost day care center that today bears her name. She worked to bring a garment factory to Ruleville to provide jobs for the unemployed.

A lifetime of hard physical work capped by more than a decade of pouring herself out in the freedom struggle took its toll on her health. In addition to the effects of childhood polio and the lingering consequences of the Winona beating, Hamer had long suffered from diabetes and heart trouble. In the mid-1970s she developed breast cancer. Although she underwent a mastectomy in 1976 and resumed her activities, the cancer continued to spread, and on March 14, 1977, she died in the Mound Bayou Community Hospital.

While she had given herself in the struggle to redistribute power and wealth, Hamer had remained poor. In earlier years, movement friends had raised money to build a house for her family, and when she died, again friends and coworkers raised money for her funeral. The service was held in the Ruleville Junior High auditorium, which overflowed with mourners from all over the country. After her death the Mississippi state legislature passed a resolution in her honor. The resolution was sponsored by four black state representatives who knew they wouldn't have been in the capitol had it not been for Fannie Lou Hamer.

It is 20 years since Hamer walked into the Sunflower County courthouse. In some ways Mississippi is a very different place. Young people nearing adulthood have never seen the "Whites Only" signs, and in many parts of the state the public schools are among the most racially integrated in the nation. Seventy per cent of Mississippi's black voting age population is registered and is a political force that politicians can't afford to ignore. Mississippi is among the nation's states with the largest number of black elected officials.

But in other ways very little has changed in Mississippi, or in the United States. On the whole, people are as poor now as they were then, and in the Reagan era, they are getting poorer. And black votes in Mississippi and elsewhere still haven't been allowed to translate into a real shift in power.

Hamer is buried at the edge of Ruleville on land purchased by the Freedom Farm Cooperative. Her grave is marked by a simple marble headstone that carries the words which were her motto and rallying cry as she spoke and organized for justice: "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired." Planted by the grave is a lone flowering cactus plant, seemingly misplaced in the damp, rich soil of the Mississippi Delta.

But the cactus is an appropriate symbol of Hamer's life. The social and cultural terrain in which she lived and worked was as harsh and inhospitable as any desert. But she managed to rise up in it, to become tough enough to survive the worst it had to offer and still blossom into a flower that offered hope to millions of struggling and sometimes hopeless people.

Once during a time of unusually frequent threats and harassment Hamer said, "I'm never sure any more when I leave home whether I'll get back or not. Sometimes it seem like to tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I'll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom. I'm not backing off that and no one will have to cover the ground I walk as far as freedom is concerned." She never backed off. And she certainly left us a great deal more than five feet four inches further along the way to freedom.

Danny Duncan Collum was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.