Voice of Calm

In the summer of 1962, I volunteered to work for SNCC in Ruleville setting up voter registration drives. We started by knocking on doors, trying to get people to go and register at the courthouse in Indianola, which was 26 miles away. After about a week of knocking on doors, we had only gotten about six people to try to register, so we decided to have a big mass rally to stimulate some interest in the community. We had the rally, and people from the plantations around Ruleville came. We told them that we were going to take a busload of people to the courthouse the following weekend.

On the day we had set to go to the courthouse, 18 people showed up. But when we got there most of the people were afraid to get off the bus. Then this one little stocky lady just stepped off the bus and went right on up to the courthouse and into the circuit clerk's office. I didn't know this was Fannie Lou Hamer.

The people on that bus knew her because she lived on the plantation around where they did. She went in and took the literacy test, and then the rest of the people went through one by one. When everybody had taken the test, we got in the bus and headed home.

But just as we left the city limits a police car flagged us down and told the driver that he was under arrest for driving a bus the color of a school bus. They carried him to jail, and while he was away everybody on the bus was shaking with fear. They didn't know whether they were going to have to sit out there on the road or whether in a few minutes the police were going to come back and put everybody in jail.

Then this voice singing church songs just came out of the crowd and began to calm everybody on the bus. It was then that I learned that Fannie Lou Hamer was on the bus. Somebody said, "That's Fannie Lou, she know how to sing."

After about an hour the police came and said the driver needed 52 dollars to pay his fine. So we took up a collection and sent someone back to get the driver. That night when Mrs. Hamer got home, the plantation owner had already received word that she had attempted to register to vote. The guy told Pap Hamer, her husband, to tell her to go back to the courthouse and withdraw her name or she would have to move. When she heard this, Fannie Lou said that she wasn't going to go back because she had registered for herself and not for Mr. Milo. Later the owner came down himself and told her she'd have to withdraw her name or move. So she packed up her stuff and moved into Ruleville to stay with Mrs. Tucker, a friend of hers who had been the one who invited Fannie Lou to the mass meeting the week before.

That night the.nightriders came through and shot up the home where we were staying and where Mrs. Hamer was staying. They also fired into the home of another active person, and two girls, students from Jackson State University, were wounded. After that Mrs. Hamer moved out into Tallahatchie County, and I didn't see her again for about two weeks. Then word came from Bob Moses [the president of SNCC] to go and find Mrs. Hamer and bring her to the annual SNCC conference in Nashville.

So I searched all day getting a little lead here and a little lead there on through the county. Finally the last directions I got were to go to Cascilla. They said you'll find her at a little brown house sitting up on a hill.

That evening it was raining like hell. Thundering and lightning and raining, and I was out there searching. I finally saw this little house with smoke coming out of the chimney. I knocked on the door and a voice told me to come in. And there was a lady in a chair with her back to me putting wood into a big pot-bellied stove. I said, "I'm looking for Fannie Lou Hamer." This was my first real meeting with her.

I told her that Bob Moses and the people at SNCC asked me to pick her up and take her on to the Nashville conference. And she got right up and went to getting her stuff. I'd never met her, and she didn't know me. She couldn't have known whether I was kidnapping her or what. But she just got right up and came.

Later during the first meeting at the SNCC conference somebody made reference to the fact that Mrs. Hamer could sing because her singing on the bus had been part of the report we'd sent in. So they asked her to sing. She started singing "This Little Light of Mine," "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around," all those songs that motivated people.

And the Freedom Singers of SNCC was born that night. Mrs. Hamer didn't come back to Mississippi with us. A tour was arranged while she was there in Nashville for her and the SNCC singers to go around to college campuses in the North to raise money for SNCC.

When this article appeared, Charles McLaurin lived in Indianola, Mississippi and had been active in black and poor people's movements since the early 1960s. He had also recently worked for the United Woodcutters Association as an organizer and in the Robert Clark congressional campaign.