Through the Spyglass: Until Everybody’s Free
Not everyone in history gets remembered for their courage and their bravery. Not everyone who was courageous or brave gets their recognition, their flowers.
Sometimes that could be because of being contemporaries with someone more historically famous. Perhaps the shine from someone shines too bright and people miss the contributions of those around them.
One moment in time that is filled with such a type of tragic archetype is the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century.
While truly remarkable men like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X are often held up in high regards. Whereas someone like Dr. King was honored and remembered almost immediately following his assassination, others like Malcolm X saw their greater appreciation come only later down the road, even after meeting a similar fate.
Sometimes, however, fighters and champions of certain causes go unsung when the wheels of history turn past them. Malcolm X and Dr. King hold their place in the collective memory of the United States, but what happens to those whose struggle isn’t so easily discussed? What about champions whose stories don’t fit neatly into narratives and perhaps even contradict the story you’re trying to tell?
Well, today is International Women’s Day. What better time to celebrate than to talk about a truly remarkable woman who falls under that category and whose name has been buried?
Let’s talk about Fannie Lou Hamer.
Fannie Lou Hamer was born in Mississippi on Oct. 6th, 1917; the youngest of 20 children. She and her family were sharecroppers (the successor to antebellum chattel slavery) for the better part of her youth. It would get to the point where Hamer was picking hundred of pounds of cotton daily, and even had to drop out of school at age 12 to help support her family.
Fast forward to 1961, and Hamer receives what she and others called a “Mississippi appendectomy,” aka a nonconsensual hysterectomy, during a separate procedure for a uterine tumor, which was a common means of population control.
Being a black woman in the Deep South, Fannie Lou Hamer saw and felt some of the hardest experiences any U.S. American could ever imagine. In a nation that has climbed from the beginning “All men are created equal,” people like Hamer experienced a United States that treated them as second class citizens at best.
Well, as Fannie Lou Hamer would famously go on to say: “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
Hamer would go on to join the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s. On August 31st, 1962, she and others attempted to vote but failed the “literacy test.” Her boss would fire her and her husband for the mere attempt.
Less than two weeks later, on September 10th, she was shot at 15 times in a drive-by shooting, perpetrated by racists.
As she continued to do throughout her life, she survived.
Trying and failing to pass the test on December 4th, she would get it on the third try on January 10th, 1963.
That same year, returning from South Carolina, Hamer and her cohorts would be arrested and beaten in detention over the course of three days.
Despite everything thrown at Hamer, she persisted. She would help to organize a mock election, the 1963 Freedom Vote, meant to education Black voters on how to vote, and go on to help organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), a necessary move due to southern segregationists blocking her and other Black voters from getting involved in the Mississippi Democratic Party, in 1964.
Despite the national Democratic Party being the advocates of Civil Rights, the lived experiences of Democrat-controlled Mississippi proved national policy was not a blanket application.
At the time, Black voter registration in Mississippi was less than 10%; far lower than other states in the Deep South.
So, in the summer of 1964, she would help to organize “Freedom Summer,” a campaign to register as many Black voters in Misssissippi as possible.
Kicking off in June, the campaign wasn’t without tragedy. Almost immediately, James Chaney and New Yorkers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were ambushed and murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Their bodies would be discovered over six weeks later on August 4th, 1964.
The tragedy was not uncommon for Civil Rights activists in the South at the time, but the murder of two white, Jewish northerners set off a chain reaction that demanded addressing.
Three weeks after the discovery of the bodies would come the 1964 Democratic National Convention. The MFDP would show up and demand their representation, on the basis of the Mississippi Democratic Party having broken the national standard’s rules be systematically excluding Black voters from the primaries.
Fannie Lou Hamer would go on to retell much of what I have told you up to this point: her story, her experiences as a sharecropper and in Mississippi in general. The painful, the hard-to-hear realities a Black woman in Mississippi would be forced to face. A life only made harder because she and others like her would fight to be treated and viewed as first-class citizens; as fellow humans. This was nationally televised, an incredibly important and impactful moment in history.
At least, it should have been. President Johnson would call an impromptu press conference with the sole intent of interrupting coverage of Hamer’s speech.
You see, her lived experiences were not only inconvenient to the national Democratic Party (the party of Civil Rights is actively stifling Civil Rights in the South), but uncomfortable for the predominantly White Southern Democrats in Mississippi and Alabama, who would end up walking out before the end of the convention.
Despite doing everything they were told, and following the rules laid out in front of them, the people on the ground, Hamer and the MFDP, were ultimately ignored in favor of the will of the party.
Vietnam factored in, it’s no wonder 1968 saw massive protests at that year’s Democratic National Convention. A party of platitudes but little action that refuses to listen to their youthful voter base.
(The more things change…)
Hamer, trying to tell her story, was silenced when it didn’t serve the interests of the Democratic Party institution. The plight of the oppressed that the Democratic Party was claiming to help fight for was instead having their voices silenced for raising awareness about how it is on the ground.
Not for nothing, everything you have read was instrumental to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Meaning Hamer, despite being a name often forgotten in recollection of Civil Rights history, played her role and changed the course of United States history.
Her place in history didn’t stop there, and her role in founding the Freedom Farm Cooperative and what that meant is a story for another time. But rest assured: Hamer was not finished after 1964.
A woman like Hamer and a story like hers is one anyone, no matter where you come from, could draw inspiration from. To come from object poverty, abhorrent living conditions, constant struggles, systemic oppression, medical malpractice and having to fight just to be considered an equal human being, Fannie Lou Hamer is as strong a human being as anyone, man or woman, that has ever existed.
Her story is not only important to highlight, and but an important lesson to take away from all of this as well.
When we in the United States Pirate Party talk about “Putting Individuals Before Institutions” in our platform, this is almost a perfect example of what we don’t mean.
Hamer was human. She bled like you or I bleed. The Democratic Party, as an institution, saw her as a token speaker when useful, and a dangerous threat to the narrative when not. They actively choose to silence her in favor of keeping up appearances and geopolitical partnerships within the Democratic Party.
We here in the Pirate Party see her as a tireless advocate of self-determination and greater humanity. We recognize the work she’s done in stripping away the systematic injustices put in place by the state.
And for those of you keeping score at home: she did it without ever winning a single election.
One of the most poignant quotes ever uttered comes from Henry George, “Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.”
Well, this International Women’s Day, take inspiration from a genuine hero of her day. A brave woman and, as Dr. King called her, an “army of love.”
Let no woman imagine that she has no influence. Whoever she may be, and wherever she may be placed, the woman who thinks becomes a light and a power.