Among the billionaires, celebrities and politicians awarded the Medal of Freedom, is someone you need to know
This past weekend, 19 people received the distinguished Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award of the United States. Among this group of billionaires, sports heroes, actors, celebrities, and politicians was a sharecropper’s daughter named Fannie Lou Hamer. Hamer died in 1977 at the age of just 60. I want to introduce you to her because she is someone whose life represents Freedom, something she never truly experienced until perhaps the last few years of her life.
She was born in 1917 in Montgomery County, Mississippi. She worked in the cotton fields from a very young age, poor and often with little food. When she was just eight years old, she witnessed the lynching of another sharecropper who demanded to be paid for his work. An image that would remain with her for her entire life.
“You know from a child up, I always at first I wanted to be white you know because my family, there was 20 of us, six girls and 14 boys,” says Hamer. “We would make 50 and 60 bales of cotton, get all that cotton and we wouldn’t have food in the wintertime. So then I figured the white people must be right but as I got older I said, “No there’s something wrong and if I ever get a chance, I’m going to do something about it. But year after year, things just like got worse and worse. The Student Nonviolent Committee helped to build confidence in people that they were just about to lose all hopes and that’s the truth.”
It was the Student Nonviolent Committee that sued the Winona, Mississippi police after Hamer and other black members of her group were arrested in 1963 for attempting to use the restroom during a rest stop on their way back from a voter registration workshop. The police put her in a cell and made two black prisoners beat her with loaded blackjacks until she was unconscious and near death. She sustained broken bones, a crushed eye socket and kidney damage due to the attack that would affect her for the rest of her life. A jury acquitted the police.
One month before her arrest, in June 1963, Medgar Evers was shot in the back in front of his home in Jackson, Mississippi. Imagine the incredible bravery that Hamer exemplified in the face of the violence. She didn’t stop. She continued and that is something I want everyone to know about this remarkable human being.
It was just one year before that assault, at the age of 45 during a church meeting, that she even knew that black people could register to vote.
“They were talking about we could vote out people that we didn't want in office, we thought that wasn't right, that we could vote them out. That sounded interesting enough to me that I wanted to try it. I had never heard, until 1962, that black people could register and vote,” she would later detail.
On her first attempt to do so, with 18 other Black Americans, she was greeted by a group of men with guns. When she returned to her home that day, her landlord told her she would have to leave if she and her family didn’t withdraw her registration.
“I answered the only way I could and told him that I didn't go down there to register for him; I went down there to register for myself. This seemed like it made him madder when I told him that,” recounted Hamer.
The year 1964 was a year of violence for civil rights activists culminating in the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. By then, Hamer had co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) with Ella Baker, Bob Moses, and Lawrence Guyot, an action that was born when Black Americans were denied the right to vote in Mississippi leading to a “Freedom Ballot” that garnered 80,000 votes and eventually led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Although the Civil Rights Act had passed in July 1964, the MFDP was denied seating as delegates during the Democratic National Convention. Eventually, they were told they could be seated but could not vote. A hearing followed in which Hamer took center stage. I encourage you to watch her testimony, which you can find here: American Experience | Fannie Lou Hamer's Powerful Testimony | Season 26 | Episode 6 | PBS.
Hamer’s comment, “I’m sick and tired and being sick and tired,” would go on to define the Civil Rights Era. When asked how she could have continued her activism against such violence, she said, "The only thing they could do to me was kill me," Hamer said, "and it seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.”
There is so much more about Fannie Lou Hamer that cannot fit into a Linkedin post. I do hope you will take the time to discover her and share her life story with others. She deserves more than a brief inclusion in today’s media.
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1 个月Christopher Escobar Thank you for letting me know about Fannie Lou Hamer's inclusion. ??