Voices of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer by Carole Boston Weatherford

Fannie Lou Hamer was born in Sunflower County, Mississippi on October 6, 1917. Her parents, James and Lou Ella Townsend were sharecroppers who were paid fifty dollars for producing another field hand. There were twenty-two people in her family.

Fannie Lou began working when she was only six years old. Like the rest of her family, she worked in one hundred-degree heat from dawn until dusk. Her family would pack fifteen tons of cotton in a season, but could not get ahead financially. This was because the scales used to weigh the cotton were fixed so that they never made enough money to pay their debts. The sharecroppers had to pay the owner for seeds, food, clothing and supplies from their wages made in the field."Sharecropping was just slavery by a gentler name. The same folks still had us, had us in chains."

Fannie's mother always wore rags so that her children would have proper clothes. Fannie noticed that white people had clothing and food, "while blacks worked and worked and went hungry." When Fannie wished she was white her mother told her "to respect yourself as a Black child, and as you get older, you respect yourself as a Black woman. If you respect yourself enough, other people will have to respect you."

Fannie was only able to attend school for four months of the year, from December to March when she didn't have to pick cotton. They didn't have much food and rarely ate meat. Their home had no electricity, heat or plumbing and there was no money for a doctor either. When her father was able to buy a wagon, mules to pull it and two cows, the livestock was poisoned by a white neighbour.

By the time Fannie Lou was twenty-two her father was dead and most of her brothers and sisters had moved to the north to escape Jim Crow.Fannie stayed behind to care for their ailing mother, now in her eighties. She married Pap Hamer and moved with him to the Marlow plantation where he drove a tractor. Life was hard here too. They never went hungry but they were very poor. Fannie not only picked cotton, she was also the timekeeper. Once again the owner rigged the scales to cheat the black sharecroppers. Fannie would try to use her own scales but this wasn't always possible.

In 1961 Fannie was tricked into having an operation that removed the parts of her body that allowed her to have children. The law in Mississippi could prevent poor people from having children.In 1962, Fannie Lou accompanied her friend Mary Tucker to a meeting about voter registration at William Chapel Church. Fannie signed up along with seventeen others to travel by bus to Indianola to register to vote. Indianola was the home of a violent white group called White Citizen's Council. They were met by barking dogs and armed men. Fannie didn't pass the test which required her to "...read, copy, and explain parts of the Mississippi constitution."

Attempting to register as a voter had serious implications for Fannie: the plantation boss fired her, her life was threatened, and she had to move away from her family and friends. But she retook the test and passed! But freedom to vote came at a price; Pap lost his job and they were once again threatened after Fannie's name was published in the newspaper. Undaunted, Fannie became involved in the civil rights movement, speaking at rallies. She was badly beaten on her way home from a citizenship school in South Carolina in 1963.

The beatings and threats only made her more determined. Fannie became involved in the political process. She ran for Congress, took part in educating black youth so they could participate in civil rights campaigns, struggled to make her voice heard at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic city as vice chairman of the new Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party and again at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Although she lost her bid for state senate in 1971, Fannie was proud that fifty-five blacks were elected in Mississippi. Fannie's dream of having her voice heard had been realized in the gains Blacks were making all over America.

Discussion

Voices of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer offers a succinct overview of Fannie's amazing accomplishments in the struggle for civil rights for African Americans. Weatherford includes an Author's Note at the back that offers a few more details about Fannie's life. Fannie's life was terribly hard; she grew up very poor, suffered under Mississippi's eugenic program which found any excuse to sterilize poor black women, and was so badly beaten after sitting in the whites-only section of a bus station that her eyesight, kidneys and leg were permanently damaged. In spite of these hardships, she became a respected and fearless leader in the civil rights movement, cofounding the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Hamer worked for integrated state delegations in the Democratic National Party, something that was finally achieved by 1968. 

Voices of Freedom is told from the perspective of Fannie, each page accompanied by Ekua Holmes earthy collages. Fannie's story is one of fortitude and determination  in the face of blatant discrimination and injustice. It is also a story of courage in the face of daunting odds, of a woman who knew African Americans deserved the same rights their white counterparts, and who persevered to see those rights championed.

Book Details:

Voices of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer by Carole Boston Weatherford
Somerville, Massachusetts:  Candlewick Press          2015
45 pp.