Speech

“So we lived on his place until I was grown, but it was just hard. Life was very hard; we never hardly had enough to eat; we didn’t have clothes to wear.” Fannie Lou Hamer was the last of twenty children born into the Townsend family in Montgomery County, Mississippi. The Townsends were sharecroppers who moved to Sunflower County when Fannie was two, and lived in poverty. Fannie Lou, as a child, picked cotton very often. She attended school, but only when she was not needed in the fields for picking and hoeing the cotton. After six years of on and off education, Fannie did not return. Hamer mentions in an interview with Dr. Neil McMillan that her favorite subject was reading, and that she learned how to read very well while she was in school.

“I had never heard, until 1962, that black people could register and vote.” As she grew up, during the Depression, politics were not often spoken of in her household. Hamer recalls that she knew the president was Franklin D. Roosevelt and that there were two parties, but that was the extent of her knowledge of government as a young girl. The very first time she learned of voting was at a church meeting approximately 30 years later, when she was told that she could vote someone out of office and that it was her right to do so. She was not aware that voting was in the constitution. Voting would prove to be very difficult for her.

“I didn’t go down there to register for him; I went down there to register for myself.” Fannie Lou Hamer went with a group of seventeen others to Indianola to register to vote. They were told they would have to enter in two at a time, and complete a literacy test. They were to copy down a section of the Mississippi constitution and then interpret it, and the interpretation was where Hamer had failed the test. They then began their return, when the bus was stopped, and the man driving was arrested for driving a bus that was “too yellow,” an arbitrary claim that clearly just targeted their having just voted. The punishment for registration did not stop there. When Hamer finally returned home, her young daughter informed her that the landowner fought with her husband and she was told that if she did not “withdraw her registration” she would have to “leave this place.” Her answer that she registered for her own self begins a strong and powerful road of answers and calls to action.

“Is this America, the land of the free and home of the brave, where we sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in America?” In Fannie Lou Hamer’s Testimony Before the Credentials Committee at the Democratic National Convention in August 1964, she puts forth this statement as the final call to action. The speech is one of her most famous, and made her name in the civil rights movement. She was chosen over Martin Luther King Jr. to give this speech to the Credentials Committee. President Johnson interrupted her speech on television as it aired. This was noticed by the networks and they “aired Hamer’s speech later that evening during their primetime newscasts.” In this speech, Hamer discusses her struggle to vote and then her later time in jail being beaten violently without committing any crime. She made this speech to convince 11 members of the Credentials Committee to seat members of their party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, rather than the elected white delegation. This ultimately failed because they were granted two seats and, in the party’s eyes, that was not enough for all of the fighting that they had done. However, Hamer’s speech opened the eyes of many who tuned in, and she began to be one of the largest voices of the movement because of her eloquent speaking skills and her powerful story. She began to reach out and give back to the community who brought her up.

“The plan of the thing is that it can grow to produce enough that people just won’t know what hunger is,” says Hamer when interviewed on her co-op project, the Freedom Farm Cooperative. She founded it in 1967 as an anti-poverty strategy to aid those in poverty residing Ruleville, Mississippi, in Sunflower County, where Hamer grew up. Not only did Hamer set out to make her voice heard in America, but she put a program together that grounds her words into action and brings forth hope for a better future for this country.