Eight of us met on Saturday October 14th to discuss Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America by Dr. Keisha N. Blain.
The one thing we all agreed on about this book is that it was short on biographical information about Fannie Lou Hamer, and instead more focused on the events of the last few years. It seems that the author’s point was to relate Fannie Lou Hamer’s work and legacy to modern activists and point out her influences on today’s justice seekers.
Fannie Lou Hamer entered the Voting Rights arena after attending a SNCC meeting. SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) was established under the mentorship of Ella Baker. The group resisted the top-down leadership model and focused on every person in the group. Fannie Lou Hamer attended her first SNCC meeting when she was 44 years old. She didn’t even know she had a right to vote, before attending this meeting.
Robin started us out, saying, “the group Sweet Honey in the Rock has this song about Fannie Lou Hamer that I have known forever so I knew that she was someone important. To know who she was she was such a radical. I’m glad to have read about her.”
Barb followed up with, “I was moved to read her stories of a young sharecropping family in Mississippi during my lifetime. This seems like it should have taken place a hundred years ago. The book is more of a political presentation rather than a biography. She fell into the Civil Rights Movement at 44 yrs. Old. A woman with a 6th grade education.”
Connie told us, “Her spunk is what I really got out of this book, the way she turned spunk into activism Initially she didn’t even know she had the right to vote. Not everyone has the characteristics to turn that revelation into action. It took her to all the conventions meeting people from different states. She went to Guinea and met the President there. When people have that internal character, there’s such power in that. The fact that people saw that she was able to do that encouraged people who normally would not have stepped up, to step us as well.”
Judy added, “I remember her not only from seeing the clips from the documentaries we'd watched. I was also alive back then when she was active. I knew about her emphasis on grass roots, the people who had the greatest need. The chapter about SNCC. Some organizations were top-down, she always stood against that. She started suddenly at age 44. Her activism and fame did not lift her out of poverty. I’m wondering if that’s still true. Is this how we treat our grass roots leaders? One of her daughters died of malnutrition.
Robin agreed, saying, “that did shock me too that she was prominent and that didn’t translate into any financial gain.”
Judy went further, saying, “She was still picking cotton. She would go out and speak and still come back to pick cotton.”
Shelara answered, “To your point Judy, about activists nowadays, what we do is criticize activists who actually get money. I understand we do need to be good stewards of money and it should be going towards what it’s intended for but Martin Luther King died broke. Malcolm X died broke. Fannie Lou Hamer died broke. They all had no money. Malcolm X didn’t even have a home when he died. The idea that because you sacrifice for a community because you want change that you should actually live in poverty, die in poverty is not acceptable. But it falls into that idea of Black sacrifice it’s supposed to be free.
Fannie Lou Hamer did a lot. I don’t believe Black women should be killing themselves for anybody. The plantation she worked on as a sharecropper, somebody owned that, somebody still owns that, we never talk about that person and their descendants. They’re probably still rich, still contributing to the Republican party in their state and still funding these candidates. Fannie Lou Hamer is owed. Her father was owed.
That man who owned the farm tricked her into running up a debt in the commissary when she was six years old. He knew he wasn’t paying that family enough to feed those kids so he takes a hungry little girl and gets her to get food out of the commissary now she has to pick cotton to pay for that food. That’s a soulless person. This was a person who had a full life and a full belly and now there are his descendants living full lives on that land with full bellies. I want there to be something happening there. If we agree that is egregious, and that it’s not correct or fair, what are we doing to make sure there is restitution?
The landowner poisoned Fannie Lou Hamer’s father’s livestock. He took away physical wealth that they could have gained as a household. I’m never going to stop talking about reparations. Monetary and physical things need to be restored. The debt has never been paid. As great as Fannie Lou Hamer was, when we read these stories now, it’s frustrating for me.”
Deb G. offered a different point of view, “Because America is so transactional, they’d say, ‘I’ve paid this money now I’m done with that.’ We wouldn’t get to the real repentance. Once I've paid you off, I don’t have to deal with the emotional struggle that continues to be manifested all these generations later. We’ve got to change the way we understand humanity. How is it that we can be comfortable with the harm that’s been done to the generations? Can you imagine being in fields in that heat without the proper ventilation, without the proper clothing or nutrition, and for no pay? You’ve been told that you are nothing. You send it down generationally and it’s manifested in our behaviors. I never understood the beauty that I possess because I was always told that I didn’t have any. I really would rather have the heart change. You are so touched when you think about a woman like Fannie, that you feel the pain.
Laura answering both Shelara and Deb, brought up the phrase ‘co-owners of trauma.’ “Hamer was talking about the importance of public testimony. Shelara, I hear you when you say, ‘I shouldn’t have to spell out a litany of my experiences for you to finally recognize my humanity.’ Yet it seems that Fannie Lou Hamer wasn’t averse to spelling out litanies of experiences. She felt that once these stories were heard, the listeners became co-owners of the trauma. That phrase ‘co-owners of trauma’ just struck me. Somehow you have to feel that another person is a human being. I’m quoting the book:”
p.24 “During the early 1960s, she used her growing visibility and national platform to share those experiences and denounce the actions of the police as well the white doctors who committed acts of violence against Black women through forced sterilizations. For Hamer, one of the strategies for addressing the persistent problem of state-sanctioned violence was the use of public testimony as an ode of resistance and revelation...A source of empowerment and healing, public testimony also provided a vehicle for Hamer to make her audience ‘co-owners of trauma.’”
Shelara: There are people that do that work, that antiracist work. If that helps non-melanated people to see the humanity in us, that’s great. We have to ask ourselves why we’ve built this society where non-melanated people need to hear about all this trauma. Your community has been affected. I do agree that we have to ask ourselves why we have built this society where non-melanized almost have to be forced to see humanity in people. It did something to you treating people like that over the centuries: the terror and the disgusting treatment doesn’t just affect one group of people. I’m done having conversations.
Connie told Shelara, “Just hearing you say all that, that’s what white people need to hear. They can read it in books, but it doesn’t have the same power. I honestly feel that it was intentional that from four hundred years ago through today white people have done everything to keep themselves in that ugly state and their purposeful continued segregation. No one has the answers for how you can undo all that intentional infliction of hate, that white people felt that’s what they needed to do to stay in power. The 1619 Project laid that out in such apparent terms, but people don’t read it. I tried to convince all my friends. One of my friends, I just asked her a couple of weeks ago if she’d read The 1619 Project, she said yes, and I asked her did you read The New York Times synopsis of it or did you read the book? She said she read the synopsis. In her mind she knows it all now. I feel so strongly about not wanting to live in a white neighborhood anymore that I’m selling my house. The reason I attend this book club is because I benefit more from hearing from people who live in an integrated environment. I just think that this purposeful segregation has prolonged white people not understanding, hearing, and implementing what you just said.
Shelara told us, “The only thing I knew about Fannie Lou Hamer is that she said ‘I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired’ in the convention back in 1964. I had no idea she had a freedom farm, that she was scheduled to be at Malcolm X’s speech before he was assassinated. We have received curated ideas about these people, about the civil rights movement.”
Marian added, “I never heard of Fannie Lou Hamer when I was growing up. Mind you, I saw Dr. King on television when I was four or five years old, and I remember my mother telling us we had to be quiet because Dr. King was on. So, there was a concentrated effort to make me know who he was. But no one ever said, “Do you know who Fannie Lou Hamer is?”
Shelara chimed in, “or Ella Baker. She was in every major movement since like the 1930s.”
Marian asked, “How do we let these people just drop from our consciousness and they worked themselves to death. I did not know that Fannie Lou Hamer had gone and met the president of Guinea. I did not know that she stood up to Dr. King at that convention. A certain congressperson at that same convention tried to embarrass her, saying, ‘Do you know who I am?’ and she retorted, ‘Have you ever picked cotton?’ This book was so eye-opening, and yet at the same time, I feel like I need to read another book about her.”
Shelara, agreeing that we needed another book, said, “I know this author was trying to tie in the modern protest movements. I wanted a biography of Fannie Lou Hamer. I felt like I only received snippets about Fannie Lou Hamer and a lot about things that happened two or three years ago. What about the non-consented sterilization? The author could have elaborated on that more, making it a fuller story.”
Laura shared that she, “liked the many different examples of intersectionality. I loved everything she said about her husband, and how she in terms of feminism, how she would not go against her husband or men. She said, ‘I’m doing this for Black and white, for people who are poor,’ because Hamer understood that historically, the most important tool of the oppressors was keeping Black and white people apart, so that we could not be together and see that are needs were allied.”
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