Respecting the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer

“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free,”

— Fannie Lou Hamer

Today we’re going to venture a bit deeper behind the Pine Curtain for an object lesson. As I’ve mentioned before, our corner of the world is more about attitude and less about space, anyway.

This journey is to a place that’s actually in the state of Mississippi, a little town called Ruleville, which I believe you’ll agree is most definitely behind the Pine Curtain.

Ruleville was not named for its adherence to any set of laws and certainly not because those who ran the town held to any sort of moral code. You’d think Sunflower County, Mississippi would be on the straight-and-narrow, given all the churches which survive even until today as the population shrinks precipitously.

Churches and moral codes don’t always go together well, either. I am not qualified to speak about which gods are worshipped in Ruleville, never having been there.

I digress. Ruleville was named for J.W. Rule but it is not clear that he was much of a moralist, either. He did lay out the tract for the town, which he promptly named in his honor.

As it so frequently happens, though, places where evil grows can be fertile places for great good, which is what brings us today to Ruleville.

It was not great good, though, that brought Fannie Lou Hamer to live in Ruleville, but rather flight from terrorism, from people who would have just as soon killed her for trying to register vote on August 31, 1962 in Indianola.

Register to vote, mind you, not vote. She wasn’t actually allowed to even register because she failed a sham of a literacy test. She had been reading the Bible for years but that was not good enough.

She was fired from her share-cropping job, but her husband was forced to stay. Shots into her ramshackle house convinced her to pack up from the her home and hide out with a friend. That didn’t stop those who would kill her, the friend’s house was shot at 15 times a week or so later.

 Here is an inflection point in Fannie Lou Hamer’s life. What she could have done — and let’s be honest, most of us would do — is folded up her tent and quit. Just like that. The Curtain would have closed tighter.

Something clicked in Hamer, though, some internal fortitude that made her set her jaw and go forward. Maybe it was the fact that a white doctor had given her a “Mississippi Appendectomy,” a slang term for forced sterilization of black women at the time.

Or maybe she’d just had enough of living a life utterly controlled by others. If she could vote no one could tell her who to vote for. That was a way her voice could be used, even if her candidate didn’t win.

This brings me back around to our part of the Pine Curtain. Just when are people here going to get enough of having others utterly control their lives?

When are you going to do the simplest thing you can do by registering and voting? When will your whining turn into actually doing something positive?

You can sign all the petitions you want, but if you don’t vote in every election, that’s worthless. You can put bumper stickers on your car and signs in your yard but don’t vote and it is wasted energy.

You can post on Facebook daily but tell me, just tell me, when are you going to vote?

It wasn’t so easy for Hamer. After being turned down to register as a voter in August 1962 with all the pain that brought upon her, she returned to take the literacy test again in December of that year.

Again, she failed, but told the registrar, “You’ll see me every 30 days until I pass.”

The very next month, she passed. Mississippi still had tricks up its sleeve, though. She was refused the right to vote because she had not paid her poll taxes.

She was almost killed by Mississippi police before she ever got a chance to vote. Traveling across the state, she was arrested and severely beaten by police that left her with permanent damage of one of her kidneys.

She kept up her activism for years but her failing health had mostly taken her out of politics by the early 1970s. She died at age 59 in 1977.

Those qualified to vote but unregistered are difficult to convince to fill out an application and I’ve never understood why.

“It won’t make any difference,” they say, or “My vote won’t count.”

I give thanks that Fannie Lou Hamer never felt that way, that she persevered and made a difference, not only while she lived but even today. What is it that makes people like Hamer persevere while others just sit on their rears?

I don’t know. The state threw up every obstacle they could to keep her from voting and she jumped over every single one. It is true that the state has erected obstacles these days to discourage voting, but they don’t come close to the ones that Hamer faced.

If you make that decision not to register or decide to sit at home on election day — for any reason whatsoever — you disrespect Hamer’s bravery and cheapen the pain the suffered.

Back then, the powers did not want her to vote. She refused to knuckle under. Today, the powers don’t want you to vote, either.

So, what will you do when the time comes? We want to know. The spirit of Fannie Lou Hamer wants to know.

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Phil Latham writes another newsletter on Substack, “American Slave Stories,” which aims to keep alive the contributions of slaves. Subscribe to cover the expenses of this project. Cost is $5 per month.