Fannie Lou Hamer, a Fight for equality.

Racial and social rights were the largest debate in America throughout the 20th century, and since the issues were so great America saw major achievements in social reforms on all fronts. Generally the leaders of these movements were educated middle class white women, like Betty Friedan, and Alice Paul. Although these women were major contributors to the cause, they claimed to be victims of the oppression of male dominance, but the privileged white women doesn’t even come close to the social inequalities and injustices dealt to women like Fannie Lou Hamer. Hamer was a victim of racial and sexual discrimination from the day she was born. Although Hamer was born into a lower class, slave like family, she refused to become a victim of the system and rose to become a prominent figure for the rights of all black people especially women. As stated previously most rights activists came from middle class families who were sent through a college education. Whereas Fannie Lou Hamer was born into a family of share croppers, and was the last of twenty children. Obviously Hamer grew up in an extremely poor household, and she ended up dropping out of school to work full time on the fields with her family. In the 1950’s Hamer became a victim to one of her major forms of injustice, “She went into a hospital to have a small cyst in her stomach removed, only to wake up and find that she had been given a hysterectomy.” (Lee 21). Without her permission, a doctor had taken one of the most valued privileges the right to reproduce. Although Hamer did not speak out much about this injustice, it did incite her to attend her first Civil Rights Meeting by James Forman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. These meetings brought a consciousness that the African-American population needed to unite and obtain their right to vote. Fannie Lou Hamer’s desire to achieve the vote was the first instance where she acted for racial equality. A group of eighteen African-Americans boarded a bus and travelled to Indianola, to register for their right to vote, as a result a “crowd had started forming near the bus as the vehicle pulled up to its final destination (the courthouse). Wearing cowboy hats and toting gun, hostile men and women were gathering” (Lee 27). Although being intimidated by the gathered mass, Mrs. Hamer demanded registration and was ultimately denied it because she could not pass the “literacy test”, which has since been removed as it’s been charged as unconstitutional for the right to vote. All in all, when Fannie Lou Hamer looked back on this instance she recognized the severe danger she had put herself in to pursue basic American rights, “I guess if I’d had any sense I’d a been a little scared. The only thing they could do to me was kill me and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.” (Lee 27). Even though Fannie Lou Hamer was turned down the instance served as a turning point in her life for social reform. She learned how to properly register for the vote and then continued to spread the knowledge to anyone that would listen. Hamer became a major figure in the SNCC, and “moved from being an individual whose sole means of “resistance” was survival to being on who took initiatives to promote collective struggle for real power. Although Fannie Lou Hamer was born into being a field worker, she aspired to achieve the same as the feminist reformers for women’s right but in effort to attain the same for all people regardless of sex, race and social status. As Hamer stated, “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired”, and that statement still stands to this day no one person especially that of minorities should be unequal to that of the dominate culture, the upper class white man. Hamer once said, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free”, a simple ideology that we should take a look at today.

Citation
Lee, Chana. For Freedom's sake The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. University of Illinois Press, 1999. Print.