That Little Light of Hers Shines On and On: How Fannie Lou Hamer Rocked Mississippi for Civil Rights

Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the tall, dapper congressman who represented Harlem, wanted to be sure the short, stout sharecropper from Mississippi in a borrowed dress understood how important and powerful he was.

Fannie Lou Hamer speaks at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in August 1964. Wikipedia

“I know who you are,” Fannie Lou Hamer told him. She had come to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City with the Mississippi Freedom Party, a group of Black delegates who wanted to unseat the state’s all-White delegation on the grounds it didn’t represent her home. The Democratic Party leadership had dispatched the Black New York congressman to persuade her to accept a compromise.

“I have two questions for you,” Hamer said to Powell.

“How many bales of cotton have you picked?

“How many beatings have you taken?”

Hamer had been picking cotton since the age of 6. So she knew that to gather a pound of cotton, a picker had to harvest 70 bolls. The 100-pound minimum daily harvest a picker had to produce meant plucking 7,000 prickly bolls with sore fingers.

At age 44, Hamer had learned from Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizers in Mississippi that the U.S. Constitution guaranteed her the right to vote. For the rest of her short life -- another 15 years -- she remained passionate about spreading the word to other Blacks in the state she called “the land of the tree and the home of the grave.” When Hamer set out to register to vote in 1963, she was arrested, and the White jailers forced two Black prisoners to brutally beat her with a blackjack. She arrived in Atlantic City in 1964 despite an exacerbated limp, kidney damage and a blood clot in one eye.

As Congressman Powell found out, nothing and no one made Hamer back down. Her delegation wasn’t allowed to vote, but her eloquence briefly made her a national celebrity (“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” she told the 1964 convention, broadcast live nationally on NBC News). Historian Keisha N. Blain tells the story of Powell and Hamer’s meeting in her new book, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America. Blain believes the story illustrates exactly what Hamer was like, along with her commanding presence, her natural leadership and her powerful singing. Most photos of Hamer show her making a speech or singing, especially her signature hymn, This Little Light of Mine. Today a statue of Hamer in her native Ruleville, Mississippi, shows her singing or speaking into a portable PA system.

Sweet Honey in the Rock released a song about Hamer (“She rocked the state of Mississippi”) in 1994. Yet Blain says she never heard of Hamer until she was in college in the early 2000s. She believes Hamer remains less well known partly because she was a grassroots organizer, working away from the public eye and big events like Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington or his 1965 march across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge with John Lewis.

Socioeconomic class may have played a role in Hamer’s obscurity, as well. In the 1960s, some middle class activists told her point-blank that she didn’t belong on the same stage with them; her diction and lack of education embarrassed them. Unlike other well-known women of the civil rights movement, including Rosa Parks and Angela Davis, Hamer was very poor all her life, and left school to support her family after completing sixth grade.

Born in 1917, the youngest of 20 children, she grew up in almost unimaginably desperate circumstances. Another new book, Walk With Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by historian Kate Clifford Larson, details Mississippi sharecroppers’ poverty and lack of medical care, especially during the Depression. On Hamer’s birthday, Larson talked about her new book at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History’s series, History is Lunch.

When Hamer was small, she broke her leg after her older brother dropped her. Her leg never was set properly and was weakened further by a bout of polio. Larson describes Hamer’s mother wrapping her children’s feet in cardboard and rags so they could walk to their unheated school; Hamer recalled that when she and her siblings rounded up the family cows, they stood in fresh cow pats to warm their feet.

After she was married, Hamer suffered what she called a “Mississippi appendectomy”: When she checked into a hospital for the removal of a benign uterine tumor, a white doctor performed a hysterectomy without her knowledge or consent. Beginning in 1964, she spoke publicly about what had happened to her, because she knew as many as 60 percent of Black women in Mississippi had been sterilized. According to Larson, Mississippi finally outlawed these forced sterlizations in 1973.

In the fall of 1964, after her historic appearance at the Democratic National Convention in August, Hamer ran for Congress. As she had expected, she lost -- but she said that she wanted to set an example to encourage other Blacks to run for office. She succeeded: one of her campaign workers was a young Bennie Thompson, now Mississippi’s sole Black Congressman. In 1971, to expand women’s political participation at local, state and national levels, she helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus along with feminist leaders including Gloria Steinem, Rep. Shirley Chisholm, D-NY, one of the first Black candidates for president, Native American activist LaDonna Harris, and scholar Angela Davis.

Hamer was sustained by her strong Christian faith and her supportive husband, Perry, known as Pap, who literally kept the home fires burning while she traveled across the United States and even to Africa. “Pap is not any man,” Hamer said. Larson’s book includes a 1965 photo of Pap stirring a pot of cracklins over an open fire for SNCC volunteers and the Hamers’ two adopted daughters, who were local girls.

When Hamer tried to register to vote in Indianola, Representative Thompson said in 2017, there were no Black elected officials in the district. “I am happy to report to you now the sheriff, the chancery clerk, the circuit clerk and four of the five county supervisors are African Americans. So Mrs. Hamer’s work has not been in vain.”

Larson says Hamer never considered leaving her home place of Mississippi, remaining determined to make the state a better place. “Until I’m free,” Hamer said, “you’re not either.” Hamer’s life reminds us that women, including poor, barely educated women, have been crucial to the ongoing battle for civil rights in this country.

 Ann Marie Cunningham is MCIR's Reporter in Residence. She holds a 2021 grant from the Domestic Violence Impact Reporting Fund at the Center for Health Journalism at the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California. Contact her at amc@mississippicir.org.