‘We never stopped the fight’: The Mississippians carrying on Fannie Lou Hamer’s legacy

This story originally appeared on The 19th.

RULEVILLE, Mississippi — When Charles “Mac” McLaurin walks past the gates of the small garden that is the final resting place for his friend, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, he tends to bypass the historic marker with the milestones of her life, as well as the headstone etched with her famous words: “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Instead, the 84-year-old McLaurin likes to stand in front of the eight-foot-tall bronze statue of Hamer a few feet away. It features Hamer holding a microphone and posing as if addressing an audience. McLaurin helped establish the memorial and statue more than a decade ago.

“As you approach the statute, you notice what happens? Your head goes up,” he said, motioning his arms in that direction. “I said, ‘I want people, when they come to this garden, to be looking up.’ Looking at that statute. Who is that up there? Why is she up there?”

Sixty years ago this week, Hamer gave a speech ahead of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) that helped shift the conversation around race and representative democracy in America.

It was August 22, 1964, and Hamer was addressing the credentials committee of the DNC in Atlantic City, New Jersey, when she delivered brief but powerful remarks on voter suppression and white supremacist violence in Mississippi. Hamer was representing the newly created Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which was trying to replace the all-White state delegation at the convention.

“All of this is on account of we want to register to become first-class citizens,” Hamer said in her steadfast voice. “And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hook because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”

That year’s effort failed, but Hamer later became part of an integrated Mississippi Democratic delegation. She is among the Black women who have begun to receive more credit for their central roles in the Civil Rights Movement.

Hamer’s activism up to that point was rooted in her lived experiences as a former sharecropper who dropped out of school at age 12 to help support her family. As noted in her DNC speech, when she first tried to register to vote, she faced eviction from her home and violence. Her subsequent efforts to help empower other Black people in the South were met with even more violence, including permanent injuries she sustained after being beaten by police.

Hamer’s remarks in 1964 were the culmination of what became known as Freedom Summer, the voter registration campaign and education initiative in Mississippi. The state had the largest population of eligible Black voters at the time, but just over 6 percent were registered to vote. That was by design — White people openly terrorized Black people who tried to vote by threatening physical danger and financial ruin.

Speakers at this year’s Democratic National Convention — where Vice President Kamala Harris is set to make history as the first woman of color to accept a major party’s presidential nomination — noted Hamer’s impact.

Family, friends and organizers in Hamer’s home state of Mississippi reflect today on the work that remains.

A few miles southwest of Ruleville, on a hot and sunny recent August afternoon, a two-story building in the Mississippi city of Greenville was the site of a small celebration of Hamer.

Inside, a group of young people, mostly in their early 20s, surrounded Jaribu Hill, passing around pieces of cake and cups of ice cream. A photo of Hamer was imposed on the cake, which amused Hill. The longtime attorney has run an internship program named after Hamer for 25 years, and she had never thought to add a photo to the end-of-summer celebratory dessert.

The meeting space is home to the Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights, which Hill founded nearly 30 years ago to provide legal services, advocacy and training to low-wage Black workers in the state. It is also a gathering place for the latest graduating class of the Fannie Lou Hamer Emerging Leaders Internship Program. Hill launched the program in 1999 with the goal of bringing young people from around the country to Mississippi to help poor people with human rights issues, including workers’ rights. Such community organizing was a reflection of Hamer’s ethos to help the neediest, added Hill.

“We believe that her style of leadership, her unwavering commitment — the heartbreaking stories that she told about how she was trying to get people to see that they didn’t have to accept the inhumane treatment, they didn’t have to lose their dignity, that they could participate in civil society — all of those reasons are the reasons why we named our program after her,” Hill said of Hamer.

As a young activist in the 1970s in Newark, New Jersey, Hill was inspired by Hamer’s work.

“I just began to channel her in everything that I started to do from then on,” Hill said. “I was forever changed after that.”

The broken windshield of an abandoned car in Ruleville, Mississippi, the hometown of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer. (Harlan Bozeman for The 19th)

Hill, a baby boomer, said she has years of organizing ahead of her. She is reflective about the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer and Hamer’s DNC remarks — particularly about inequity. Mississippi’s poverty rate is the highest in the country; it’s worse for Black people.

“Fast forward to today, those are still the battle cries that we have,” Hill said. “That we want to live as human beings. We want to not have to trade our dignity for work. We want to not have to trade our dignity for a decent place to live, or a decent salary or decent food for our children. We don’t want our children to sacrifice their dignity to get an education. So these things are still so much with us today, that any part of that speech that she made is still so applicable to today.”

Some of Mayor Melanie Townsend’s earliest memories while growing up in Drew, Mississippi, were of car rides to Ruleville, just a few miles south.

She remembers hopping in a brown station wagon driven by Perry Hamer — or “Pap,” the husband of Fannie Lou Hamer. He had agreed to take Townsend and her cousins to the local Head Start program in town. Townsend’s memories of her great aunt are more vague.

“A lot of people didn’t have a vehicle to get around, but they would come and pick us up and we would spend time with them as a family at their home,” she said of the Hamers. “I used to hear her sing gospel music a lot. She loved the Lord, and she would sit around and be singing songs.”

According to Townsend, she is related to Hamer through one of the civil rights activist’s siblings. Hamer, whose last name before she married was Townsend, was the youngest of 20 children. That sprawling family tree, between the married Hamers, means distant cousins are still finding each other today.

Hamer’s legacy was mostly lost on Townsend growing up. It was only as a young adult, studying at Jackson State University, that she began to learn everything about her great aunt through a work-study job in the history department.

“You hear people talk about your aunt but you really couldn’t relate, because you weren’t really old enough to know all the things that she had done,” Townsend said.

After college, Townsend moved back to Drew. She worked for the state corrections department for several decades before retiring in 2020. She then ran for mayor of Drew, and was elected in 2021. She plans to seek another four-year term.

“I love my town, and I never wanted to leave,” Townsend, now 56, said. “I wanted to see a difference. And I always just thought about how [Hamer] loved her community, and the things that she did in her community. I wanted to follow in her footsteps.”

Townsend said she wants to bring economic opportunities to her hometown. She listed several businesses that have popped up during her tenure. She sees a connection between her love of Drew and Hamer’s of Ruleville, and with Hamer’s famous quote on her tombstone.

“It was one of the ways I felt when I was running,” she said. “I wanted to embrace change in Drew because I was sick and tired of this community being in the shape that it was in. … I wanted to be someone like her, to make a difference.”

Shaquita Allen looked out into the audience of Black women. They were in a church meeting space in the northern Mississippi city of Southaven, and Allen was there to guide the group in best practices for phone banking and get-out-the-vote door-knocking. Her first advice was on awareness.

“Safety is first,” she told the women, many of whom were looking down and taking notes. “I know how bad you want people to register. I know how bad you want people to vote. But your safety is first.”

After Allen ran through practice scenarios and the training wrapped, she packed her car and headed several hours south. As mayor of the small town of Metcalfe, Allen needed to get ready for the work week.

Allen, who is 37, remembers learning about Hamer when she was about 8 years old in her predominantly Black school.

“Our teachers made sure that we knew not just of Black activists across the world, they wanted to make sure we knew about people here in the state of Mississippi, and what happened here,” she said.

Hamer’s relentless care for others has shaped how Allen thinks about showing up for people.

“For Fannie to bravely give her speech 60 years ago, as a woman — I can say it’s really meaningful,” she said. “For a woman to do that 60 years ago, and even now.”

Allen would know. Her mother, Shirley Allen, was also the mayor of Metcalfe, located just north of Greenville.

“My mom was an activist. Especially being in the Mississippi Delta, she made sure that my siblings and I always knew what was happening, and why we’re still fighting,” she said.

Shirley Allen, who died in 2017, was the first Black woman mayor in the county and held the seat for 16 years. The younger Allen became mayor after a special election in 2023 — exactly 30 years after her mom was sworn in. She intends to run for a full term in 2025.

Allen said the role has taught her about how small Mississippi communities struggle with adequate funding.

“If other areas in the state are progressing, why is it that the majority of the Black counties are lacking resources?” she said.

Allen is also an organizer with the national group Black Voters Matter, which is what brought her to Southaven. Like Hamer decades earlier, Allen is advocating for better health care access — specifically for the expansion of Medicaid in Mississippi, one of the last states without the federal-state health care program for low-income residents.

“We never stopped the fight,” Allen said about what it means to remember the legacy of Hamer. “The same song that they sang then, we’re singing it now. We’re fighting not just for voting rights, but human rights. And to still be doing that 60 years later, is …”

Her voice trails off.

“I don’t know.”

McLaurin, himself a civil rights activist along with Hamer, later worked in local government for decades before retiring. He occasionally gives guided tours of the Mississippi Delta and its place in the Civil Rights Movement. He tries to make it out to Hamer’s grave several times a year.

McLaurin was with Hamer when she and the others went to the county courthouse to try to register to vote. Later he ran her 1964 congressional campaign. Hamer lost her Democratic primary, but her efforts took her to the U.S. Congress in January of 1965 to advocate for fairer elections in the future.

“She had a kind of determination to do something,” McLaurin said. “She had some courage.”

McLaurin said he was in the room in Atlantic City when Hamer gave her testimony, which President Lyndon B. Johnson tried to interrupt, worried it would impact his support in the South. But her speech made primetime television.

“All of a sudden, here this little sharecropper is getting this attention on TV,” he said. “And the president of the United States of America is involved in this.”

The following year was a pivotal one in the Civil Rights Movement. Organizers marched for voting rights from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, the state capital, and images of them being beaten and arrested on what became known as Bloody Sunday were shown on television and in newspapers. That summer, Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that prohibited racial discrimination in voting.

McLaurin thought their work was done. He remembers saying as much to Hamer while sitting on her porch one day.

“I went to feeling, it was over,” he said. “We sitting there talking and she goes, ‘Mac. It’s not over.’ She realized it was an ongoing struggle.”

Hamer would go on to found the Freedom Farm Cooperative with an aim to help local farmers grow their own crops and vegetables. She is credited with funneling more funding for Head Start centers in her state and opening a low-cost day care for her community.

“All she needed to do was set her mind on something, and she was going to do that,” he said.

Hamer died in 1977. Some of the gains achieved during her lifetime, including the 1965 Voting Rights Act, are being challenged today.

“We’ve got to protect the gains we’ve made,” McLaurin said. “Now it’s young people’s job to protect it and advance it.”

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