"My Mind Stayed on Freedom: The Revolutionary Voice of Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer,” a special production in words and music, is one of the creative highlights scheduled for the fourth annual Mario A.J. Bennekin Black History Month Symposium at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College.
The play, which debuts Wednesday, Feb. 21 at the college, uses drama, music and dance to celebrate American voting and women’s rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer through her own spoken words and songs. Hamer was a sharecropper forced by economic circumstances to leave school at age 12. She emerged as a formidable Freedom Fighter in the movement for African American liberation.
Performers include classical soprano Maria Clark senior lecturer, vocal studies at Spelman College and a voice instructor at Emory University; Dr. Marcia Cross, actress and educator; Eileen Menefee, actress; Dr. Monica Lee Weatherly, Georgia Author of the Year, poet and Perimeter College English professor; and Njema Amirah Ali Williams, Ballethnic Dance Company ballerina.
“Hamer is an exemplary (s)hero that has arisen from the American working class.” said Dr. Shawn Williams, the production’s director and Georgia State Perimeter College professor of English and Africana Studies. “The folk songs passed down from her mother and the Freedom songs she sang were a source of empowerment for her fellow workers” he said.
Williams added that “My Mind Stayed on Freedom” also reflects the national Black History Month theme of African Americans and the Arts.
“My Mind Stayed on Freedom” debuts Wednesday, Feb. 21 from 3-5 p.m. at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College Decatur Campus. The performance is part of the 2024 Bennekin Black History Symposium, with the theme, “The Challenges and Triumphs of the Black Working Class in America.” Georgia State’s Decatur Campus is at 3251 Panthersville Road. The performance is free and will be in building SB-1190.
— Kenya King, Perimeter College Public Relations & Marketing Communications
Who Was Fannie Lou Hamer?
Fannie Lou Hamer. Source: Library of Congress
Fannie Lou Hamer was born in 1917 as the 20th and last child of sharecroppers Lou Ella and James Townsend, in Montgomery County, Mississippi. Growing up in poverty, she left school to go to work at age 12, marrying in 1944 and serving as timekeeper at the plantation because she was the only worker who could read or write.
In 1961, she underwent a hysterectomy without her consent - a forced sterilization dubbed a "Mississippi appendectomy," but a procedure that horrifically occurred all too often in states across the country, with origins in the eugenics movement of the early part of the 20th century. She and her husband would later adopt two children.
That summer, she attended a meeting led by activists of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and would in August 1962 lead volunteers to register to vote in Indianola. After having to undergo a literacy test, she and her group were denied the right to vote, and the group was harassed on the way home. Her employer that evening fired her for trying to vote, but her husband was required to stay until the harvest - the employer, B.D. Marlowe, confiscated much of their property.
In June 1963, she was part of a group of Black women who completed a voter registration program in Charleston, S.C., but was later arrested for sitting in a "whites-only" bus station restaurant back in Mississippi. Beaten at the jailhouse, she suffered lifelong injuries to her eye, kidney and leg.
Recalling the need to take action, she told an audience in 1964, "you can pray until you faint, but if you don’t get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap.”
Fannie Lou Hamer represents the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. (Credit: Methodist Church Global Ministries/Kenneth Thompson)
Hamer gained national recognition at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, when she led the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party - which challenged the local Democratic Party's efforts to keep Black citizens from participating. She and the MFDP argued to be recognized as the official delegation from the state; to distract media attention, the nominee, President Lyndon B. Johnson, held a televised press conference at the time she spoke before the Credentials Committee. It did not work in distracting the media from her testimony; it happened to give it a larger audience when her compelling words made it to the evening news broadcasts - speaking from memory about her eviction from the Marlowe plantation and the 1963 assault against her in jail.
Hamer would go on at the 1968 convention to be a member of the state's first integrated delegation to the DNC.
She was part of the effort to organize Freedom Summer in 1964, the major effort that gathered college students to help with African American voter registration in the South. She also attempted to run for the Mississippi House of Representatives, but was barred from being on the ballot. In 1965, she, Victoria Gray and Annie Devine became the first Black women to stand in the U.S. Congress when they protested the Mississippi House election of 1964.
After the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, she took the lead in lawsuits that led to the first elections in which large numbers of Black residents of Sunflower County, Miss., were registered and eligible to vote in 1967. She also organized plaintiffs for a school desegregation lawsuit, and was involved in the introduction of federal Head Start programs for low-income children.
Traveling nationally on behalf of civil rights, she helped to found the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971. In the late 1960s and into the 70s, she launched programs to help provide economic opportunity and housing - with some of the housing units still in existence in Ruleville, Miss., in the 21st century.
Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1976, she passed away the following year from complications of cancer and heart disease at age 59. Her funeral included civil rights luminaries and other national leaders; Atlanta's Andrew Young - namesake of Georgia State's school of policy studies and the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations at the time - delivered the eulogy, noting that the seeds of social change in the United States were "were sown here by the sweat and blood of you and Fannie Lou Hamer."
— Jeremy Craig, Communications Manager, Office of the Provost
Sources:
Blaine, K.N. (2019, Oct. 4). "‘God Is Not Going to Put It in Your Lap.’ What Made Fannie Lou Hamer’s Message on Civil Rights So Radical—And So Enduring." Time. Retrieved February 12, 2024 from https://time.com/5692775/fannie-lou-hamer/.
Fannie Lou Hamer, "We're On Our Way." (Sept. 1964). Speech delivered at the Negro Baptist School in Indianola, Miss. From Voices of Democracy - The U.S. Oratory Project, University of Maryland. retrieved February 12, 2024 from https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/hamer-were-on-our-way-speech-text/.
Early, R. (Winter 2021). "The Sweat and Blood of Fannie Lou Hamer." Humanities, Winter 2021, Vol. 42(1). National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved February 12, 2024 from https://www.neh.gov/article/sweat-and-blood-fannie-lou-hamer.
Michals, D. (2017). "Fannie Lou Hamer." National Women's History Museum. Retrieved February 12, 2024 from www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/fannie-lou-hamer.
The SNCC Legacy Project (n.d.) "Fannie Lou Hamer." Duke University Libraries. Retrieved February 12, 2024 from https://snccdigital.org/people/fannie-lou-hamer/.
WGBH. (n.d.) Fannie Lou Hamer. In Freedom Summer - American Experience. Retrieved February 12, 2024 from https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/freedomsummer-hamer/.