A Voice That Could Stir an Army

Summary: A rhetorical biography of Fannie Lou Hamer.

Fannie Lou Hamer, I think, has had a minor renaissance in the public's imagination over the past few years. Kate Clifford Larson (who also has a biography of Harriet Tubman), Keisha Blain, and Maegan Parker Brooks all have new biographies of her in the last three years. There is also a children's picture book only a couple of years older. And PBS documentary of Hamer in 2022. Maybe it is more about who I am listening to and the era I tend to read about. (Jemar Tisby, who lives in the Mississippi Delta area and is a historian of the 20th century Civil Rights movement, talks about Hamer as one of his heroes).

I read Keisha Blain's short biography of Fannie Lou Hamer just over a year ago. Hamer was also a significant player in the biography of Stokley Carmichael. And many of the broader histories of the civil rights movement include discussions of Hamer's work and influence. But A Voice That Could Stir an Army is the most detailed look at her life, especially the rhetoric I have read so far. Blain's biography was intended to be a short, accessible introduction to Hamer at only 135 pages of the main text. Brooks' biography is just over 100 pages longer, and while much of the difference is a close analysis of Hamer's speeches, many details here help to round out Hamer's legacy.

I have not read a biography like A Voice That Could Stir an Army. It has traditional biographical details, but the main focus of the biography is understanding Hamer's rhetoric and how that rhetoric fits within the broader Black Freedom Movement. Hamer's participation in the civil rights movement came later than Rosa Parks or Ella Baker, although Hamer was only 3 and 14 years younger than they were.

Fannie Lou Hamer was tricked into signing an employment contract as a sharecropper at the age of six. She attended school between picking seasons; Black schools had a short school year to encourage children to work in cotton fields. At 12, she dropped out of school to help support her parents (although there was little access to high school for Black students then.) In 1944, she became the time and record keeper and soon after married her husband, Perry (Pap) Hamer. Fannie Lou was sterilized without her permission while being treated for a tumor, but they eventually adopted four children and partially raised a child from Pap's first marriage.

Hamer first heard a speech by Bob Moses of SNCC in 1962 at her local church. Moses was recruiting people to register to vote. This was Hamer's first understanding that voting was possible for her as a Black woman in Mississippi. She soon attempted to register to vote and was immediately fired from her job as a sharecropper. She attempted to register again and was forced to temporarily leave the county because of threats of violence against her and her family. It was her third attempt when she was allowed to register.

One of the details that I think many modern readers of that history will be surprised to learn is that the names of those attempting to register and who actually registered to vote were printed in local newspapers. This was very clearly intended as an intimidation tactic. Those that registered would lose their jobs and their future potential for jobs. Hamer's employer was called when she left the county courthouse on that first attempt. Her husband, who knew about the attempt, was notified of her firing and their eviction from their house before she could return from the county courthouse. Fannie Lou Hamer never again had a regular job in Sunflower County. She was hired by SNCC as a field organizer in part because there was no other work available to her.

Part of what is helpful about this biography is that Brooks traces some of the rhetorical shifts of the later civil rights era. Economics was always a part of the reality of racism. And the 1963 March on Washington was for “Jobs and Freedom.” But as legal segregation was dismantled, economic issues became more salient. It was not just that you could be individually economically retaliated against for attempting to vote but also that systems existed to maintain economic control. For example, Fannie Lou Hamer was initially able to get a contract for Head Start, and that program was managed and controlled by the black community. But while the Head Start continued, local and state officials worked to make the Head Start organization a contractor that worked under a white-controlled agency instead of being an independent nonprofit. It exactly points like this that eventually gave rise to Critical Race Theory, which looked explicitly at systems, not just individual actions. (And why Christians should understand Critical Race Theory well.)

Fannie Lou Hamer is somewhat of a tragic figure, not unlike Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks spent years in desperate poverty and in fear of violent retaliation after the bus boycott. Fannie Lou Hamer died at 59 of cancer, 15 years after starting to work on voting rights. She and her husband struggled to make ends meet. She did not seek care for her cancer earlier enough because of their poverty. One of her daughters died; she was denied treatment for internal bleeding because she was Fannie Lou Hamer's daughter. Fannie and Pap then raised their children as their adopted children because their father was disabled from injuries in the Vietnam War. Fannie Lou Hamer's last remaining (grand) child died of cancer just a few weeks ago at 56 years old. The other children died at 47, 53, and 64. (You can see family pictures here.)

Brooks paints a picture of Fannie Lou Hamer that is complex and nuanced. Hamer never wanted to be called a feminist. But as Brooks shows, her work paid attention to issues of gender and race in ways that could be considered an early version of intersectionality. She sought to help people with jobs by creating the Freedom Farm and Head Start program, but some of the management decisions (and the systems of the community as a whole) did not lead to long-term viability. Hamer pointed out issues of class both inside and outside of the Black community and was able to change national elections systems, but was not able to win any of the elections where she ran. He fought for health care for others but did not seek health care for herself early enough. As illustrated in At The Dark End of the Street, Hamer's life was an example of how sexism and sexual violence were part of the reality of Jim Crow-styled segregation and the civil rights movement.

Maegan Parker Brooks raises good questions about how Fannie Lou Hamer is often flattened in our memory of her. She is made into both a hero and an everyman persona. She is remembered for her speeches at the Democratic National Convention but less remembered for her lawsuits trying to force recognition of Black elected officials. She is remembered as a gifted speaker but is often portrayed as only speaking extemporaneously instead of working to develop her speaking skills and hone her speeches over time.

I look forward to reading another biography or two of Hamer in the future because the different retellings of her story do matter. But I strongly recommend this biography because it so clearly presents her as a figure with agency.