Unlearning and Learning, Fannie Lou Hamer

As I have unfortunately discovered over the past few months, there are many Black Americans that were “left out” of my education. One of them is Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the most powerful voices of the civil and voting rights movements. Hamer was born in 1917 in Montgomery County, Mississippi to her parents, two sharecroppers, and was the granddaughter of slaves. Hamer’s family was impoverished and at the age of six, she began to pick cotton. At age of 12, Hamer dropped out of school in order to work.

In 1961, while Hamer was undergoing surgery to remove a uterine tumor, a hysterectomy was performed by a white doctor without Hamer’s consent. At the time, the forced sterilization of Black women as a means to decrease the Black population was extremely widespread. Hamer’s hysterectomy was deemed to be a “Mississippi appendectomy” and she was no longer able to bear children.

Soon after, Hamer’s activism in the Civil Rights Movement began. She attended a meeting led by activists James Forman and James Bevel. Once Hamer learned of the efforts to deny Black people the right to vote, she became an organizer and attempted to register 17 volunteers to vote at the Mississippi Courthouse. A discriminatory literacy test was given to the volunteers and they were all denied the right to vote. On their way home, the group was stopped by police and fined $100 because their bus was “too yellow.” Hamer and her husband were fired from their jobs at a plantation and they moved to a new county with little to no money, as their property was confiscated by their former boss.

Hamer successfully registered to vote in June 1963, but was soon arrested along with several other Black women for sitting in a “whites-only” bus station restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina. Several of the women arrested, including Hamer, were severely beaten at the jailhouse. Hamer suffered lifelong injuries as a result of the beatings, including a blood clot in her eye and kidney and leg damage.

Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) which confronted the Democratic Party’s efforts to prevent and obstruct Black participation. MFDP members, including Hamer, attended the Democratic National Convention and Hamer spoke before the Credentials Committee. By 1968, state delegations became integrated and Hamer was a member of Mississippi’s first integrated delegation. To learn more about Hamer’s life and further work to create more economic opportunities for Black Americans, click here.

When I read about Fannie Lou Hamer and her perseverance, I thought of Impact Network students and their dedication to education despite numerous struggles. I thought about students who must decide between working to support their families and receiving an education. I thought about students who travel for hours each day to attend an Impact Network school and I remember those that cannot. I thought about the privileges that I have been given as a white American female, my easily accessible education, and the systems of support put in place for white privilege to marginalize others. I think about how unfair it is that a person’s success is most often determined by race, socioeconomic status, environment, and geography.

But I have hope because there are organizations like Impact Network that fight for the rights of students and provide quality education to an underserved group of people, influencing many individuals beyond just its students. I have hope because Impact teachers are shaping the minds of our youth and providing them with the tools to flourish in society. I have hope because despite the extreme educational setbacks posed by COVID-19, Impact Network teachers, staff, and leaders alike persevered and created solutions for our incredible scholars.

As I have come to realize, there are many people and parts of history that were not included in my formal education and I have made and will continue to make efforts to educate myself. What ideologies and biases do you have to unlearn? What history do you have to educate yourself about?

Let us get to it with diligence, dignity, and respect.

-Julia Darcy