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Stokely Carmicheal, Andrew Young, John Lewis, and other well-known leaders of the civil rights movement have admitted that women often had the ideas for which men took credit. In this ground-breaking book, credit finally goes where credit is due--to the bold women who were crucial to the movement's success and who refused to give up the fight. From the Montgomery bus boycott to the lunch counter sit-ins to the Freedom Rides, Lynn Olson's Freedom's Daughters offers a remarkable corrective to the standard history as she tells the long overlooked story of the extraordinary women, both black and white, who were among the most fearless, resourceful, and tenacious leaders of the civil rights movement.
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Fannie Lou Hamer Rough times would
not end with the coming of warm weather. In the summer of 1963, Mrs. Hamer
was invited by Annelle Ponder, the SCLC field secretary in the Delta town
of Greenwood, to attend the organization's citizenship school in South
Carolina. Seven black Mississippians were chosen for the long bus ride
to Charleston, where they were led by well-known civil rights activist
Septima Clark in training sessions on voter registration. A week later,
on June 9, near the end of the all-night ride home from South Carolina,
the Continental Trailwaysbus stopped in Winona, Mississippi. When members
of the group sat down at the lunch counter and asked to be served, several
Winona policemen and highway patrolmen entered the station and forced
them to leave. (As in much of the South, town officials had not accepted
the ruling of the Interstate Commerce Commission outlawing segregated
transportation facilities.) Once outside, Annelle Ponder made a point
of writing down the license number of one of the patrol cars, so infuriating
a police officer that he began arresting everyone in sight. Mrs. Hamer
had returned to the bus because her left leg, disfigured from polio as
a child, was sore from the strenuous week. But when she saw the officers
herding her companions into police cars, she came out and asked Ponder
what the folks left on the bus should do. Should they drive on to Greenwood
or wait at the station? Before her friend could answer, an officer in
one of the police cars noticed Mrs. Hamer and shouted to a colleague,
"Get that one there, bring her on down in the other car!" Mrs.
Hamer was then shoved into the back seat, kicked in the thigh, and cursed
repeatedly on the drive to the jail. "They carried us on to the county
jail. It wasn't the city jail, [but] the county jail, so we could be far
enough out. [They] didn't care how loud we hollered, wasn't nobody gon'
hear us.... When we got to the jail they started beatin' the man--his
name was James West--and they put us in cells, two to a cell, and I could
hear all this hollerin' and goin' on. Then they took Miss Ponder. I could
hear these awful sounds and licks and screams, hear her body hit the concrete,
and this man was yellin', `Cain't you say yes sir, you nigger bitch?'" June Johnson, a fifteen-year-old black teenager who had attended the voter registration workshop, was the next person led by Mrs. Hamer's cell in this grim parade of tortured bodies. "The blood was runnin' down in her face, and they put her in another cell." In the booking room, whence Johnson was coming, the sheriff had pulled the young girl aside for his own personal whipping. He asked her whether she was a member of the NAACP. She told him yes. Then he hit her on the cheek and chin, and when she raised her arms to protect herself, he hit her on the stomach. He continued to ask her questions about the NAACP--"who runs that thing?" "do you know Martin Luther King?" Soon the four men in the room--the sheriff, the chief of police, the highway patrolman, and another white man--threw Johnson onto the floor, beat her, and stomped on her body in concert. The men ripped Johnson's dress and tore her slip off; blood soaked her tattered clothes. The men came next for Mrs. Hamer. "Get up from there, fatso," one of the policemen barked. When the officers confirmed that this was Fannie Lou Hamer from Ruleville--the same woman stirring up trouble in the Delta--they began to revile her with insulting words. "I have never heard that many names called a human in my life," she said later. "You, bitch, we gon' make you wish you was dead," an officer said, as he brought two black inmates into the bullpen to carry out his ghastly design for torture. Mrs. Hamer asked them, "You mean you would do this to your own race?" But an officer quickly warned the men, "If you don't beat her, you know what we'll do to you." Mrs. Hamer recalled, "So they had me lay down on my face, and they beat with a thick leather thing that was wide. And it had sumpin' in it heavy. I don't know what that was, rocks or lead. But everytime they hit me, I got just as hard, and I put my hands behind my back, and they beat me in my hands 'til my hands ... was as navy blue as anything you ever seen." She tried to put her hands over the leg that was damaged from polio, but this only made her hands vulnerable to the beating. When the first inmate grew exhausted, the blackjack was passed to the second inmate. "That's when I started screaming and working my feet `cause I couldn't help it." One of the white officers became so enraged when he heard Mrs. Hamer's cries that "he just run there and started hittin' me on the back of my head." The torture became more brutal. "I remember I tried to smooth my dress which was working up from all the beating. One of the white officers pushed my dress up. I was screaming and going on--and the young officer with the crew cut began to beat me about [the] head and told me to stop my screaming. I then began to bury my head in the mattress and hugged it to kill out the sound of my screams." By the end, the flesh of her beaten body was hard, one of her kidneys was permanently damaged, and a blood clot that formed over her left eye threatened her vision. "They finally told me to get up, and I just couldn't hardly get up, and they kept on tellin' me to get up. I finally could get up, but when I got back to my cell bed, I couldn't set down. I would scream. It hurted me to set down." Back in her dark cell, Mrs. Hamer was left alone to bear the physical and spiritual effects of torture. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ But then the next day something happened that slowly
transformed the killing despair of the jail and dispersed the power of
death. "When you're in a brick cell, locked up, and haven't done
anything to anybody but still you're locked up there, well sometimes words
just begin to come to you and you begin to sing," she said. Song
broke free. Mrs. Hamer sang:
Paul and Silas was bound in jail, let my people
go. "Singing brings out the soul," she said. And at Winona, singing brought out the soul of the black struggle for freedom, for Mrs. Hamer did not sing alone. Sitting in their cells down the hall, June Johnson, Annelle Ponder, Euvester Simpson, and Lawrence Guyot joined her in song. Church broke out, empowering them to "stay on `the Gospel train' until it reaches the Kingdom." Mrs. Hamer "really suffered in that jail from that beating," June Johnson said. The physical and psychological effects of Winona stayed with her for a long time--she almost never talked about her life without talking about Winona. Even so, her songs of freedom gave voice to her suffering and the suffering she shared with her friends. Their singing did not remove their suffering or the particularities of their humiliation; rather, it embraced the suffering, named it, and emplotted it in a cosmic story of hope and deliverance. At first tentatively, and then with growing confidence, their song floated freely throughout the jail, exploding the death grip of the cell. "Jail doors open and they walked out, let my people go." Despair turned into a steady resoluteness to keep on going. A miracle happened. And at least for Mrs. Hamer, a peaceable composure, incomprehensible apart from a deep river of faith, transformed not only her diminished self-perception but the perception of her torturers. She said astonishingly, "It wouldn't solve any problem for me to hate whites just because they hate me. Oh, there's so much hate, only God has kept the Negro sane." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In the short term, nothing changed as a result of her beating and incarceration. The cases brought by the Justice Department against the City of Winona would come to a dismal end. June Johnson explained, "They picked an all-white jury to try the policemen, and there were lots of white students from Ole Miss in the courtroom with Confederate flags." Both civil and criminal charges filed by the Justice Department were decided in favor of local law officials. The defendants--the City of Winona in the civil suit, and officers Patridge, Herrod, Surrell, Basinger and Perkins in the criminal suit--were found not guilty. But even more disheartening news awaited Mrs. Hamer and her friends when they were released on the afternoon of June 12. They learned that civil rights leader Medgar Evers had been gunned down the night before in front of his own home--just seconds after his wife Myrlie and their three children had walked out into their carport to welcome home the weary traveler. The news of the murder was heavily felt. Evers stood as the animating center of the burgeoning Jackson movement, leading sit-ins and church visits, and organizing a wide range of strategic attacks on the city's segregated institutions. More than ever it seemed that the call to freedom was a call that might very well lead to death. The torture left Mrs. Hamer in considerable pain. "I wouldn't let my husband see me for a month, I was in such bad shape." In fact, after her release from jail, she stayed away from her family for six or seven weeks, traveling back and forth to Atlanta, Washington, and New York. Nonetheless, Mrs. Hamer emerged, as the ancient Christian theologian Athanasius wrote of Antony after his years in desert isolation, "with utter equilibrium, like one guided by reason and steadfast in that which accords with nature." Or as she explained with an earthier candor, "If them crackers in Winona thought they'd discouraged me from fighting, I guess they found out different. I'm going to stay in Mississippi and if they shoot me down, I'll be buried here." The experience brought her face to face with her worst fears about white racist violence, civil rights activism, and herself, but empowered by freedom songs and "the truth" she emerged full of courage and righteous anger. She said, "I'm never sure any more when I leave home whether I'll get back or not. Sometimes it seem like to tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I'll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom. I'm not backing off." |
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