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Keeping It Trim &
Burning
—for
Fannie Lou Hamer
By Rudolph Lewis
Financiers and other plantation owners dine in
drawing
rooms of plush island hotels and desert resorts,
smoking
Cuban cigars and sipping French brandy.
Their
smiles tighten like sixteen bullets. Holy war
& secret
societies rage in Ruleville. I laugh to keep
down
tears. Decency speaks, as chord changes: “I tried
to
register myself. I heard licks—screams. A beating
that
lasted an eternity that questions America, lives
threatened daily when the First Occupiers tried to become
first-class citizens.” Seekers, poets, & madmen rave when
arrested
for bus driving with wrong colors—black beige & brown,
awful
screams hard as train whistles and gunshots in Negro houses
from
dark woods, a county jail & Mama Fannie Lou, a death wish
for
freedom. Ordered face down on a bunk bed highway patrolmen
pounded
her with billy clubs to drive out resistance hope & dreams
until
they got exhausted. All Night Blues is dressed up in red.
Some
lives end in Winoma jail cells or in front yards after a job
well
done, like Medgar Evers. There’s no rescue from a hanging
noose
tight around black necks in Mississippi America. Purple
shadows
slash tombstones, hunger crimes blood. Fannie Lou prays—
at the end of a white man’s
boot. Her sky blue gloves shoot into dirt.
23
February 2006/ revised 1 December 2011 |
Responses
Fannie Lou would love that one—in all her
righteous indignation—at what's going on. --
Miriam
posted 23 February 2006
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Fannie Lou Doc 1 /
Fannie Lou Hamer Doc 2 /
Fannie Lou Hamer Doc 3 /
Fannie Lou Hamer Doc 4 /
Fannie Lou Hamer Doc 5
Fannie Lou
Hamer's speech at the 1964 DNC
Fannie Lou Hamer
(born Fannie Lou Townsend on October 6, 1917 – March 14, 1977)
was an American voting rights activist and
civil rights leader. She was instrumental in organizing
Mississippi
Freedom Summer for the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and later
became the Vice-Chair of the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, attending the
1964 Democratic National Convention in
Atlantic City, New Jersey, in that capacity. Her
plain-spoken manner and fervent belief in the
Biblical righteousness of her cause gained her a reputation
as an electrifying speaker and constant activist of civil
rights. . . .
On August 23, 1962, Rev.
James Bevel, an organizer for the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and an associate of Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a sermon in Ruleville,
Mississippi and followed it with an appeal to those assembled to
register to vote. . . . Hamer was the first volunteer. She
later said, "I guess if I'd had any sense, I'd have been a
little scared—but what was the point of being scared? The only
thing they could do was kill me, and it seemed they'd been
trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could
remember."
On August 31, she traveled
on a rented bus with other attendees of Bevel's sermon to
Indianola, Mississippi to register. In what would become a
signature trait of Hamer's activist career, she began singing
Christian hymns, such as "Go
Tell It on the Mountain" and "This
Little Light of Mine," to the group in order to bolster
their resolve. . . . Bob Moses . .. dispatched Charles McLaurin
. . . to find "the lady who sings the hymns". McLaurin found and
recruited Hamer. . . . On June 9, 1963, Hamer was on her way
back from
Charleston, South Carolina with other activists from a
literacy workshop. Stopping in
Winona, Mississippi, the group was arrested on a false
charge and jailed. Once in jail, Hamer and her colleagues were
beaten savagely by the police, almost to the point of death.
Released on June 12, she
needed more than a month to recover. . . Hamer was invited,
along with the rest of the MFDP [Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party] officers, to address the Convention's Credentials
Committee. She recounted the problems she had encountered in
registration, and the ordeal of the jail in Winona, and, near
tears, concluded: "All of this is on account we want to register
to become first-class citizens, 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 the hooks because our lives be
threatened daily because we want to live as decent human
beings—in America?"
Senator
Hubert Humphrey (who was campaigning for the
Vice-Presidential nomination), [along with]
Walter Mondale, and
Walter Reuther, as well as
J. Edgar Hoover . . . suggested a compromise which would
give the MFDP two non-voting seats in exchange for other
concessions, and secured the endorsement of
Martin Luther King, Jr. and the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference for the plan. But
when Humphrey outlined the compromise, saying that his position
on the ticket was at stake, Hamer, invoking her Christian
beliefs, sharply rebuked him:
"Do you mean to tell me
that your position is more important than four hundred thousand
black people's lives? Senator Humphrey, I know lots of people in
Mississippi who have lost their jobs trying to register to vote.
I had to leave the plantation where I worked in
Sunflower County, Mississippi. Now if you lose this job of
Vice-President because you do what is right, because you help
the MFDP, everything will be all right.
God will take care of you. But if you take [the nomination]
this way, why, you will never be able to do any good for civil
rights, for poor people, for peace, or any of those things you
talk about. Senator Humphrey, I'm going to pray to Jesus for
you."
Future negotiations were
conducted without Hamer, and the compromise was modified such
that the Convention would select the two delegates to be seated,
for fear the MFDP would appoint Hamer. In the end, the MFDP
rejected the compromise, but had changed the debate to the point
that the Democratic Party adopted a clause which demanded
equality of representation from their states' delegations in
1968.—Wikipedia
The Autobiography of
Medgar Evers
The Medgar Evers Story
/
Medgar Evers /
Mississippi Martyr
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Black
Power, A Critique of the System
/
Black
Power / What We Want
Amite
County Beginning
Kish Mir Tuchas
A
Tribute to Kwame Toure/Stokely Carmichael
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News Brief:
Killing the Euro—By Paul Krugman—1 December
2011—I hope, for our sake as well as theirs, that
the Europeans will change course before it’s too
late. But, to be honest, I don’t believe they will.
In fact, what’s much more likely is that we will
follow them down the path to ruin. For in America,
as in Europe, the economy is being dragged down by
troubled debtors—in our case, mainly homeowners. And
here, too, we desperately need expansionary fiscal
and monetary policies to support the economy as
these debtors struggle back to financial health.
Yet, as in Europe, public discourse is dominated by
deficit scolds and inflation obsessives.— NYTimes
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Black World
Browse all issues
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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