Fannie Lou Hamer, Christian Abolitionism, and the Radical Black Feminist Tradition
Essay by Jaimie D. Crumley
Introduction
Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) was a radical Black Christian feminist abolitionist who raged against racism, sexism, and classism. Although she received only about six years (on and off) of formal education, she described herself in a 1972 interview as being capable of “competing with the kids who are now in twelfth grade” (from “Beatings in Winona Jail,” SNCC Digital Gateway (blog), accessed February 1, 2022, https://snccdigital.org/events/beatings-winona-jail/). Her depth of thought and a nearly photographic memory for names and dates indicate that she would have likely exceeded the scholarly abilities of the average high school graduate. She never assumed that her lack of formal education made her any less worthy than any other activist of her time.
Hamer’s death at age sixty was technically due to cancer. However, a close reading of the events of her life reveals that she lived with the chronic problems of racism, poverty, and sexual terror that took their mental, emotional, and physical toll on her. Hamer’s political ideologies were grounded in her unwavering Christian faith and her personal experience as a Black Southern woman who was poor her whole life. As a Mississippi sharecropper turned voting rights activist, her activism demonstrates the connection between Black women’s Christianity and their political demands. Hamer’s practical theories about the American nation-state illustrate the connection between Christian approaches to abolitionism and the Black feminist tradition.
In this essay, I define abolition as ideologies that lead to a future where we all are free, and the Black feminist tradition as ideologies that prioritize Black wholeness despite the rupture chattel slavery and colonialism have caused. In the United States, Christian abolitionist thought was birthed in the 1830s in Boston, Massachusetts, under the ideological leadership of David Walker, Maria W. Stewart, Angelina Grimké, and others. Meanwhile, the Black feminist tradition began the first time a woman of African descent demanded that she be seen as a human rather than an object. These theories yearn to be considered concurrently.
While Christian abolitionist thought and Black feminist thought are not the same ideologies, they share common goals. When practitioners of both ideologies work collaboratively, their causes are strengthened. This brief essay offers some thoughts about the connection between these ideologies as they were expressed through the physical (embodied) courage of Fannie Lou Hamer in the twentieth-century American South. Hamer realized that her body was always at risk of state-sanctioned physical violations as a Black woman.
The focus of this essay is Hamer’s choice to speak publicly about the crimes the state perpetrated against her body during her fifteen-year public career. The state objectified her body by turning it into no more than a thing to be used to increase capitalist production in the mid-twentieth century American South. Hamer responded by publicly naming what the state wanted to keep quiet. Her body and her witness about it became her sacred text. Join me as I consider how her public witness creates a bridge that allows us to consider Christian approaches to abolition and the radical Black feminist tradition together.
Who was Fannie Lou Hamer?
Fannie Lou Hamer exemplified the often-overlooked culture of radicalism among Black religious women in the twentieth-century American South. You have probably heard her name before. There are many biographical monographs and essays dedicated to the details of her life and her radical philosophies. Her name and story are often included within the two decades of scholarship that have reimagined the male-centered historiography of the Civil Rights Movement that serve to demonstrate that Black women also were essential organizers and creators of a more just present (Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard, eds., Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (New York, NY: New York Univ. Press, 2009), 8-9).
Fannie Lou Hamer was her parents’ twentieth child. She was born fifty-four years after Emancipation on a plantation. She began her labor on a Mississippi plantation when she was only six years old (from the blog “Beatings in Winona Jail,” SNCC Digital Gateway https://snccdigital.org/events/beatings-winona-jail/). Hamer became a voting rights activist when she was already in her forties. When she first registered to vote, she served as a timekeeper on a plantation. When she returned home, her employer gave her the option to withdraw her voter registration or to leave her children and husband to work on the plantation while she sought work elsewhere. Although sharecropping was the only way the family could afford to live, and although she had served the plantation owner’s family for eighteen years, Hamer chose the vote (from the blog “Beatings in Winona Jail,” SNCC Digital Gateway https://snccdigital.org/events/beatings-winona-jail/). Despite the Emancipation Proclamation, which was signed one hundred years before Hamer registered to vote, Black Americans found that while chattel slavery was illegal, unjust systems of racial capitalism were not.
Although Hamer was invested in changing labor relations and gaining the vote, her activism was not exclusively related to voting and labor. Her family history taught her that Black women were at constant risk of sexual violence. As a young girl, she learned that her maternal grandmother, Liza Bramlett, had birthed twenty-three children, only three of whom had a Black father (p. 159 in Chana Kai Lee, “Anger, Memory, and Personal Power: Fannie Lou Hamer and Civil Rights Leadership,” in Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement, ed. Bettye Collier-Thomas and V.P. Franklin from the New York University Press, 2001). Hamer also knew of the overlooked crisis of sexual violence against Black men. Sexual violence against Black persons was a phenomenon that made unjust labor relations possible and continued to enforce a social-sexual hierarchy that diminished all Black persons. The crisis that Black people of all genders were and are sexually coerced across the color line is a problem that theorist Christina Sharpe (2010) has called monstrous intimacies. Sexual coercive behavior geared toward Black masculine persons is a problem that is largely overlooked in academic scholarship and in society (Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: The Making of Post-Slavery Subjects). However, it is a problem that Fannie Lou Hamer refused to ignore.
When we understand sexual and racial violence as connected crises, we can better understand the interpersonal dynamics that undergirded Hamer’s rage. The sexual violations against Hamer and other Black women extended beyond the domestic space to the medical and carceral spheres. In 1961, Hamer went to the hospital to have a cyst removed from her stomach. When she woke up from the surgery, she found that the doctors performed a hysterectomy without her consent. In 1963 in a Winona, Mississippi jail, she endured brutality that can only be described as sexualized racial terror (from Chana Kai Lee, “Anger, Memory, and Personal Power: Fannie Lou Hamer and Civil Rights Leadership,” in Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement, ed. Bettye Collier-Thomas and V.P. Franklin from New York University Press, 2001).
Hamer’s efforts during her activist career must be understood as an ongoing struggle against Jim Crow as it was made manifest through unjust labor practices, refusal of citizenship rights, and a regime of sexual and racial terror. Her radicalism emerges in her failure to allow fear or Christian piety to lull her into silence about the brutal details of sexual terror and how those terrors were directly related to poverty and racism. She was the kind of Christian who demanded new heaven and a new earth in the here and now. She was not waiting for a future moment when God would make all things new. Instead, she believed her work was to join God’s work by being a witness and insisting that the world be just and safe for all people now.
What Was Fannie Lou Hamer’s Theology of the Flesh?
Fannie Lou Hamer was a highly respected Southern Christian woman who refused a private crucifixion by the state. She insisted that everyone know the brutality she and many other Black Southern women endured. Hamer decided that she would not permit the state to treat her as a criminal for exercising her right to participate in the privileges of American citizenship by registering herself and other Black Southerners to vote. Although she was focused on voting rights, she understood that most Black Mississippi residents did not have many of their essential needs due to extreme poverty. She believed that it “made little sense to recruit the disenfranchised to go into a courthouse and register to vote when they were worried about eating or having shoes to wear.” She demanded that Black Mississippians be treated as full citizens of Mississippi and that their every basic need for food, shelter, and clothing also be met.
Hamer’s focus on simultaneously dismantling poverty, sexual violence, and Jim Crow racism points to the need for contemporary activists to do likewise. The rupture cannot be repaired by those who do not have their basic needs. While Hamer defined her approach as pragmatic, it is true to the intersectional feminist framework that Black feminists have promoted for generations. The members of the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black feminists who began meeting in 1974, described their work as an effort to dismantle the “major systems of oppression that are interlocking” (p. 154 in Chana Kai Lee, “Anger, Memory, and Personal Power: Fannie Lou Hamer and Civil Rights Leadership,” in Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement, ed. Bettye Collier-Thomas and V.P. Franklin from New York University Press, 2001). Among these systems of oppression were racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression (p. 15 in Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed., How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective from Haymarket Books, 2017).
The Combahee group’s leaders, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier, were upwardly mobile, college-educated women. Their daily struggles did not include the abject poverty and daily risk of physical violence that Fannie Lou Hamer’s did. Hamer likely would not have described herself or her activism as feminist. However, the Combahee River Collective members understood that the distance between themselves and Southern sharecropper women was not far at all. The group’s Black feminist theory flowed from their lived experiences and from the experiences of Hamer and other Black women who used their minds and bodies to reject racism, sexism, and poverty. They believed that Black feminism was only successful if it dismantled white supremacy in all the ways it was made manifest.
Twentieth-century Black women, including Hamer, understood the risks she took when she publicly protested Southern racism. Hamer learned from her first attempt to register to vote that becoming involved in creating more just conditions for her fellow Black Mississippians would make her subject to even more surveillance than that to which Black Southerners were already subject. She also learned that her persistence made her subject death. Ordinary white Mississippians would rather kill than allow poor Black Southerners to fully participate in Southern politics (p. 147 in Chana Kai Lee, “Anger, Memory, and Personal Power: Fannie Lou Hamer and Civil Rights Leadership,” in Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement, ed. Bettye Collier-Thomas and V.P. Franklin from New York University Press, 2001).
Although many other Black Christian women quietly suffered under the specter of mid-twentieth century Southern violence because of their flawed belief that they must suffer as Jesus Christ did, Hamer took a different route. She offered public testimony about the high crimes committed against her flesh [See Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17 (Summer 1987): 67]. She believed that God wanted her to overcome “sin in life, not in death” [Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1993), 145-148]. She understood that the witness of Jesus compelled her to live well. Her public testimonies about Jim Crow racism, which I will discuss in greater detail in the section that follows, indicate that Hamer decided she would not glorify suffering or the sins the nation consistently perpetrated against Black women’s bodies. Instead, she would use her words to call attention to brutality and demand that Black women be allowed to live with dignity.
How does Fannie Lou Hamer’s witness allow us to think through Christian abolitionism and Radical Black Feminism as related traditions?
I wish to call sustained attention to Fannie Lou Hamer’s life-altering experience in a Winona, Mississippi jail in 1963 based on her own testimony about the incident before the Democratic National Convention in 1964. On June 10, 1963, Hamer was on a bus with some activist colleagues. When they made a rest stop, five group members left the bus to patronize the restaurant, which was a segregated establishment. When law enforcement arrived to arrest the offenders, Hamer witnessed the incident. She left the bus to demand that the group be left alone. As punishment for her audacity, the police officers kicked Hamer before loading her into the car with the rest of the group and taking her to the county jail. When she arrived in jail, she and other group members were booked before the officers placed her in a cell with another woman.
As soon as she arrived in the cell, she heard the sound of “licks and terrible screams” from a female captive. Hamer remembered that they had beaten the woman at length when she began to “pray that God would have mercy on those people.” Although Hamer did not comment on how she felt as she heard her fellow captive woman screaming and praying, her framing of the night’s events indicates that their pain was shared. Like the other violated woman, Hamer believed that God would allow them to triumph over the pain of white supremacy.
Before long, white jailers came to Hamer’s cell to get her, telling her that they were “going to make [her] wish [she] were dead” (Fannie Lou Hamer’s Testimony before the DNC Credentials Committee, 1964, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRCUUzpfV7k). They had planned a unique indignity for Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer. Black men were there to enact brutality on her body under the authority of a white supremacist government. Although Hamer shares no more about the men than that they shared her skin color, we can only imagine the terror these men must also have endured in being called upon to do white supremacy’s bidding. Each lick they inflicted upon her flesh ripped them apart also, widening the rupture and causing new breakages. It was for Hamer to do the work of healing and repairing what these men had ripped apart.
As they beat her, her dress began to rise up. She worked to push it back down, but one of the white officers continued lifting her dress as they repeatedly dealt blows to her body (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRCUUzpfV7k). Again, Hamer offered no commentary about her opinion about the officer repeatedly lifting her dress while she tried to maintain a modicum of dignity. However, her mere mention of this sexualized terror is enough. She understood that racial violence and sexual violence are interlocked.
Hamer ended her report with the Black jeremiad, “Is this America . . . where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hook because our lives are threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in America?” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRCUUzpfV7k). Religious studies scholar Eddie Glaude has described the Black jeremiad as “a rhetoric of indignation urgently challenging the nation to turn back to the ideals of its covenant.” The Black jeremiad is a “structure of ambivalence that constitutes African Americans’ relation to American culture” (p. 34-34 from Eddie S. Glaude, Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America from the Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000).
Hamer’s graphic and unflinching testimony of the terror visited upon her in the Winona jail is a scathing critique of the so-called land of the free. The tone of her voice, when paired with her critique of her nation, situated her as a missionary to all who heard her. Her words urged American legislators to live up to their promises. As a Christian woman, she believed in the eschaton, that is the end of the world as God saw fit to bring it about. Black feminists share a less theistic approach to this same hope. Theorist Tina Campt calls Black feminist hope for the future the future real conditional, that is the “performance of a future that hasn’t yet happened but must” (p. 17 from Tina Marie Campt, Listening to Images from Duke University Press, 2017).
Hamer’s resigned final words in her testimony, “Thank you,” represent the ironies of her nation-state. Her “thank you” is almost mumbled. Whereas the rest of her testimony was verbose, her final words, followed by a smattering of applause, represent the repeated failures of the state to provide her with anything to feel thankful about. Yet, she clung to the hope that with the help of God and resilient activists like herself, the trouble of her days would not last forever.
In Conclusion, or a Resigned “Thank you.”
Fannie Lou Hamer’s witness during her activist years in Mississippi allows us to broaden our conceptions about abolitionist theory and Black feminist thought. Hamer’s own words indicate that she was an activist who was opposed to the structures that kept poor people poor and kept Black people from being treated as full and equal citizens of the United States. Her disappointments in her life were many, but she depended on God to help her cope with the joys and pitfalls of life. Rarely if ever, is Hamer included in the legacy of Christian abolitionists or Black feminist thinkers.
In this brief essay, I have proposed that Fannie Lou Hamer, and other poor, sharecropping, Black women in the South who insisted that they receive the full rights, privileges, and responsibilities of American citizenship were Christian abolitionists in the nineteenth-century tradition. Their abolitionist visions were made manifest in their insistence upon the end of a system that rejected them and the beginning of a new world where they would receive the decency due to them, not only as citizens of the United States but more importantly, as rational humans. I have also proposed that these women belong in the Black feminist radical tradition because their praxis was the practice of radical Black feminist thought. Their praxis was unconcerned with living well in an unjust present; instead, they insisted upon producing the world that must become.
In her 1964 testimony before the Democratic National Convention about her brutal experience in a Winona, Mississippi jail, Fannie Lou Hamer mused about the failures of her nation. She wondered how it could be that Black people could live in a nation where they were so unprotected for desiring to participate in the basic rights of American citizenship, such as the right to fair wages and the right to vote. She wondered about a nation where she and others were beaten almost to death for dining at a segregated rest stop. She also wondered about the soul of a nation where she could barely sleep at night because of the verbal assaults of strangers who called her home to threaten her life.
Connecting the Christian approach to a new world that Black Southern women proposed and the Black feminist futures that so many of us now seek is a radical proposal that assumes that women like Hamer were theorists who can point us to new futures. The future that Hamer proposed in her 1964 testimony was a compelling one from which we can learn. Hamer unflinchingly discussed the harm done to her, she raged against her nation for allowing it to happen, and she ironically thanked the committee for taking the time to hear from her.
Hamer’s is a radical Christian abolitionist vision. Although she was a known activist, she did not spend her time appealing to the white establishment. Instead, Hamer remained in Mississippi among those who desired to hear from her. Her Democratic National Convention testimony was a rare time that she stepped outside of her community to make her voice heard. She was among other poor rural Black people like herself most of the time. She compelled them to want something more than the nothingness into which they had been born. She raged against white America for its failures. Then, she left white supremacists to fix what they had broken. She chose to focus on herself and her people. Fannie Lou Hamer was a radical Black feminist Christian future maker. She proved her radicalism through her unflinching honesty and her refusal to fix a nation that failed her too many times.
