Black History Month 2: Fannie Lou Hamer

Yesterday, Vivienne and I spent the day signing This Little Light of Mine.  We learned that Fannie Lou Hamer helped this song become a part of the Civil Rights Movement by singing it to bring encouragement to people who were fighting for the right for Black Americans to vote. 

Today it seemed to make sense to learn a bit about Fannie Lou Hamer.  Obviously we are learning in small bits because the girls are young and Ruth finds this kind of learning much more interesting that Vivi, so we will be excited to share more with her, but three interesting facts we learned about Fannie Lou Hamer are:

1. Miss Fannie was one of 20 children and grew up on a cotton plantation. 

2. Miss Fannie was an adoptive mommy.  She adopted two daughters.  She was unable to have children after a hysterectomy.  She was meant to only have a tumor removed. 

(We learned that involuntary or uninformed sterilization of black women, common in the South in the 1960s-- as a way to reduce the numbers of impoverished blacks.)

3. Miss Fannie was instrumental in her activism as she fought for the black right to vote.  She believed that the struggle for civil rights was a spiritual battle and often sang Christian Hymns as a way to encourage weary co-laborers.  She worked on a plantation almost all of her life but was fired when she was told by the plantation owner not to try to vote.

Some quotes we read were attributed to her are:

• "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."
• "We serve God by serving our fellow man; kids are suffering from malnutrition. People are going to the fields hungry. If you are a Christian, we are tired of being mistreated."
•  “Sometimes it seems 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.”

What other people said about her:

"Fannie Lou Hamer made me realize that we’re nothing unless we can hold this system accountable and the way we hold this system accountable is to vote and to take an active note to determine who our leaders are." Constance Slaughter-Harvey

"If Fannie Lou Hamer had had the same opportunities that Martin Luther King had, then we would have had a female Martin Luther King." Kay Mills

What an amazing woman Fannie Hamer was!

Remember that we are learning this together as a family with a 12 year old and a 1 year old, this is for our family to take pride in the history of Black Africans.  It is not an academic exercise.  Please forgive any misinformation on these posts as we are learning what we can from sources online and hopefully they are true!! Please feel free to correct anything that is untrue or a misrepresentation.  Nothing here is intentionally incorrect!