In Touch With Fannie Lou and John

“I am sick and tired of being sick and tired,” Fannie Lou Hamer

“Engage in good trouble, necessary trouble,” John Robert Lewis

By Betty Miller Buttram
Ink Spot Contributing Writer

Fannie Lou Hamer was a determined woman of her time. She was short, stocky, and poor with a deep southern accent. She was also a voting and women’s rights activist, a community organizer, and a leader in the civil rights movement. Fannie Lou was born on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the youngest of twenty children, to parents who were descendants of slaves. They made their living as sharecroppers on a cotton plantation. Fannie married Perry Hamer in 1944 and moved to Ruleville, Mississippi where they continued as sharecroppers on another plantation. It was a rural environment oppressed with the mentality of keeping African American folks in their place. African Americans in the south were legally able to vote but were often too intimidated to do so. On August 23, 1962, Fannie Lou saw a glimmer of hope when she attended an event organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)in her hometown. She was one of the first to volunteer to get her people to register to vote. She knew the danger but forged ahead despite the threats. When she tried to register to vote, the white landowner evicted her. She was exhorted, threatened, harassed and shot at. In Winona, Mississippi, while trying to register Black people to vote, Fannie Lou and others were arrested and jailed. She was brutally beaten and groped repeatedly by members of that police force. When she was released, Fannie needed more than a month to recuperate from the beatings and she never fully recovered. She was left with profound physical and psychological effects, including a blood clot over her left eye and permanent damage to one of her kidneys. None of that stopped her because she was able to continue to help and encourage thousands of African Americans in Mississippi to become registered voters, and she helped thousands of disenfranchised people in Mississippi through her work programs like the Freedom Farm Cooperative. Fannie Lou unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate in 1964 and the Mississippi State Senate in 1971. Fannie Lou Hamer died of breast cancer at the age of 59 in 1977. Her burial place is in Ruleville, Mississippi, where her epitaph reads: “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.” This quotation is inspiration for others to risk everything for the right to have their voices heard.

John Robert Lewis was born near the county seat of Troy, Alabama on February 21, 1940, the third of ten children to parents who were sharecroppers in rural Pike County, Alabama. The county was majority Black by a significant percentage and Lewis had little interaction with white people. He had relatives who lived in northern cities and learned from them that in the North, schools, buses, and businesses were integrated. When he was eleven, an uncle took him to Buffalo, New York where he became acutely aware of the contrast of Troy’s segregation. He became interested in the struggle for social justice and freedom at a youthful age after hearing one of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s early sermons on the radio. While attending Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, Lewis was exposed to the direct-action workshops of Reverend James Lawson and the nonviolent politics of Mahatma Gandhi. He was inspired by these teachings and became a strict believer in the power of passive resistance, and the disciplines and philosophies of the nonviolent movement continued to guide him in his professional and private life. While a student, Lewis became involved in the Civil Rights Movement. He organized sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Nashville, bus boycotts and other nonviolent protests to support voting rights and racial equality. John became one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders in 1961 riding buses from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans challenging the segregated policies of the South. On one trip on the road to Montgomery, they were met with violence, and Lewis was hit in the head with a wooden crate. On March 7, 1965 (Bloody Sunday), at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, Lewis’s skull was fractured by a mounted trooper with a nightstick. John Lewis served for 33 years (1987 to 2020) as U.S. House Representative from Georgia’s 5th Congressional District. He passed away on July 17, 2020.

Fannie Lou Hamer and John Robert Lewis were both children of sharecroppers and raised in the rural south—Mississippi and Alabama, and despite all the threats and dangers, they became voting rights and equality activists in the Civil Rights Movement and continued their fight until the end of their lives.

The voting rights issue is a consuming topic today for the American population, but attention must be paid to it. The voting restrictions in states will impact people of color, the elderly, the handicapped, the poor and the young people who are eligible to vote. All of this is about fear. It is the fear that is driving this force of inequality. The United States of America is a country for all people and not just for the privileged who fear that they are losing something that they think they are entitled to, but never had it in the first place.

Here are two messages to those who want to take the road back to inequality: (1) Do not underestimate the power of the young voters. They are a smarter generation, particularly, those born between 1995 and 2004; and (2) This is not YOUR country. This is OUR country, and it belongs to all of US.