Fannie Lou Hamer: The Civil Rights Leader Who Spoke Out On Live TV
Library of CongressUnsung civil rights hero Fannie Lou Hamer gave a face to the brutal conditions facing many Black Americans.
On Aug. 22, 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer sat down in front of the television cameras and began to speak. For 13 minutes, without notes, Hamer told the world about the horrors of American racism.
Hamer spoke that day on behalf of her political party, the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She wanted them to be seated at the Democratic National Convention, and her words resonated across the country.
She talked about how Black people couldn’t vote and how white policemen had brutally beaten her for even trying. She told the world how she’d been thrown out of segregated restaurants, and how bullets had torn through houses where she’d slept. Then, Hamer asked a question.
“Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave,” she demanded, “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?”
Fannie Lou Hamer InstituteFannie Lou Hamer speaks to a rapt crowd.
Unlike many civil rights leaders, Hamer was uneducated and had spent most of her life working on a Mississippi plantation. She didn’t even realize that Black people could vote until she attended a 1962 SNCC meeting. At the meeting, Hamer immediately volunteered to register the next day.
“[W]hat was the point of being scared?” She said later. “The only thing the whites could do was kill me, and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.”
On Aug. 31, 1962, Hamer led other hopeful voters to register. Not only did the registrar turn them away, but police pulled Hamer and the others over on their way home. The policeman gave the activists a $100 fine because their bus was “too yellow.”
But for Hamer, that was just the beginning. Two years later, she formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and spoke powerfully on their behalf. President Lyndon B. Johnson worried so much about what she’d say that he scheduled a news conference for the same time.
Though network news obligingly listened to the president speak, they played Hamer’s statement at prime time a few hours later.
Hamer went on to become a major — if unrecognized — part of the civil rights movement. She helped organize Freedom Summer, ran for Congress, and launched the Freedom Farm Cooperative so that Black people could own land.
