Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 2, Episode 1: Keisha Blain, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America

Transcript

Season 2, Episode 1: Keisha Blain, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
0:02
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: In this episode, I will be speaking with Dr.
0:19
SPEAKER_00: Keisha Blaine, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, and the president of the African American Intellectual History Society.
0:29
SPEAKER_00: In her new book, Until I Am Free, Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America, Dr.
0:35
SPEAKER_00: Blaine situates Fannie Lou Hamer as a key political thinker alongside other civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks.
0:46
SPEAKER_00: Professor Blaine demonstrates how Hamer's ideas remain salient for a new generation of activists committed to dismantling systems of oppression in the United States and across the globe.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: Welcome, looking forward very much to our conversation.
1:02
SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for having me.
1:03
SPEAKER_00: Can you tell us a little bit about the origins of the book?
1:06
SPEAKER_00: I would suspect, actually, though all of us should know Fannie Lou Hamer.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: I'm rather sure that many of the people joining do not know Fannie Lou Hamer or maybe know the name, but could not place the name.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: You've written a wonderful account of her leadership and her life, and we need to know Fannie Lou Hamer, so maybe you could describe at the outset who she is and why you wrote the book.
1:33
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
1:33
SPEAKER_01: Fanny Lou Hamer was a civil rights activist.
1:37
SPEAKER_01: She was also a human rights activist.
1:39
SPEAKER_01: One of the things that I would emphasize is that when we think about Black political rights in the United States, we have to think about the crucial work of someone like Fannie Lou Hamer, who really, I think, spoke out about the injustices that black people face and particularly spoke out against voter suppression.
1:59
SPEAKER_01: Fannie Lou Hamer was a disabled Black woman from Mississippi.
2:03
SPEAKER_01: She was born in 1917.
2:06
SPEAKER_01: She was the youngest of 20 children and grew up as a sharecropper.
2:10
SPEAKER_01: And I think all of these aspects of her life really help us to understand how she developed into this fearless activist who committed herself to improving the lives of black people, certainly, but really committed herself to improving the lives of all Americans.
2:27
SPEAKER_01: So she is someone that I think every American needs to know about.
2:31
SPEAKER_01: And I'm thrilled to have written this book, which, as you point out, centers to her life, but also gives us a good sense of her ideas.
2:51
SPEAKER_00: You're our historian here, and this was really a central moment, but I'd like people to hear her voice because it's even though this is just a tiny snippet, it's it's very powerful.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: So this is uh a moment that uh Keisha will describe for us uh in detail, but it is at the 1964 Democratic Party nominated convention when Lyndon Johnson was to be nominated as candidate for president in in the 1964 elections.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: And there was a battle over who would represent Mississippi.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: And Fannie Lou Hamer is this remarkable activist, came to the convention and said, We, the real people of Mississippi, not the white supremacist, should be the one to represent Mississippi.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: So we just have a few seconds of clip, but you can see the power of this person in her remarks.
3:53
SPEAKER_03: It was the 31st of August of 1962, that 18 of us traveled 26 miles to the county courthouse in Indonola to try to register to become first-class citizens.
4:09
SPEAKER_00: So, Keisha, this is an iconic moment of American history.
4:14
SPEAKER_00: This woman that nobody in the nation knew before showed up at the Democratic Convention because she had started a party in Mississippi in which African Americans would be represented and have the right to vote.
4:28
SPEAKER_00: She had struggled with incredible bravery, as you'll describe for us, to get that right to vote.
4:35
SPEAKER_00: And it's just mesmerizing to watch her in the committee.
4:39
SPEAKER_00: No notes.
4:40
SPEAKER_00: You might imagine the first time ever for her in a situation like this, she'd be trying to read and shaking and nervous, but she's sitting there.
4:49
SPEAKER_00: I come from Rooville, Mississippi.
4:52
SPEAKER_00: This is my street address, and I am here because I represent the people of uh Mississippi.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: And uh tell us about this moment, please.
5:02
SPEAKER_01: Well, this is, as you point out, uh such a pivotal moment.
5:05
SPEAKER_01: You know, in fact, there are several things that I would emphasize just because as I was listening to it again, and I could only think about the fact that two years prior, Sandra Hamer was pretty much uh in Ruralville, Mississippi, working on the plantation as a Shirley Cromber.
5:23
SPEAKER_01: She was not someone who I think many people imagined would find herself in August 1964 giving this powerful speech.
5:34
SPEAKER_01: And when she's at this convention, she's talking about the moment in August 1962 when she attempts to register to vote.
5:42
SPEAKER_01: It's important for people to know that this was the first time that she joined the movement.
5:47
SPEAKER_01: It was in August 1962 that Fanny Lulu Hamer attended a mass meeting in which she learned, according to Hamer, for the first time she learned about her constitutional right to vote as a citizen of the United States.
6:01
SPEAKER_00: You know, she says she she didn't know whether to go to the meeting.
6:04
SPEAKER_00: She said no, then she decided to go.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: And then she says, I didn't know that I had a right to vote.
6:10
SPEAKER_00: It opened her eyes.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: It's really an amazing, uh, it's it's so true and uh so powerful.
6:17
SPEAKER_01: It is.
6:18
SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of people might reflect on this in this kind of moment and say to themselves, how is that possible?
6:26
SPEAKER_01: But I think the answer lies in really understanding the Jim Crow South in particular.
6:31
SPEAKER_01: It lies in understanding all of the strategies that white supremacists were employing to keep black people from the ballot box.
6:40
SPEAKER_01: So we know about things like literacy tests, which of course Hamer uh experience.
6:44
SPEAKER_01: She spoke about what that was like.
6:47
SPEAKER_01: We know about the violence and an attempt to keep people from voting.
6:51
SPEAKER_01: And the other strategy, too, is limiting access to information, making sure that people did not have access to the kind of information that would empower them, just the way that it empowered Fannie Lou Hamer.
7:04
SPEAKER_01: And so when she learned in this mass meeting about her right to vote as a citizen of the United States, she couldn't believe it.
7:10
SPEAKER_01: And she was so moved, she decided that she would join the movement immediately.
7:14
SPEAKER_01: She became a field secretary, and this is for you know the student nonviolence coordinating committee, and it became a way for her to ultimately play a role in expanding Black political rights.
7:27
SPEAKER_01: One of the things that she decided that if she did not know about these rights at the age of 44 in Mississippi, she knew that that meant many other people did not know about these rights.
7:40
SPEAKER_01: And so part of her effort was to get that information out to a broader public.
7:47
SPEAKER_01: So I think this point is important.
7:48
SPEAKER_01: So here you have a person who joins the movement at the age of 44.
7:52
SPEAKER_01: Some would argue that she's late to the game, right?
7:55
SPEAKER_01: Some would say that when you're 44 years old joining a movement of which most of the people you're actually collaborating with are much younger than you.
8:03
SPEAKER_01: Many of them are college students.
8:05
SPEAKER_01: One might think that she would be uncomfortable in the space, you know, in the space, that she would be nervous about collaborating with these folks, or maybe she might feel you know a kind of way, uh, given the fact that she's much older and she had to listen to them and learn from them.
8:22
SPEAKER_01: But family neighbor was someone who I think she was powerful.
8:26
SPEAKER_01: She was humble too.
8:28
SPEAKER_01: And she had this approach that she could learn from anyone.
8:31
SPEAKER_01: And once she obtained the information that she obtained in that meeting, she set out to let the whole world know.
8:40
SPEAKER_01: And the road to August 1964 was a rocky one.
8:44
SPEAKER_01: Fanny Blue Hamer in August of 1962 attempts to register to vote for the first time.
8:51
SPEAKER_01: She is stopped.
8:52
SPEAKER_01: She talks about the encounters of the police, she talks about the literacy tests.
8:56
SPEAKER_01: Uh, this was a black woman who had a sixth-grade education, and she was being asked a very specific question about the constitution, about the state constitution of all things, and she did not know the answers.
9:07
SPEAKER_01: But again, this was a strategy to block her and to block others from voting.
9:12
SPEAKER_01: Yet she persisted.
9:13
SPEAKER_00: Something like 5% of the African-American population was registered, or even less.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: This was absolutely an unbelievable apartheid system that used every means, as you said, every trickery, every amount of violence, every amount of disempowerment to make sure that someone like Fannie Louhamer would not show up to register.
9:36
SPEAKER_00: It makes it so amazing.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: And just to repeat uh what you said, but I want to underscore it, she's the 20th child of a sharecropping family, grows up in incredible poverty.
9:48
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
9:49
SPEAKER_00: We'll talk later on about all of the abuses, but polio victim as a young girl.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: Nothing stops this woman.
9:57
SPEAKER_00: She learned she has the right to vote.
9:59
SPEAKER_00: It says, and just with the most straightforward, direct honesty okay, I have a right.
10:08
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna get that right.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: I'm a human being.
10:11
SPEAKER_00: That's it.
10:12
SPEAKER_00: Not more complicated than that.
10:14
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
10:15
SPEAKER_01: Hamer talks about this moment as both a political awakening, but also as a religious awakening.
10:22
SPEAKER_01: One of the things that I emphasized in the book is that she was a person of faith.
10:25
SPEAKER_01: And she believed that it was God's will for her to join the movement.
10:30
SPEAKER_01: She believed that as part of her calling to be part of this effort to shed the light on exactly all that you're pointing out, you know, to so that people would be aware of what was happening, particularly in the state of Mississippi, which was which was not different than what was happening in other parts of the South.
10:47
SPEAKER_01: I think one of the things that she resisted immediately was this notion that only certain people should have a voice, that only certain people uh should be able to serve in political office.
10:58
SPEAKER_01: And here's where she bumped up against the Democratic Party in the state of Mississippi.
11:03
SPEAKER_01: A party that, as you point out, they were completely fine with having a state with an estimated 450,000 black people, and yet only 5% actually registered to vote.
11:14
SPEAKER_01: They were okay with that.
11:15
SPEAKER_01: And they were okay with having an all-white party that would, in fact, represent the state.
11:21
SPEAKER_01: They were okay with not having the voices of so many residents from Mississippi heard and represented.
11:28
SPEAKER_01: And Fanny Lee Hamer joined forces with a number of activists uh to establish the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which was a direct counter, a direct opposition to the state Democratic Party.
11:41
SPEAKER_01: And they were making a case that you cannot, you absolutely have a democracy.
11:47
SPEAKER_01: And again, she was going right back to thinking about the Constitution and the core ideals.
11:52
SPEAKER_01: Uh she said, you cannot have a democracy and yet not have full representation.
11:58
SPEAKER_01: What do we the people actually mean if you have thousands, hundreds of thousands of people not heard, not represented?
12:06
SPEAKER_01: And so the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, as you point out, uh they traveled from Mississippi to Atlanta City in August 1962, which gets us to this moment where Hamer gives a speech.
12:17
SPEAKER_01: And as you noted, they were there because they insisted that they should be seated instead of the all-white Democratic Party of the state of Mississippi, because they wanted to send a message that certainly on the national level, no one should accept any kind of representation that excluded a large segment of the state population.
12:41
SPEAKER_01: This speech that she gave electrified the nation.
12:44
SPEAKER_01: It's in fact the speech that catapulted her political career.
12:48
SPEAKER_01: As you pointed out, no one knew about Mrs.
12:49
SPEAKER_01: Hamer until she gave the speech.
12:51
SPEAKER_01: And in this speech, she talks about voter suppression, she talks about the violence, she talks about the difficulties that she endured, and she talks about state-sanctioned violence, she talks about all the ways that black people in Mississippi are being blocked.
13:07
SPEAKER_01: And she makes a demand that ultimately, if in fact the Democratic Party on the national level, if they are in fact committed to this notion of upholding a democracy, if in fact they are committed to equal representation, which of course, you know, they weren't.
13:25
SPEAKER_00: They weren't.
13:26
SPEAKER_01: I mean, just to be straight up, they weren't.
13:28
SPEAKER_01: But she was saying, you know, show, you know, tell us what you really think.
13:32
SPEAKER_01: You know, tell us where your commitment, show us where your commitments really lie in making the decision.
13:37
SPEAKER_01: And so what did they offer her?
13:38
SPEAKER_01: They offered her two symbolic seats.
13:41
SPEAKER_00: Before we get there, Akeisha, I wanted to note something that I didn't know as I was after reading your book, went to look at these clips, which I would encourage people to do online.
13:51
SPEAKER_00: It turns out one of the reasons why that is such a short segment is that the national networks cut away from her remarks as she started these incredibly powerful remarks, because Lyndon Johnson pulled a typical Johnson maneuver.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: She did not want Americans to see her on national broadcast television.
14:15
SPEAKER_00: So he called an impromptu news conference that moment.
14:19
SPEAKER_00: And as she's just warming up to describe how the police pull them over for trying to register to vote, they say, Oh, we have to cut away.
14:28
SPEAKER_00: We have a word from Washington, and there's Lyndon Johnson, and he babbles for a couple of minutes.
14:34
SPEAKER_00: Everyone's amazed.
14:35
SPEAKER_00: There's no reason for a press conference, no nothing.
14:38
SPEAKER_00: But by the time they go back to the Democratic Party convention, she's finished.
14:44
SPEAKER_00: But then they play it that evening, I guess, on the news.
14:48
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
14:49
SPEAKER_01: And so his strategy did not work.
14:51
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's important for us to really reflect on this.
14:54
SPEAKER_01: Think about what it means for the president of the United States to be ultimately intimidated by this black woman, sharecropper, who's there to simply, she's telling her testimony.
15:08
SPEAKER_01: She's sharing what she has gone through.
15:11
SPEAKER_01: But the irony is that he understood, I think, the power behind that testimony.
15:17
SPEAKER_01: He understood how it could, in fact, change hearts and minds.
15:22
SPEAKER_01: He understood how it could, in fact, also embarrass the Democratic Party, that it could allow people to see how black people in this case were being treated as second-class citizens.
15:34
SPEAKER_01: And it is really telling because in the process of writing the book, what I found so intriguing is I would look for how people would, you know, describe the Democratic National Convention and in particular those who were there.
15:46
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, even I remember just reading all of these newspaper articles or even archival material of people who were who were at the convention without fail.
15:57
SPEAKER_01: Every single person would talk about Fanny Hamer.
16:00
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
16:00
SPEAKER_01: It was yeah, it was as if nothing else happened.
16:03
SPEAKER_01: I remember trickling thinking, well, there are other people speaking there too.
16:06
SPEAKER_01: Like other things happened at this convention.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: But interestingly, by the way, Martin Luther King spoke before her.
16:12
SPEAKER_00: And he, you know, he spoke, he spoke well as he always did, but she spoke so powerfully.
16:18
SPEAKER_00: And I love that hands clasped, not fidgeting at all, and looking straight ahead, and all those white faces in the room, amazed.
16:28
SPEAKER_00: Who is this person?
16:30
SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, what she talks about also is astounding.
16:35
SPEAKER_00: Two basic stories.
16:37
SPEAKER_00: One is of this occasion of trying to vote and then coming back to the plantation, and the other is this terrible incident when she's beaten.
16:46
SPEAKER_00: And I wonder whether you could describe uh both of those because they are riveting, but they are also so emblematic about the United States of America in 1964.
16:58
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
16:59
SPEAKER_01: And so, to the first point about the experience of returning home after trying to register to vote and coming back to the plantation, one of the most difficult things that Hamer uh deals with in this particular context is when she returns, the white landowner says to her, I'm giving you an ultimatum, essentially, you need to withdraw your registration or you need to leave the plantation.
17:22
SPEAKER_01: It's important for people to understand that, you know, we were talking about Hamer living in poverty.
17:27
SPEAKER_01: She was a sharecropper.
17:29
SPEAKER_01: She at the time was married, and her husband was also working as a sharecropper on the plantation.
17:36
SPEAKER_01: They were already struggling to make ends meet.
17:39
SPEAKER_01: So having essentially your employer will say to you, your involvement in this effort for voting rights means that you're going to have to choose either you're going to do this or you're going to be able to sustain yourself and be able to uh take care of your family.
17:54
SPEAKER_01: And Hamer made a very difficult decision.
17:58
SPEAKER_01: She walked away and said, Okay, fine, then I'll leave.
18:02
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, what she said to this man, which was incredible, her whole livelihood, her family depended on it, everything.
18:11
SPEAKER_00: She looked at him after the police intervention.
18:14
SPEAKER_00: She looked at him and said, I'm not doing it for you.
18:17
SPEAKER_00: I'm doing it for me because I'm a person.
18:22
SPEAKER_00: Unbelievable.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: So the guts is just incredible.
18:27
SPEAKER_00: The straightforwardness is such a gift.
18:30
SPEAKER_00: The bravery is it's it's amazing, actually.
18:34
SPEAKER_01: It is, and it ties back to her early life too.
18:36
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I hope people will read the book in which I'll talk about her mother.
18:40
SPEAKER_01: So when you talk about her bravery, and I think immediately about her own mother, and and so all these lessons, you know, growing up in a family of people who were struggling to make ends meet, but they understood, they understood that they needed to speak up, that they needed to assert themselves at certain moments, because I think all of these lessons made a difference for Hamer and it shaped her as a person.
19:07
SPEAKER_01: So when she has this encounter, you know, as you point, as you point out, it's a dangerous thing to do.
19:12
SPEAKER_01: This is a moment where, you know, in Mississippi, but but also true across the South, there's just a wave of violence when it comes to lynchings in particular.
19:22
SPEAKER_01: Hamer being able to stand up to the white landowner and say, I'm not doing this for you, I'm doing this for me, was a very bold move.
19:31
SPEAKER_01: And she paid the price.
19:32
SPEAKER_01: I mean, she walked away from the plantation, not surprisingly, you know, really in only a matter of weeks.
19:39
SPEAKER_01: Her husband was throwing off too, right?
19:41
SPEAKER_01: And so it led to a lot of financial instability on top of the difficulties that she was facing.
19:48
SPEAKER_01: But there is a point where later in life, and I always reflect on this, she's talking about that painful experience, talking about being kicked off the plantation.
19:56
SPEAKER_01: And she said that when she looked back, she realized that it was the most empowering moment because it set her free.
20:02
SPEAKER_01: And she said, So here you have a landowner saying to her, Listen, you either walk away from this from this movement or you ultimately face the risk of not having a job.
20:12
SPEAKER_01: And she said, What he didn't realize is that he opened up the door for her because what she said was, okay, great, then I'll just do this.
20:20
SPEAKER_01: And she thrust herself fully into the movement.
20:23
SPEAKER_01: And so what he saw as blocking her and opening up the door for her in interesting ways.
20:28
SPEAKER_00: How rare, by the way, because how many of us would be crushed saying, Oh my God, I can't do anything, I'm trapped, I'm lost.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: And it is remarkable.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: I think the basic theme of her life is that nothing stopped her.
20:42
SPEAKER_00: The polio didn't stop her, the extreme poverty didn't stop her.
20:46
SPEAKER_00: And then these harrowing events that this uh hysterectomy, if you could describe that, because this is also, I would say, modern America.
20:55
SPEAKER_00: This is our times, my lifetime.
20:57
SPEAKER_00: And then this Winona incident, which she also describes in this testimony.
21:03
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
21:03
SPEAKER_01: Uh so in 1961, one year before Hamer joins uh the civil rights movement, she is the victim of a forced realization.
21:12
SPEAKER_01: In the years leading up to this, Hamer had been trying to have children and had not been successful.
21:17
SPEAKER_01: You know, she had experienced several miscarriages.
21:20
SPEAKER_01: You know, she and her husband, Pat Perry, really wanted to start a family, and it was so painful for them to, in 1961, go through this really traumatic experience where Hamer is hospitalized because she had a small urine tumor.
21:39
SPEAKER_01: And this was a non cancerous tumor.
21:40
SPEAKER_01: It was a procedure that should have been fairly simple.
21:44
SPEAKER_01: And Hamer goes in for the procedure.
21:48
SPEAKER_01: The white doctor who performed the procedure without Hamer's knowledge decided to remove Hamer's uh uterus.
21:55
SPEAKER_01: And as I talked about in the book, that experience itself is already traumatic, you know.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: That's already traumatic.
22:01
SPEAKER_01: But to add insult to injury, he doesn't tell her.
22:04
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't, he says nothing to her.
22:06
SPEAKER_01: She leaves.
22:07
SPEAKER_01: I didn't read.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: I miss I missed that point.
22:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he didn't tell her.
22:11
SPEAKER_01: Um, so she went back, you know, she's on the plantation with her loved ones.
22:16
SPEAKER_01: She finds out through gossip because he doesn't tell her, but he tells the wife of the landowner, who's a relative of his.
22:23
SPEAKER_01: So he tells other people.
22:24
SPEAKER_01: Oh my god.
22:25
SPEAKER_01: And people start talking about it.
22:26
SPEAKER_01: And so Hamaru is completely stunned when she finds this out.
22:31
SPEAKER_01: And almost, I mean, it's unbelievable.
22:33
SPEAKER_01: So she she actually rushes back to confront the doctor to ask him, like, what happened?
22:39
SPEAKER_01: You know, how could you do this to me?
22:41
SPEAKER_01: And the doctor refused to talk to her.
22:44
SPEAKER_01: He refused to answer her questions.
22:47
SPEAKER_01: One can imagine the pain, the anger that Tamar felt.
22:50
SPEAKER_01: And later on in reflecting on it, she said that she knew there was nothing she could do.
22:56
SPEAKER_01: Uh, she felt so helpless as a black woman in Mississippi, confronting this white doctor.
23:02
SPEAKER_01: She said she knew that you know that she could not really take matters into her own hands.
23:06
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and all the anger that she felt, she needed to find a way to channel it into some effort to bring about change.
23:14
SPEAKER_01: And she finds the answer.
23:16
SPEAKER_01: She finds the answer when she becomes a civil rights activist.
23:19
SPEAKER_01: She decides that she is going to talk about the forced realizations.
23:23
SPEAKER_01: And so there are a lot of these moments where Huma shows up.
23:25
SPEAKER_01: People think that she's coming to talk about voting rights.
23:28
SPEAKER_01: And she does talk about voting rights.
23:29
SPEAKER_01: She talks about the importance of the vote.
23:31
SPEAKER_01: And then she sort of shifts the narrative and she starts, she starts talking about violence.
23:35
SPEAKER_01: And then she starts talking about medical racism and medical violence and the violence that she endured at the hands of this white doctor that surprises a lot of people.
23:46
SPEAKER_01: And she's talking about this at a moment where, quite frankly, a lot of people didn't want to talk about it.
23:52
SPEAKER_01: Uh, it was uncomfortable.
23:53
SPEAKER_01: And she insisted that she needed to tell the story because one of the things that people need to know is that what happened to Hamer was not unique to Hamer.
24:01
SPEAKER_01: In fact, it was a pattern, it was a troubling pattern whereby black and brown women, impoverished women would go into the hospital.
24:09
SPEAKER_01: This is true not only for Mississippi, this was happening across the South.
24:13
SPEAKER_01: It was happening all over the country.
24:14
SPEAKER_01: I talk about it in the book, you know, all these statistics of women who would go in for all kinds of procedures, and doctors would take it upon themselves to decide who they considered fit or unfit to reproduce.
24:28
SPEAKER_01: And they would remove uterus.
24:29
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they would just remove someone's uterus.
24:32
SPEAKER_01: And Hamer pointed it out.
24:35
SPEAKER_01: She spoke about it, and she wanted people to know what was happening to um black women, what was happening to poor women, and she demanded that these practices stop.
24:47
SPEAKER_01: So that's one example of the violence that she endured in her lifetime.
24:51
SPEAKER_01: And then the second point that's another pivotal moment for her is actually one year before she gives this testimony in Alana City, and that's 1963 in Winona, Mississippi.
25:02
SPEAKER_01: Hamer is traveling with a group of activists.
25:05
SPEAKER_01: They had just organized a voter's registration workshop, and they're traveling from South Carolina back home, and they stop in Winona.
25:12
SPEAKER_01: It's a rest stop.
25:13
SPEAKER_01: You know, some folks have to use the restroom, other people want to grab a bike to eat.
25:18
SPEAKER_01: And yet it ends up being this particular moment where Hamer once again experiences brutal violence.
25:27
SPEAKER_01: I mean, Hamer is sitting on the bus looking out and seeing her friends being arrested by police officers and not knowing what's going on.
25:35
SPEAKER_01: She gets off of the bus just to inquire, and within minutes, the police officer starts kicking her.
25:41
SPEAKER_01: She's on the ground.
25:43
SPEAKER_01: She's arrested along with several activists, and they're taken to a Winona prison cell.
25:48
SPEAKER_01: And in that prison cell, the beatings continue.
25:51
SPEAKER_01: And in that prison cell, not only do police officers beat her and other activists, but they force other prisoners to do the same.
26:00
SPEAKER_01: Hamer leaves that prison cell with a number of ailments.
26:04
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, you mentioned earlier that she, you know, had polio as a young child.
26:08
SPEAKER_01: So she walked with a limp, and that beating ultimately worsened the limp.
26:14
SPEAKER_01: Uh, she had kidney damage, uh, blood clot in her eye, just a number of physical problems, as well as, as one can imagine, emotional and psychological trauma that she endured after that beating.
26:28
SPEAKER_01: One of the things that Heber later reveals, she doesn't say it initially, but within a couple of years, if he's comfortable, she begins to talk about the fact that there's also a sexual assault that takes place uh in that prison cell.
26:41
SPEAKER_01: These are the things that she's talking about in August 1964 before a national audience, as bold as ever, sitting there telling people, this is what I went through, this is what we went through, um, and this is what black people are facing in this country.
26:56
SPEAKER_01: Why?
26:56
SPEAKER_01: Again, what is the crime that has been committed?
27:00
SPEAKER_01: Oh, the crime of trying to register people to vote.
27:03
SPEAKER_01: Rights that we're supposed to have as citizens of the United States.
27:07
SPEAKER_01: It's quite remarkable to hear a Himmer's story.
27:10
SPEAKER_00: And of course, unique how she told it, how straightforward she always said, telling it like it is, uh, and she wasn't going to hold back.
27:19
SPEAKER_00: And every one of those incidents she just carried on with even more fervor.
27:26
SPEAKER_00: One of your great themes, and it's a theme I think of all your historiography and your view, is she speaking from multiple points of view of disadvantage.
27:38
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, the racial discrimination is uh such an understatement or euphemism for the extraordinarily violent white supremacism of the U.S.
27:49
SPEAKER_00: at that time, but also as a woman, uh, which is not so usual even in the civil rights movement, which is one of your main points.
27:58
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of the men, this was fairly patriarchal civil rights movement, in a way, I think it's it's fair to say, and from the class point of view, that who is this sharecropper and she doesn't even speak properly, and uh where's her PhD and so on?
28:14
SPEAKER_00: And so she's representing this intersectional perspective from gender, class, and race in an extraordinary way, and decades before this was kind of sorted out as an understanding of these multiple kinds of representations.
28:32
SPEAKER_00: But you've made a wonderful body of knowledge about African American women leaders throughout modern history that have uh acted in this way.
28:42
SPEAKER_00: I wonder if you could just put her in that broader context of these remarkable women that you've been writing about.
28:48
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
28:49
SPEAKER_01: So as you were talking, I was thinking about many of the women who I wrote about in my first book set the world on fire.
28:56
SPEAKER_01: And similarly, these are women who I talk about as women who were ultimately on the margins.
29:03
SPEAKER_01: And as you as you just perfectly explained, it's not just that they were black women, it's not just that they were having to deal with a patriarchy, having to deal with sexism.
29:15
SPEAKER_01: I mean, all of that is true, but it's also that they were working class, or to be more accurate, working for black women, often in spaces where not only white people didn't necessarily want to hear them, but more to the point, other black people didn't want to hear them either, because they didn't fit the mold of who certain people thought a leader should be or what a leader should sound like, what a leader should look like.
29:42
SPEAKER_01: We have to think about the longer history and what we talk about, you know, as a politics of respectability, which is broadly this notion that black people have to come up with these strategies to send a message to the rest of the world that they belong.
29:58
SPEAKER_01: And so, how do you get other people to accept you as equal?
30:04
SPEAKER_01: Well, you you try to show them how similar you are to them.
30:07
SPEAKER_01: So maybe it's demonstrated by the way you speak or the way that you carry yourself, the way that you dress.
30:13
SPEAKER_01: And so there's all this emphasis on formal education and presenting yourself a certain way.
30:19
SPEAKER_01: These are very much wrapped up in middle class elite visions.
30:24
SPEAKER_01: The reality is that that's not humorous experience.
30:28
SPEAKER_01: Neither is it uh the experience of any of the women who I talk about uh in my earlier work.
30:33
SPEAKER_01: And so what I have done in my scholarship is try to push these women to the center to really, I think, complicate our collective understanding of who we consider, on the one hand, who we consider an intellectual.
30:49
SPEAKER_01: I want us to, us broadly, you know, just everyone reading the book, to begin to understand that leadership doesn't just look one way, to understand that sometimes the leader is, in fact, the Cherokropper, the disabled black woman with a sixth-grade education.
31:08
SPEAKER_01: And to see that even though she did not have much access, she did not have much material resources, that she had a vision of the world, and more to the point, she had a commitment, a desire to bring about meaningful change, a love for people, all people.
31:28
SPEAKER_01: And I think if we open up ourselves to listening to her, to hearing what she has to offer us, we could in fact be transformed the same way so many others were transformed when they encountered her.
31:41
SPEAKER_01: And so you're absolutely right to say that, you know, in telling the story about Fan Lou Hamer, it does fall within my broader scholarship to center Black women as activists, to see how they function as organizers, as thinkers.
31:56
SPEAKER_01: Even when we don't see them, they are doing the work.
31:59
SPEAKER_01: That's the irony of this story is that we may not have seen Fan Lou Hamer, but she was there and she was inspiring people and she was making such a difference.
32:08
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and uh it is truly, I think, a powerful story uh and one that I'm glad I get to tell.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: One thing that I find uh amazing about history, it's uh, of course, the theme that you live, represent, uh, teach is uh the question who gets to tell the story?
32:25
SPEAKER_00: And in general, it's the victors that tell the story, it's the powerful that tell the story.
32:31
SPEAKER_00: American history has been told by powerful white people uh that have created not just their own view, but what is history.
32:41
SPEAKER_00: And so the voices that you're bringing back and featuring and making people listen to, who are absolutely core to our history, are not known in general because the way that the story is told, and especially by whom it's told, is not exactly a balanced objective view of reality.
33:06
SPEAKER_00: It's told from a particular perspective.
33:09
SPEAKER_00: And I I mentioned to you just before we started that COVID for me has been, aside from the lockdowns and all the rest, a period of uh reading and listening to lots of audiobooks and perhaps more time for thinking and reflection than we might otherwise have had.
33:27
SPEAKER_00: And the most amazing experience for me in this period was reading, actually, I listened to 40 hours of the audiobook of Black Reconstruction by W.E.B.
33:39
SPEAKER_00: Du Bois.
33:40
SPEAKER_00: I wanted to ask you about it because you're the great expert on all of this history.
33:44
SPEAKER_00: But what amazed me, it was 40 hours.
33:47
SPEAKER_00: I thought I was going to listen to 10 or 15 minutes.
33:50
SPEAKER_00: It's the story of how Jim Crow is reasserted and how apartheid America is constructed.
33:55
SPEAKER_00: So exactly what Fannie Lou Hamer is trying to end, Du Bois in the 1930s is describing how it is put back into place after a civil war that supposedly freed all Americans and that had created the Second Republic that was a republic for everybody.
34:13
SPEAKER_00: But what so moved me, I thought I'd listen to a little bit.
34:17
SPEAKER_00: I was riveted for 40 straight hours because it's a work of great genius, in my view.
34:23
SPEAKER_00: But it was one brave scholar against a whole racist academic establishment led by a professor at my university at Columbia University, Dunning, who had the Dunning School of History, who told the story that everything that happened after the Civil War when uh there was black empowerment was awful, and thank God it was corrected by uh the whites taking over again.
34:51
SPEAKER_00: And one person made himself heard in the 1930s, and history never could be the same again, even though they tried to push him away and eventually pushed him out of the country, but he changed the way we know history.
35:09
SPEAKER_00: One person is incredibly brave.
35:12
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
35:13
SPEAKER_01: And you know, as you were talking, there's so many parallels that one can draw to Family Haver, because I always marvel at the fact that today we can talk about Du Bois' Black Reconstruction, generally speaking, in a very rampant kind of way.
35:29
SPEAKER_01: People love it, and yet I think about going back to reading how people responded to the book, right?
35:38
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's so interesting how much has changed.
35:41
SPEAKER_01: As you pointed out, people were very upset.
35:44
SPEAKER_01: I mean, people critiqued the book, strongly critiqued Du Bois, and it took a while for even historians to look at the text and begin to accept that in fact Du Bois was doing something quite extraordinary, which was not even a miracle.
36:01
SPEAKER_01: I mean, in the sense that he was he was simply telling the truth of the history.
36:06
SPEAKER_01: He was simply centering black people, um, showing the importance of black agency.
36:12
SPEAKER_01: He was simply pushing back against these sort of representations of reconstruction that I know as a failure.
36:19
SPEAKER_01: And he was using his knowledge as a historian, I'll emphasize that.
36:24
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
36:25
SPEAKER_01: Because a lot of people forget that Du Bois was a historian, which I always chuckle about too.
36:29
SPEAKER_01: But he was using all of these skills to present the history, the true history.
36:35
SPEAKER_01: And it took so long, I think, for people to actually uh recognize the significance of this intervention.
36:43
SPEAKER_01: And imagine, so think about this.
36:45
SPEAKER_01: You're talking about a black man with a PhD from Harvard.
36:48
SPEAKER_01: I mean, we Du Bois, one of the most prolific black people uh in history, quite frankly.
36:54
SPEAKER_01: You know, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who can even compare to someone like Du Bois.
37:00
SPEAKER_00: Pure genius, amazing.
37:02
SPEAKER_01: Pure genius, right?
37:03
SPEAKER_01: And imagine that if he's facing that kind of resistance, now imagine Fanny Blue Hamer.
37:10
SPEAKER_01: Imagine Fanny Blue Hamer with a sixth grade right.
37:13
SPEAKER_01: I mean, imagine Fanny Blue Hamer showing up and actually having something to say and saying it to people who don't think that she has a right to be speaking, not only because she's a woman, because she's a support black woman.
37:29
SPEAKER_01: And I just, I mean, I think at how much the odds were against her in that sense, and how much courage one needed to have pushed back.
37:38
SPEAKER_01: There's a there's a scene in the book, and I you probably chuckled when you read it too, as I always chuckle, where Hamer's having this confrontation with Adam Clayton Powell, and this is at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
37:51
SPEAKER_00: I love that.
37:52
SPEAKER_00: Yes, I love this.
37:53
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's just so amazing.
37:55
SPEAKER_01: And uh and he's talking to Hamer, you know, he's trying to reason with her, trying to get her to understand, like, you know, this is the best way forward, you got to compromise, you know, this is what we do, you know, we're experienced politicians, we know how this goes.
38:08
SPEAKER_01: And she's not accepting what he has to say.
38:11
SPEAKER_01: So he's he's a bit puzzled, like, you know, maybe you don't know who I am.
38:14
SPEAKER_01: So he says, Do you know who I am?
38:17
SPEAKER_01: And she says, Yeah, I know who you are, but how many bells of cotton have you picked?
38:22
SPEAKER_01: How many beatons have you taken?
38:24
SPEAKER_01: And I just thought to myself, wow.
38:27
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
38:28
SPEAKER_01: So amazing.
38:29
SPEAKER_01: It's her way of saying, Listen, you may very well have a title, right?
38:33
SPEAKER_01: I know who you are, but let me tell you I am.
38:37
SPEAKER_01: I'm the black woman who endured all of these things, and I'm speaking on behalf of the people of Mississippi.
38:43
SPEAKER_01: And as much as I know you have something to say, and you think I had to listen to you, recognize that I bring something to the table.
38:51
SPEAKER_01: It's a life experience, right?
38:52
SPEAKER_01: I don't have all these degrees, I don't have much formal education, but I have life experience, and that compels me to be able to stand here and speak back to you.
39:02
SPEAKER_01: I think it's one of the most powerful moments that really just helps us see who Hamer was as a person.
39:08
SPEAKER_01: And it helps us see why she was so effective.
39:11
SPEAKER_01: Because people gravitated toward her because they saw, I think, in her just this authentic person, as you said, who told it like it was.
39:21
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that was one of her phrases to tell it like it is.
39:24
SPEAKER_01: She would tell you what's on her mind.
39:25
SPEAKER_01: You could trust her.
39:26
SPEAKER_01: Uh, she didn't give you fluff, she didn't just say stuff to make you feel good.
39:30
SPEAKER_01: And that meant that when she spoke, you would in fact listen.
39:34
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it is quite powerful.
39:37
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think, you know, as I reflect on it, I think it's truly a model for us today.
39:42
SPEAKER_00: I could not agree more, and it's such a uh great gift that you've given us to be able to read her words and uh think about her life again in our present context.
39:54
SPEAKER_00: And I should point out that your book moves back and forth between her words and absolutely the current crises that we're in, the current divisions that we're in.
40:06
SPEAKER_00: And boy, we're in more trials of police brutality right now, more murders of uh young blacks, completely innocent kids being gunned down and then claimed, no, no, it was an accident, and and so on.
40:20
SPEAKER_00: So there's nothing more resonant.
40:23
SPEAKER_00: And we're in a a huge debate over history, of course.
40:26
SPEAKER_00: You know, you're at the center of this swirling debate.
40:30
SPEAKER_00: And I I wonder if you could uh reflect for us a little bit about where we stand in this debate.
40:36
SPEAKER_00: I think, of course, what's wonderful is that these stories and the history are being told, and frankly, that uh Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans are telling the history themselves, not depending on someone else to tell the history, because we saw what happened when white Americans told the history of black Americans.
40:57
SPEAKER_00: It did not exactly come out as a very accurate rendering.
41:00
SPEAKER_00: But we're in this huge public debate right now.
41:04
SPEAKER_00: You must follow it hour to hour, day to day.
41:06
SPEAKER_00: Where do we stand on it?
41:08
SPEAKER_01: I think a lot about uh a piece of advice that one of my mentors gave me several years ago.
41:13
SPEAKER_01: I wrote an op-ed.
41:14
SPEAKER_01: It was probably one of the first op-eds that I wrote.
41:18
SPEAKER_01: And remember just receiving a lot of negative feedback.
41:22
SPEAKER_01: Pushback, a lot of pushback.
41:24
SPEAKER_01: People were emailing me, calling me, not saying very nice things.
41:27
SPEAKER_01: And I called one of my mentors and I said, you know, this is frustrating, you know, what should I do?
41:32
SPEAKER_01: I I'm just shocked that people are responding this way.
41:34
SPEAKER_01: And and she said to me, if you are not facing resistance um in your work, then you're not doing anything worth resisting.
41:42
SPEAKER_01: And I remember thinking, like, okay, and so what she was saying to me is listen, this is part of the process.
41:48
SPEAKER_01: You know you are on the right track when people are ready to stand up and block you.
41:54
SPEAKER_01: It's quite telling to me that we are at this moment, just at the very same moment that we're seeing, one might say, the explosion of scholarship that is, you know, as you point out, centering the voices of marginalized people, narratives being written by folks like me.
42:14
SPEAKER_01: And in fact, books and articles that are being circulated widely.
42:19
SPEAKER_01: And I think I'm certainly grateful to have a readership of an audience that I think, you know, other folks like me didn't have 20 years ago, 10 years ago, you know.
42:30
SPEAKER_01: And at this very same moment, there's all this pushback now trying to uh limit what information will show up in in schools to see people resisting Tony Marson's work and saying maybe we should not have her books in a classroom.
42:47
SPEAKER_01: On the one hand, I'm frustrated, but on the other hand, I think, okay, this is a sign that the work that we're doing is actually making an impact.
42:56
SPEAKER_01: It's shifting people's perspectives.
42:58
SPEAKER_01: It's it's causing, I suspect, you know, students to um look within and to ask the kinds of questions, you know, to their parents that maybe they didn't ask.
43:07
SPEAKER_01: Parents might not have expected the students to ask.
43:09
SPEAKER_01: And a lot of people are terrified by this.
43:11
SPEAKER_01: A lot of people are terrified.
43:13
SPEAKER_01: Uh, we know that change is always difficult.
43:16
SPEAKER_01: And so, as much as it is frustrating, I think to myself, okay, I certainly have to keep doing this work.
43:22
SPEAKER_01: We all have to keep, you know, doing this work because it is important for us to know our full history, period.
43:28
SPEAKER_01: Than Lou Hamer needed to know about the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment, right?
43:33
SPEAKER_01: She needed to know what had taken place in the 19th century.
43:36
SPEAKER_01: She needed to know these things because they empowered her to be able to strategize in her lifetime.
43:42
SPEAKER_01: We need to know about Fanny Lou Hamer.
43:44
SPEAKER_01: We need to know about what she endured, we need to know about this history so that it empowers us to strategize in our lifetime.
43:51
SPEAKER_01: And hiding that history serves no one.
43:54
SPEAKER_01: Hiding that history doesn't change it.
43:57
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
43:58
SPEAKER_01: You know, it just right, it just doesn't change.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: And and when when Mitch McConnell, who I am not much of a fan, writes to uh the Secretary of Education and says, we shouldn't teach this stuff that makes kids unpatriotic and divides our country, it's really unbelievable, actually.
44:15
SPEAKER_00: I mean it it it it's not unbelievable, but it is it's awful.
44:19
SPEAKER_00: And that is the perspective.
44:21
SPEAKER_00: And yet the truth is there's horrible things that are uncovered in the truth because we have part of the history that is absolutely shocking and evil.
44:31
SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, it uncovers glory, it uncovers bravery, diversity, fortitude, core values of humanity in ways even greater than we could have imagined, because you read these stories of Penny Lou Hamer and they're profoundly inspiring.
44:50
SPEAKER_00: Her life is even more inspiring than the darkness of uh that is that made it possible because she's actually not just a symbol, she's iconic for us in how to persevere in countless contexts.
45:03
SPEAKER_00: And so there's something so glorious about this true history that we should be uh absolutely regarding as the great gift now that so many voices are present giving us the true history.
45:17
SPEAKER_01: You're absolutely right.
45:18
SPEAKER_01: And I did not learn about feminine behavior until I was a senior in college.
45:22
SPEAKER_01: And I was majoring in history and africano studies.
45:25
SPEAKER_01: We think about that.
45:27
SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
45:28
SPEAKER_00: But by the way, I I am 67 and I say to my wife almost every day, I cannot believe it.
45:34
SPEAKER_00: I never learned about such and such.
45:37
SPEAKER_00: It's consisted throughout life.
45:39
SPEAKER_00: I didn't even know about the boys' black reconstruction actually until a couple of years ago.
45:45
SPEAKER_00: Never heard a word about it.
45:47
SPEAKER_00: So this is why it's so important what you're doing, so important African American Intellectual History Society, so important your voice.
45:57
SPEAKER_00: And we have unfortunately run out of time because I have a thousand things more I want to uh talk with you about, and we will find more time to do that.
46:07
SPEAKER_00: But in closing, let me thank you for a wonderful book, but a wonderful opening for us, not just this book, but all of your writing, because you're bringing incredible perspectives and important voices to the fore that are profoundly enriching for us.
46:25
SPEAKER_02: Mr.
46:25
SPEAKER_02: Chairman, and to the credentials committee.
46:30
SPEAKER_02: My name is Mrs.
46:32
SPEAKER_02: Fanny Lou Hamer, and I live at 626 East Lafayette Street, Roosevelt, Mississippi, Sunflower County, the home of Senator James O.
46:45
SPEAKER_02: Eastman and Senator Stenner.
46:49
SPEAKER_02: It was the 31st of August in 1962 that 18 of us traveled 26 miles to the county courthouse in Indonola to try to register to become first-class citizens.
47:06
SPEAKER_02: We were met in Indonola by policemen, highway patrolmen, and they only allowed two of us in to take the literacy test at the time.
47:20
SPEAKER_02: After we had taken this test and started back to Roosevelt, we were held up by the city police and the state highway patrolmen and carried back to Indonola, where the bus driver was charged that day with driving a bus the wrong color.
47:43
SPEAKER_02: After we paid the fine among us, we continued on to Rooseville, and Reverend Jess Sunny carried me four miles in the rural area where I had worked as a timekeeper and sharecropper for 18 years.
48:02
SPEAKER_02: I was met there by my children that told me the plantation owner was angry because I had gone down, tried to register.
48:13
SPEAKER_02: After they told me my husband came and said the plantation owner was raised and came because I had tried to register.
48:22
SPEAKER_02: And before he quit talking, the plantation owner came and said, Fanny Lou, do you know?
48:29
SPEAKER_02: Did Pap tell you what I said?
48:31
SPEAKER_02: And I said, Yes, sir.
48:34
SPEAKER_02: He said, Well, I mean that, said if you don't go down and withdraw your registration, you will have to leave.
48:42
SPEAKER_02: Then if you go down and withdraw, you still might have to go because we're not ready for that in Mississippi.
48:50
SPEAKER_02: And I addressed him and told him, said, I didn't try to register for you.
48:56
SPEAKER_02: I tried to register for myself.
48:59
SPEAKER_02: I had to leave that same night.
49:02
SPEAKER_02: On the 10th of September, 1962, 16 bullets were fired into the home of Mr.
49:09
SPEAKER_02: and Mrs.
49:10
SPEAKER_02: Robert Tucker for me.
49:12
SPEAKER_02: That same night, two girls were shot in Roosevelt, Mississippi.
49:17
SPEAKER_02: Also, Mr.
49:18
SPEAKER_02: Joe McDonald's house was shot in.
49:21
SPEAKER_02: And June the 9th, 1963, I had attended a voter registration workshop, was returning back to Mississippi.
49:34
SPEAKER_02: Ten of us was traveling by the Continental Trailway bus.
49:39
SPEAKER_02: When we got to Winona, Mississippi, which is Montgomery County, four of the people got off to use the washroom.
49:49
SPEAKER_02: And two of the people to use the restaurant.
49:52
SPEAKER_02: Two of the people wanted to use the washroom.
49:56
SPEAKER_02: The four people that had gone in to use the restaurant was ordered out.
50:02
SPEAKER_02: During this time I was on the bus.
50:05
SPEAKER_02: But when I looked through the window and saw they had rushed out, I got off of the bus to see what had happened.
50:13
SPEAKER_02: And one of the ladies said it was a state highway patrolman and a chief of police ordered us out.
50:21
SPEAKER_02: I got back on the bus, and one of the persons had used the washroom got back on the bus too.
50:27
SPEAKER_02: As soon as I was seated on the bus, I saw when they began to get the fire people in a highway patrolman's car.
50:37
SPEAKER_02: I stepped off of the bus to see what was happening, and somebody screamed from the car that the fire workers was in and said, get that one there.
50:49
SPEAKER_02: And when I went to get in the car when the man told me I was under arrest, he kicked me.
50:57
SPEAKER_02: I was carried to the county jail and put in the booking room.
51:04
SPEAKER_02: They left some of the people in the booking room and began to place us in cells.
51:10
SPEAKER_02: I was placed in the cell with a young woman called Missy Jessica Simpson.
51:16
SPEAKER_02: After I was placed in the cell, I began to hear sounds of lick and scream.
51:22
SPEAKER_02: I could hear the sounds of licks and horrible screams.
51:27
SPEAKER_02: And I could hear somebody say, Can you say yes, sir, nigga?
51:33
SPEAKER_02: Can you say yes, sir?
51:34
SPEAKER_02: And they would say other horrible names.
51:37
SPEAKER_02: She would say, Yes, I can say yes, sir.
51:40
SPEAKER_02: Well said, she said, I don't know you well enough.
51:44
SPEAKER_02: They beat her, I don't know how long.
51:47
SPEAKER_02: And after a while she began to pray and ask God to have mercy on those people.
51:53
SPEAKER_02: And it wasn't too long before three white men came to my cell.
51:58
SPEAKER_02: One of these men was a state highway patroller.
52:02
SPEAKER_02: And he asked me where I was from.
52:05
SPEAKER_02: And I told him Rooseville.
52:07
SPEAKER_02: He said, We're going to check this.
52:10
SPEAKER_02: And they left my cell and it wasn't too long before they came back.
52:15
SPEAKER_02: He said, You're from Roosevelt, all right.
52:17
SPEAKER_02: And he used a curse word.
52:20
SPEAKER_02: And he said, We're going to make you wish you was dead.
52:23
SPEAKER_02: I was carried out of that cell into another cell where they had two Negro prisoners.
52:30
SPEAKER_02: The state highway patrolman ordered the first Negro to take the black guy.
52:36
SPEAKER_02: The first Negro prisoner ordered me, by orders from the State Highway Patrolman, for me to lay down on a bunk bed on my face.
52:46
SPEAKER_02: And I laid on my face, the first Negro began to beat.
52:50
SPEAKER_02: And I was beat by the first Negro until he was exhausted.
52:56
SPEAKER_02: I was holding my hands behind at that time on the left side because I suffered from polio when I was six years old.
53:04
SPEAKER_02: After the first Negro had beat until he was exhausted, the State Highway Patrolman ordered the second Negro to take the black jacket.
53:14
SPEAKER_02: The second Negro began to beat and I began to work my feet.
53:20
SPEAKER_02: And the state highway patrolman ordered the first Negro had beat to sit on my feet.
53:25
SPEAKER_02: To keep me from working my feet.
53:28
SPEAKER_02: I began to scream, and one white man got up and began to beat me in my head and tell Mr.
53:35
SPEAKER_02: Hud.
53:36
SPEAKER_02: One white man, my dress had worked up high.
53:41
SPEAKER_02: He walked over and pulled my dress.
53:43
SPEAKER_02: I pulled my dress down and he pulled my dress back up.
53:48
SPEAKER_02: I was in jail when Matthew Evers was murdered.
53:52
SPEAKER_02: All of this is on account of we want to register to become first-class citizens.
53:59
SPEAKER_02: And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America.
54:07
SPEAKER_02: Is this America the land of the free and the home of the brave?
54:13
SPEAKER_02: Where we have to speak with our telephones off of the hook because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in America.
54:28
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
54:34
SPEAKER_00: So Keisha Blaine, thank you again, and uh everybody, please read this wonderful book, Until I Am Free.
54:41
SPEAKER_00: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America truly is enduring.
54:45
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
54:46
SPEAKER_00: Next time I will be speaking with Professor Heather Cox Richardson, American historian and author of How the South won the Civil War.
54:54
SPEAKER_00: Oligarchy, democracy, and the continuing fight for the soul of America.
54:59
SPEAKER_00: The North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a new perfect freedom.
55:05
SPEAKER_00: Richard is the democracy's victory was the family.
55:09
SPEAKER_00: How the South won the Civil War, crazy claims of the Holy Air Wolf.
55:20
SPEAKER_00: Together we will discuss how we will discuss.
55:29
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
55:31
SPEAKER_00: Please subscribe, rate, and read a review on whatever platform you listen for your podcast.
55:38
SPEAKER_00: I would love to hear your thoughts as we continue to develop this series.