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By Phil Williams
pwilliam@franklin.uga.edu
Chana Kai Lee was only a child that day in April 1968, but she knew from her mother’s voice that  something irrevocable had happened.
“A friend of hers had called on the phone, and I could hear my mother say, ‘They killed him! I knew they would! I knew they would!’ ” says Lee, an associate professor of history and Women’s Studies at UGA. “Until then, I’d never seen my mother cry.”
The murder of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis shook America, black and white, but there was a special poignance for African Americans. Lee’s parents, natives of Little Rock, Ark., had moved to Los Angeles, but their family ties to the South remained strong. Chana Lee watched Dr. King’s funeral with her parents and began to ask questions.
“They talked about growing up under Jim Crow, and there was so much I wanted to know about the civil rights movement,” she says.
Lee’s interest in the movement grew through her years in high school, as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley and then as a graduate student at UCLA. One result, published last year, is For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, a biography of one of the “mothers” of the civil rights movement.
Hamer was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi, in 1917 and, until the summer of 1962, her life was not unlike that of other African-American women of her time in the South. The last of 20 children, she married, adopted children and worked on a plantation as a “timekeeper,” maintaining records on working hours.
By the summer of 1962, however, a great change was sweeping over the South. Fannie Lou Hamer, 44 years old by then, joined with a group of African Americans from the tiny town of Ruleville to do something they thought was guaranteed to them by their government: register to vote.
Mississippi, however, was a bitter, violent place for blacks in those years, and registering to vote was fraught with danger. With the help of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a civil-rights umbrella organization named the Council of Federated Organizations, a busload of African Americans set out to register at the Sunflower County Courthouse in Indianola, Miss.
“The civil rights workers gave them hope, and Mrs. Hamer clearly sensed that she could make a small difference in her own community,” says Lee.
The group had underestimated white resistance, however. Hamer was apparently surprised by the crowd of gun-carrying white people that surrounded the bus when it arrived in Indianola. The 18 blacks were allowed to enter the courthouse to attempt to register but, faced with requirements to read, copy and interpret sections of Mississippi’s state constitution, they failed to register.
On the trip back to Ruleville, the bus was stopped by a state trooper, allegedly because its yellow color was too close to that of a school bus. Facing a fine of $100, the group agreed to go en masse to jail. Seeing the potential for bad publicity, local officials reduced the fine to $30, which the group paid. They were never taken into custody.
The trouble was just beginning for Fannie Lou Hamer, however. The owner of the plantation where she and her family sharecropped was furious and demanded that she either go back to Indianola and remove her voter application or leave the plantation immediately. With the help of civil-rights activists Andrew Young and James Bevel, Hamer moved out.
Lee visited Ruleville while she was writing her book and found the experience disconcerting.
“It was very difficult for me to be in Ruleville,” she says. “It is so small and terribly intimate that it made me feel in awe of what Mrs. Hamer did.”
In the years that followed, Hamer crisscrossed the country, speaking for civil rights. Two incidents took her from small-town activist to national figure. In the summer of 1963, she joined a group of African Americans traveling by bus from Mississippi to Charleston, S.C., to help with a black-voter registration drive. During the return journey, in Columbus, Miss., a bus driver made them wait until white passengers were seated and then sent them to the back of the bus. One of the blacks told the bus driver he was violating their civil rights.
“Niggers don’t have no civil rights,” the driver reportedly said, and then stopped several times to phone ahead to the next stop, Winona, Miss. When the bus arrived, a group of whites had gathered. Despite the threat of violence, several of the blacks went into the bus terminal and sat at the lunch counter. They were arrested, and many of them, including Hamer, were savagely beaten. The assaults sparked outrage nationally; several men were tried for violating the civil rights of the blacks, but they were speedily found innocent and no criminal charges were ever lodged.
At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Hamer helped lead a group of Mississippi activists who attempted to replace the all-white Mississippi delegation. While they eventually lost the challenge, Hamer’s speech, in her trademark booming voice, recounting her beating in the Winona jail and the need for justice in Mississippi, brought her national recognition.
For the next 13 years, Hamer was one of the most vocal speakers on behalf of civil justice in America. Ill during most of her adult life, she died of heart failure while battling cancer in March 1977.
“Biographies of the poor make generous offerings,” writes Lee in the book’s preface. “They teach us just as much about the empowered as they do about the dispossessed and disenfranchised. . . . Hamer drew strength and inspiration from poverty and racism and went on to become one of the most respected leaders of her day.”
All her life, Hamer was something of a radical, says Lee, and leaned away from more conciliatory groups such as the NAACP. In a movement dominated by powerful men, she was one of the so-called “mothers”--strong females who demanded and received a voice in the direction of events in that turbulent era.
“There’s so much more to tell about the women in the movement, but writing about Hamer is a good place to start,” says Lee. “Even though she wasn’t herself a feminist, she became an icon for the feminist movement. I think she will be remembered as a very important leader with a tremendous personality and depth of commitment. She eventually made the ultimate sacrifice. She wore herself down in the fight, but she surely touched many lives.”
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