BOOK REVIEW : A Woman Who Got Tired of Being Pushed : THIS LITTLE LIGHT OF MINE: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kay Mills ; Dutton $24; 390 pages
If you happen to fall in a group of people that doesn’t vote, or isn’t permitted to vote, you tend to get pushed around. You don’t carry much leverage with the mayor or the governor or the President.
Fannie Lou Hamer, essentially the Rosa Parks of voting, decided in 1962 at age 45 that she was tired of being kept from voting, and of being pushed around. The registrar of voters had given her a section of the Mississippi constitution to interpret, and deemed her interpretation unsatisfactory. This was no surprise to her or to him. She was black. He was white.
When Hamer returned to the plantation where she worked, in the Mississippi Delta town of Ruleville, her employer, who had been in contact with the registrar, said, “If you want to stay here and everything go like it always is, you better go back down there and get your name off that book.”
Though she would lose her job and be jailed and beaten for her efforts, Hamer eventually won her right to vote. But then she was again ruled ineligible because she hadn’t been paying poll tax for two years. She hadn’t been paying poll tax, of course, because she hadn’t been registered.
Kay Mills, who worked for many years as an editorial writer for The Times, tells the story of how this short, stocky woman, the youngest of 20 children, a fieldworker on a cotton plantation since age 6, became a national heroine. Hamer was tired of indignities that were customary and commonplace. In her early 40s, for example, Hamer, who experienced two stillbirths and was raising two adopted daughters, was sterilized without her knowledge or permission.
But Hamer was unusually determined, the strong character that a tough moment in history required. Through her example, her speaking and her singing, she led hundreds of thousands of black Mississippians to register to vote. One way to measure the difference she made is to note that about 10 years after Hamer’s death, Mike Espy was elected from her Delta congressional district, Mississippi’s first black U.S. representative since Reconstruction. He will soon become our nation’s secretary of agriculture.
Mills, who chronicled other social changes in her first book, “A Place in the News: From the Women’s Pages to the Front Page,” met Fannie Lou Hamer only once, in 1973, as a Washington-based reporter writing about the 10th anniversary of the March on Washington. Her writing is crisp and clear, her reporting scrupulously researched, and this would be a terrific addition to high school and college reading lists.
If you were black in Mississippi, harassment meant not just losing your job or your home, but your life. Ruleville was one of several very small towns in Sunflower County, home of Sen. James Eastland, powerful chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who saw desegregation and black voting registration as communist plots.
Even after two years of voting registration work in Sunflower, there were only 155 black people registered in the county, out of 13,524 of voting age. It is probably easier to write the life of a villain, or a rogue or a neurotic than of a heroine whose demons were so obviously external.
Hamer stuck to her religious faith and her political principles; her life is virtually without internal conflict. She did not hate her enemies, believing, “Ain’t no such thing as I can hate anybody and hope to see God’s face.” Unfortunately, few of her speeches were recorded. Eleanor Holmes Norton, now a non-voting delegate to Congress from the District of Columbia, remembers that Hamer, who could “set a room afire,” had no equal as a speaker, except Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Kay Mills demonstrates why it’s important to write Fannie Lou Hamer’s history. She notes that Lyndon Johnson’s memoirs don’t mention the protest Hamer mounted at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, when she challenged the Mississippi convention delegates who had been chosen without black participation. “Atlantic City in August 1964,” Johnson wrote, “was a place of happy surging crowds and thundering cheers. To a man as troubled as I was by party and national divisions, this display of unity was welcome indeed.”
She also shows what happened when black leaders acted out of fear. Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, told Hamer, “You don’t know anything, you’re ignorant, you don’t know anything about politics. I been in the business over 20 years. You people have put your point across, now why don’t you pack up and go home?”
She did go home, but she also went on to challenge the seating of the entire Mississippi congressional delegation and to run for Congress against an unbeatable Democrat, Jamie Whitten. Why run in a hopeless race, a reporter asked her. Her answer became her epitaph: “All my life I’ve been sick and tired, Now I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
