by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)
We celebrate grassroots organizer, civil rights and voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer in today’s Daily Drop podcast. Our salute to Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party founder Hamer is based on the Thursday, March 24 entry in “A Year of Good Black News” Page-A-Day®️ Calendar for 2022:
You can follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.com or create your own RSS Feed. Or just check it out every day here on the main website (transcript below):
SHOW TRANSCRIPT:
Hey, this Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a daily drop of Good Black News for Thursday, March 24th, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.
“Sick and tired of being sick and tired,” in the 1960s, Mississippi plantation worker Fannie Lou Hamer was fired, threatened by white supremacists, and beaten in police custody when she tried to vote and register others to do the same.
But Hamer would not be silenced. She formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and demanded to represent her state at the 1964 Democratic Convention. Hamer fought for voting rights, education rights, and economic rights and even ran for Senate.
Although she wasn’t rich, traditionally educated or well-connected, Hamer was a grassroots leader who got involved – and stayed involved — because she believed to her core “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
Hamer passed in 1977 after years of dealing with serious health issues, but her legacy as an outspoken and effective activist, organizer and champion for equal rights will never be forgotten.
Last February, rapper and activist Common announced he’s producing a biographical movie on Hamer based on her 1967 autobiography To Praise Our Bridges and the book God’s Long Summer by Charles Marsh, which chronicles the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
Just last month, the documentary Fannie Lou Hamer’s America debuted on PBS and can now be seen in full via WORLD Channel on YouTube.
https://youtu.be/5h2MzXavgEg
To learn more about Fannie Lou Hamer, you can read her autobiography on snccdigital.org, that’s SNCC digital dot org, read 2013’s The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like it Is, or check out 2021’s Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America by Keisha N. Blain and Walk With Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson.
This has been a daily drop of Good Black News, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar for 2022,” published by Workman Publishing.
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Sources:
- https://www.fannielouhamersamerica.com
- https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/fannie-lou-hamer
- How The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Started (by Unstripped Voice)
- Fannie Lou Hamer: Stand Up (Mississippi Public Broadcasting)
- https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/freedomsummer-hamer/
- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fannie-lou-hamers-dauntless-fight-for-black-americans-right-vote-180975610/
- https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/hamer-fannie-lou
- https://goodblacknews.org/2021/02/28/bhm-good-black-news-celebrates-fannie-lou-hamer-sharecropper-senate-candidate-voting-and-civil-rights-activist/
(paid links)
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