Saturday, Jan. 6, 2024 at 11p.m. on KPBS TV / Stream now with KPBS Passport!
AMERICA REFRAMED ushers in its milestone 10th season with the world premiere of "Fannie Lou Hamer’s America." Produced by Hamer’s great-niece Monica Land and Selena Lauterer and directed by Joy Davenport, the captivating portrait of one of the civil rights era’s preeminent icons through her own speeches, interviews and songs follows Hamer’s life from the cotton fields of Mississippi to the halls of Congress.
"Fannie Lou Hamer's America" is a portrait of a civil rights activist and the injustices in America that made her work essential. Through public speeches, personal interviews, and powerful songs of the fearless Mississippi sharecropper-turned-human-rights-activist, Fannie Lou Hamer's America explores and celebrates the lesser-known life of one of the Civil Rights Movement’s greatest leaders.
“Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave?” With those words at the 1964 Democratic Convention, Fannie Lou Hamer changed the course of Civil Rights forever. By working in the cotton fields of Mississippi from the age of six, Fannie Lou Hamer was keenly aware of the racial injustices that forced her family to labor so much while earning so little.
In childhood, Fannie Lou Hamer, her parents and her nineteen siblings lived with hunger. Like many young Black children, she began picking pounds and pounds of cotton in the fields, dropping out of school at the age of twelve. It was a lesson about poverty and race that was not lost on her.
Encouraged by her participation in groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Fannie Lou Hamer devoted herself to voter enfranchisement and increasing Black political representation. Her efforts would mobilize thousands of Black people to register to vote and inspire her historical run for Senate.
In August of 1962, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee traveled to Ruleville, Mississippi to talk to the residents about voting. In the audience was Fannie Lou Hamer. From that day forward, Mrs. Hamer became invested in voting rights for the Black people of Mississippi.
"Fannie Lou Hamer's America" explores and celebrates the lesser-known life of a Mississippi sharecropper-turned-human-rights-activist and one of the Civil Rights Movement’s greatest leaders. Through the layering of audio recordings and archival video footage of her powerful speeches, soul-stirring songs and impassioned pleas for equal rights, Fannie Lou Hamer tells her extraordinary story in her own words.
Why did Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Bob Moses and others organize a separate political party in Mississippi? For the inclusion of Black residents in state politics which was powered by white supremacy. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party would soon ruffle feathers all the way to Washington, D.C.
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For the family of Fannie Lou Hamer, she was a woman of power and presence as a civil and human rights activist. But to Jacqueline Hamer Flakes, Monica Land, and Jimmy Lee Lacey, she was also so much more - a mother, a wife, and a friend who was loving and giving. The in-depth interview provides an intimacy to Mrs. Hamer's life, work and legacy that can only be told by those who knew her best.
Credits: A coproduction of Monica Land; The Bitter Southerner; GBH WORLD Channel; American Documentary, Inc., PBS and Black Public Media with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
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Atlantic City, N.J., Aug. 10, 1964. The 1964 Democratic Convention. Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegates challenge Mississippi Democrats. Fannie Lou Hamer, center, sings during a MFDP rally on the boardwalk, along with, from left, Emory Harris, Stokely Carmichael (straw hat), Sam Block, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Ella Baker.
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Atlantic City, N.J., Aug. 10, 1964. MFDP delegates challenge Mississippi Democrats at Democratic Convention. Inside Convention hall: Fannie Lou Hamer and Bob Moses assess the Mississippi seating situation.
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Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer of Ruleville, Miss., speaks to Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party sympathizers outside the Capitol in Washington, Sept. 17, 1965, after the House of Representatives rejected a challenger to the 1964 election of five Mississippi representatives. Mrs. Hamer and two other African American women were seated on the floor of the House while the challenge was being considered. She said, "We'll come back year after year until we are allowed our rights as citizens." The challengers claimed that African American were excluded from the election process in Mississippi. (AP Photo/William J. Smith)
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Fannie Lou Hamer (undated photo)
By Jim Peppler/Southern Courier, Alabama Department of Archives and History
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FBI photo of Fannie Lou Hamer (undated)
Public Domain
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G. Marshall Wilson/Mandatory Credit Ebony Collection. National Museum of African American History and Culture
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Fannie Lou Hamer (undated photo)
Credit: Bruce Harvey/Delta Ministry, Fannie Lou Hamer papers, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, LA.
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Aug. 25,1964, Atlantic City, N.J. at the Convention Hall, Mrs. Fannie Hamer, member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, was one of the exciting highlights of the National Democratic Convention. Here, she walks firmly toward the convention hall entrance, to which she and other members of her group were finally admitted.
Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
