Fannie Lou Hamer Walking Off the Plantation: Questioning and Transforming America

Summary

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Mrs. [Fannie Lou Hamer] comes into self-conscious being and begins her journey on the road to world recognition when she decides to walk away from the plantation that imprisoned her. She says, "In 1962 nobody knew I existed. . .and I hadn't heard of them either. Then one day, the thirty-first of August, I walked off the plantation". This is her first lesson then-that the will to be free must come from within and that to be free we must walk off the plantation, that is to say, away from the physical and psychological sites that imprison and oppress us. SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, had come to launch a campaign for voter registration and Mrs. Hamer had gone to a meeting to hear them speak of freedom. But no matter what they said or did, she had to embrace the idea and possibilities of freedom herself and commit herself to the awesome work and struggle to achieve it. And she had to make up her mind to stay steadfast on the way to freedom in spite of a rough and rocky road, full of signs and sites of casualties and costs of every kind, including the possibility of losing one's life in the cause of freedom. Indeed, she said death is a daily threat and "I may be killed, but I'll be standing up for God and my race until my time comes". But she said, if she falls in battle, it will be "forward in the fight for freedom".

To walk away from the plantation, regardless of how comfortable and comforting and to constantly question ourselves and society, leads us to dare to transform ourselves, society and ultimately the world. And this means, Mrs. Hamer taught us, that "every step of the way you've got to fight" and that "people have got to get together and work together". It is, she stated, in our interests, for "nobody's free until everybody's free". And only by working and struggling together, can those who suffer-Africans, Native Americans, Latinos, Asians and Europeans-end their personal and collective suffering, "make this country what it has to be" and "live as decent human beings".

[...] Mrs. Hamer taught us to question America in order to relieve it of its cherished illusions and reconceive and reconstruct it in the interest of a more expansive freedom and human flourishing.

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Fannie Lou Hamer Walking Off the Plantation: Questioning and Transforming America

Fannie Lou Hamer was born 1917 October 6 in Mississippi in the midst of the racial madness and social mayhem called White supremacy in which walls of brutal separation were built in life and law to imprison and suppress a whole people, and in spite of this, she lifted herself up to look over and beyond those walls...

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