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xi introduction Showing Love and Telling It Like It Is The Rhetorical Practices of Fannie Lou Hamer “The education has got to be changed in these institutions,” Fannie Lou Hamer boldly declared while addressing students at the University of Wisconsin– Madison. Invited to speak at the campus’s Great Hall in January 1971, Hamer wasted no time before indicting those in power. “We got to tell the truth even in these institutions because there’s one thing about it, folks—you elderly folks my age is almost hopeless,” she admitted, but “you got to know now that the children know what’s going on and you not going to be able to fool them any longer.” If the near-decade Hamer had spent traveling the nation, testifying about her experiences and challenging America to live up to its principles had taught her nothing else, Hamer learned that Americans possessed an anemic view of their history. The informal education Hamer gleaned through her civil rights activism incited her to “think about some of our past history,” like “when you never taught us, white America, that it was a black doctor that learned to save blood plasma to give a blood transfusion—you never taught that in the institution,” she insisted, chastising the faculty and administrators seated before her. “And you never taught us that the first man to die in the Revolution was Crispus Attucks, another black man.” Having “found out” these, and “so many other things” about the overlooked and suppressed accomplishments of African Americans, Hamer took it upon herself to encourage students at college campuses across the country “to work to make this a better place,” imploring them to follow her example and “deal with politics and the history of this country that’s not in the books.”1 As Fannie Lou Hamer traveled from Harvard to Seattle University, from Berkeley to Carleton, Shaw, Florida State, and Duke—without manuscript, just telling all those who would listen “what it is and telling it like it is”—some audience members doubtlessly wondered: who is this woman speaking in a xii Introduction southern black vernacular dressed in clothing that reflects her impoverished status, and what does she have to teach us? In fact, that patronizing sentiment was expressed by audience members on college campuses, at political conventions, and in organizational meetings alike. In 1969, when Hamer received an honorary doctorate from Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, for instance, a cohort of middle-class black alumni objected to the accolade because she was unlettered.2 Seasoned activists like Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), were similarly critical of the attention Hamer garnered; in fact, Hamer remembered Wilkins calling her “ignorant” and encouraging her, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) she represented, to leave the 1964 Democratic National Convention (DNC).3 Even President Lyndon B. Johnson took issue with her unlettered grammar. During a meeting of notable civil rights activists gathered to consider the two at-large convention seats that Johnson grudgingly offered the MFDP at the 1964 DNC, Bayard Rustin asked if Fannie Lou Hamer would be considered for one of those two seats, to which vice presidential hopeful Hubert Humphrey replied: “The President will not allow that illiterate woman to speak from the floor of the convention .”4 Perhaps most surprisingly, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an organization that eschewed hierarchical structure and exercised considerable disrespect for respectability, questioned the value of Hamer’s contribution. During a heated organizational meeting, when she spoke out against the proposed expulsion of whites from SNCC, several black staffers remarked that her comments held little weight because she was “not at their level of development.”5 Thankfully, there were others—people like Charles McLaurin, who consistently assured Hamer: “You’re somebody, you’re important,” like Ella Baker, who helped cultivate Hamer’s political philosophy, and like Bob Moses, who encouraged Hamer to express this philosophy at mass meetings, national conventions, and speaking engagements across the nation.6 Fortunately, there were also those movement participants like Moses Moon (formerly Alan Ribback ) and Sue (Lorenzi) Sojourner, who so appreciated the power of Hamer’s story and the inspirational quality of her voice that they recorded speeches she delivered before southern audiences. Beyond this, northern activist families like the Sweets and the Goldsteins of Madison, Wisconsin, also captured and preserved Hamer’s addresses before a variety of audiences there. This collection was made possible by...

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