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147 Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer by Dr. Neil McMillen, April 14, 1972, and January 25, 1973, Ruleville, Mississippi; Oral History Program, University of Southern Mississippi Of the many interviews Hamer gave during the last fifteen years of her life, this oral history interview—conducted by Dr. Neil McMillen, professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi—is distinctive. While several newspapers and magazines published interviews with Hamer throughout the 1960s, by the early 1970s the nation’s gaze followed the civil rights workers out of the Mississippi Delta and toward urban centers where race riots and antiwar rallies raged. This shift in focus left many Americans in the dark about the local work Hamer continued to do in her community. Most regrettably, information about her Freedom Farm Cooperative, which secured food, shelter, and jobs for the Delta’s poor, is not widely known. McMillen’s two-part interview with Hamer, conducted at her Ruleville home in April of 1972 and January of 1973, helps fill this gap in knowledge about Hamer’s local activism with her own commentary about Freedom Farm, in addition to the school integration and voting rights struggles she continued to wage. The later period in Hamer’s activist career, during which this particular interview occurred, is also significant, as the lapsed time imbues Hamer’s memories of her most well-known struggles and popularized experiences with additional perspective. McMillen prompts Hamer to reflect upon the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s 1964 challenge, their subsequent relationship to the Loyalist delegation, the 1972 Democratic National Convention, her trip to Africa, and much more. Through the process of sharing these memories, Hamer explores her past and present relationships with local and national politicians as well as civil rights leaders; and, in so doing, she fashions an aperture through which to view the alterations in her activist ideology over time. * * * 148 ruleville, mississippi Part I McMILLEN: Mrs. Hamer, why don’t we begin with something about your childhood life? Where were you born and what was your life like when you were a little girl? HAMER: Well, I was born fifty-four years ago on a plantation in the hills, the kind of place that’s something similar to Hattiesburg, the place where you are from. In fact I was the last child of twenty children, six girls and fourteen boys. I’m the twentieth child of a very poor family, sharecroppers [who] never had anything—family life, didn’t hardly have food to eat. My family moved to Sunflower County when I was two years old; that’s fifty-two years ago they moved here to Sunflower County, so I was mostly raised here in the Delta. In fact, from two years old up until now I’ve been in the Delta. My family moved here, and we moved on a plantation; the landowner was named Mr. E. W. Brandon. So we lived on his place until I was grown, but it was just hard. Life was very hard; we never hardly had enough to eat; we didn’t have clothes to wear. We had to work real hard, because I started working when I was about six years old. I didn’t have a chance to go to school too much, because school would only last about four months at the time when I was a kid going to school. Most of the time we didn’t have clothes to wear to that; and then if any work would come up that we would have to do, the parents would take us out of the school to cut stalks and burn stalks or work in dead lands or things like that. It was just really tough as a kid when I was a child. McMILLEN: What subjects did you like when you were in school, Mrs. Hamer? HAMER: I loved reading when I was in school. When I was a child, I loved to read. In fact, I learned to read real well when I was going to school. I never had a chance to go to school too long—about six years—but I believe I can compete today with a kid now that’s twelfth grade at least. McMILLEN: So how did you spend your life then from when you were finished with your six years of school? HAMER: Well, that was just in and out of school—in and out of school, until I was grown. I’d just have some months I...

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