The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is

“The Only Thing We Can Do Is to Work Together,”: Speech Delivered at a Chapter Meeting of the National Council of Negro Women in Mississippi, 1967

70 “The Only Thing We Can Do Is to Work Together,” Speech Delivered at a Chapter Meeting of the National Council of Negro Women in Mississippi, 1967 With passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty, Fannie Lou Hamer’s rhetorical trajectory shifted ever so subtly. Instead of relying almost exclusively on personal narratives highlighting the cruelties and violence of Mississippi’s white supremacist culture, as the late 1960s played out Hamer marshaled new rhetorical strategies and tactics for bureaucratic and electoral ends. Having been outmaneuvered in Atlantic City in 1964 and in the halls of Congress in 1965, she was learning to master the bureaucratic back channels, political allegiances, and arcane policy details so instrumental to controlling resources and thus political power. Even so, her gift for drawing historical parallels and contextualizing all manner of political infighting squarely within the Judeo-Christian tradition enabled her to translate complex realities for her myriad audiences. In this address, most likely delivered in Jackson, Mississippi, early in 1967, Hamer continues her attacks on the alliances among “chicken-eating” black ministers , white power brokers, and educated middle-class blacks. Always vigilant about how poor Mississippi blacks figured into any political equation, Hamer directed her anger specifically at the Sunflower County Progress Inc. (SCPI), a coalition of moderate blacks and whites seeking to attract Head Start monies from the federal government. The SCPI would compete directly with the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), with whom Hamer was aligned, and which was administered largely by poor, rural blacks. That a moderate and interracial alliance, however well meaning, could prove disastrous, if not fatal, is underscored by Hamer’s not-so-subtle analogy to three murders in particular: the 1961 killing of Herbert Lee by a white Mississippi politician; the ambush murder of Reverend George W. Lee, who was given up by a black Judas to local whites, on the streets of Belzoni in 1955; and the June 71 1967 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers by Greenwood white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith. Hamer probably did not believe that the SCPI had murderous intent in seeking Head Start support, but even so she was exceedingly wary— perhaps hyperbolically so—of wealthier blacks making common political cause with well-connected whites. As always, Scripture and experience were her twin guides in engaging Mississippi’s increasingly complicated post–Jim Crow political realities. * * * Thank you very much, Annie Devine. That was quite an introduction. I don’t know whether I can live up to it or not, but I would just like to say that I am very happy to be here. I started early today and I had to go back home and we finally made it about four-thirty this afternoon. I’m glad to see white and Negro working together for the cause of human dignity. I won’t have too much to say tonight, but I’ve been greatly shocked for the past few years and for the past seven or eight months at what I have watched in the state of Mississippi. In 1962, 1963, 1964 and ’65, when it was some of us traveling from place to place without money, without food, and at all times we didn’t have really decent clothes. I remember at one time when we was traveling from place to place a co-worker of mine, we would have sometime just enough money to get a sour-pickled wiener, and a pop to go from place to place, we drank that and we would eat that wiener together and we would go on to one place to the other, and my blood pressure went up to 230! And I know some of you see me with this leg, where I’m suffering now from permanent kidney damage because of my experience in Montgomery County. But what puzzle me now is the people that we couldn’t get to say a word, not only church doors was closed in our face, but teachers said: “We got it. So what is we got to worry about?” You know, “We got ours.” But today, all over the state, these same professional people that’s supposed to be leaders is turning us right straight back into Reconstruction. We’re going into the second phase of Reconstruction. This is a shame. But, you see, I’m one person in this building—I don’t know...