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121 “Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either,” Speech Delivered at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, January 1971 Of her scores of speaking destinations, perhaps none was visited more frequently by Fannie Lou Hamer than Madison, Wisconsin. Not only was Madison home to many progressives within a progressive state, but Hamer received significant and regular support for her Freedom Farm ventures from Measure for Measure. The organization was founded in 1965 by Madison residents, who had traveled south to forge contacts with rural blacks in Mississippi and Arkansas. Hamer first met with Measure for Measure members during a visit to Madison as part of her Office of Economic Opportunity training in 1966. In 1968, the organization brought thirty-five hundred pounds of clothes to Ruleville, and later in the same year they raised five thousand dollars to help residents of Sunflower County purchase food stamps. Measure for Measure would also be a frequent contributor to Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative as it sought to purchase land, farm animals, seeds for crops, and farm machinery. Before a predominantly white audience at the University of Wisconsin, one that had likely heard her speak before, Hamer strays from her autobiographical calling cards of August 31, 1962, and June 9, 1963. Instead she ranges broadly across several topics, including birth control, black power and black separatism , the story of Freedom Farm, foreign policy, federal bureaucracies, the interrelationship of all classes and races, and the importance of young people to a progressive political agenda. Of note also is the relative absence of religion, specifically the interanimation of movement goals with Old and New Testament parallels. Such an omission was not new for Hamer: often when speaking before northern progressive audiences, she would de-emphasize her literalist and occasionally apocalyptic reading of Scripture. For one of the first times in her speechmaking, Hamer calls attention to her manner of delivery: she did not work from a manuscript because she liked to 122 madison, wisconsin “tell it like it is” to “folk” like her in the audience. A detailed manuscript was a fiction, an elaborate and artificial rhetorical gesture that inhibited her ability to connect with audiences. Public speaking was always personal and imbued with the spiritual for Fannie Lou Hamer. As someone who had spent all of her religious life in the rural southern black church, she understood intimately the power of the impromptu word to connect with listeners—white and black. As such, while a manuscript might mask some of her educational limitations, it would also profoundly interfere with her ability to inspire and move total strangers to action. * * * Thank you very much, Martha Smith. I don’t know whether I’ll have to holler or not because I am just used to talking loud. So, I don’t have too much trouble having to carry my voice. But with this kind of introduction—Martha Smith is a very good friend of mine. I remember going on educational television with Martha here about two years ago here at the university in Wisconsin and honest to God this woman tickled me to death. You know, I had all kinds of trouble, but she just brought all of that out and for a while I could relax, just doing this show with Martha Smith. I would like to say this a beautiful audience out here to me this afternoon because I always like people. A couple of weeks ago I was doing a show in New York City for NBC on the role of a black woman and somebody asked a question during the time we was on this panel: how did I feel talking to a lot of people? I said, “I feel like I always feel because I know out there in front of me is just some more folk,” you know. So, you don’t have to worry about other people—no, you get up and tell them the truth. Now, you might be expecting me to have a long essay written down and I would have to use my glasses every time—[indicating] this and this way. But I don’t carry around a manuscript because it’s too much trouble. I’m just up here to rap and tell you what it is and to tell it like it is. As Martha said, I was born fifty-three years ago in Montgomery County. Now Mississippi, you heard about this twister the other week, but it was already a disaster...

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