PROFESSOR ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH ON THE LEGACY OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
MEET THE EXPERT
The United States bills itself as “with the people, by the people, for the people”, Fannie Lou Hamer often noted at civil rights rallies. However, as a black woman sharecropper from Mississippi, she had lived under the racist Jim Crow laws of the American South and thought it more accurate to say, “with the handful, for a handful, by a handful”. The goal of the Civil Rights Movement was to “change that, baby,” she explained, and make “democracy a reality”.
More than half a century later, Hamer’s vision of what made democracy a reality still resonates. Her powerful speeches – delivered alongside Malcolm X, at women’s rallies and on the floor of political conventions – cited voting rights, ending poverty and providing citizens “proper healthcare” as core necessities. She also captured racism’s devastation. Not only did Hamer describe the horrific effects of police violence, but she talked about her children going hungry, and the hysterectomy that the state of Mississippi had performed on her without consent. For Hamer and her fellow activists, civil rights – combined with attention to economic and physical wellbeing – defined human rights. Rights without justice wasn’t much of anything at all.
Then, as now, civil rights issues were diffuse but intertwined. Fannie Lou Hamer’s speeches would have fit right in at a Black Lives Matter rally today, or as part of ongoing debates about reproductive justice and bodily autonomy. This insistence on thinking about structural transformation with spiritual transcendence was part of what continues to give the fight for racial justice its reach and its salience. The assertions of civil rights activists that they fought “for the liberation of all people” enabled them to connect their movement to others near and far, from struggles over power and identity at home to anti-colonial struggles abroad. And in considering their role in a still-evolving movement, modern-day activists continually return to Hamer’s
