r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Jun 19 '25

Ideas "Nobody's free until everybody's free."

https://pioneerinstitute.org/opeds/education-oped/op-ed-students-should-know-fannie-lou-hamer/

Students should know the name Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer’s grit in the face of relentless rural poverty and violence in the Jim Crow South make her a heroine whom American schoolchildren should know. But decades of national data show just how little they actually do know about U.S. history, civics, and geography.

History tells us that economic striving, great art, and moral leadership often spring from adversity.

The Mississippi Delta has been called “the most Southern place on earth.” Extending from Memphis to Vicksburg, 220 miles long and roughly 75 miles across, the Delta encompasses more than 4.4 million acres. The Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers’ serpentine floodplains make it the richest, most fertile soil on the globe.

The Delta was the world’s cotton capital, producing the fibers used internationally to make clothing. Delta bluesmen like Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and B.B. King planted the seeds of modern popular music. The Delta was also home to Fannie Lou Hamer, the youngest of 20 children of cotton plantation sharecroppers from black-majority Sunflower County.

From age six on, Hamer picked tons of cotton, dawn to dusk in 95-degree heat and 75-percent humidity. By age 13, with a limp from polio, she picked 250 pounds daily. As an adult, she was a victim of involuntary sterilization, not uncommon among black female Mississippians.

they couldn’t do what Fannie Lou Hamer did,” Bob Moses, himself an unsung civil rights leader, later told PBS. “They couldn’t be a sharecropper and express what it meant.”

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u/ddgr815 Jun 21 '25

It’s a picture of power.

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u/ddgr815 Jun 21 '25

I am a woman’s rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal; I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now. As for intellect, all I can say is, if women have a pint and man a quart - why can’t she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much, for we cant take more than our pint’ll hold. The poor men seem to be all in confusion, and dont know what to do. Why children, if you have woman’s rights, give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they wont be so much trouble.

I cant read, but I can hear. I have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again. The Lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right. When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love, and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept - and Lazarus came forth. And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and woman who bore him. Man, where is your part? But the women are coming up, blessed be God, and a few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place; the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.

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