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The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is
Abstract
Most people who have heard of Fannie Lou Hamer are aware of the testimony that this Mississippi sharecropper and civil rights activist delivered at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Far fewer are familiar with the speeches she delivered at the 1968 and 1972 conventions, to say nothing of addresses she gave closer to home, or with Malcolm X in Harlem, or even at the founding of the National Women’s Political Caucus. Until now, dozens of Hamer’s speeches have been buried in archival collections and in the basements of movement veterans. This book presents twenty-one of Hamer’s most important speeches and testimonies. It includes speeches from the better part of her fifteen-year activist career delivered in response to occasions as distinct as a Vietnam War Moratorium Rally in Berkeley, California, and a summons to testify in a Mississippi courtroom. The book includes brief critical descriptions that place Hamer’s words in context. The book also includes the last full-length oral history interview she granted, a recent oral history interview with Hamer’s daughter, as well as a bibliography of additional primary and secondary sources. The book demonstrates that there is still much to learn about and from this valiant black freedom movement activist.
This essay employs Dr Martin Luther King, Jr’s sermon, “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life”, as an acute lens through which to assess and impart new meanings to African–American activists’ strivings to reach an ideal state of humanness and communal holism as they fulfilled their personal, political, and spiritual missions in the food realm during the 1960s Civil Rights era and the contemporary food justice movement. Narrative analyses of these Black activists’ personal testimonies convey that their discrete journeys to completeness—what Dr King called the ideal state of humanity in its fullness—were not only facilitated by a divine calling but were also conditioned by the enactment of their Christian faith, particularly in reconciling the affective tolls engendered by their participation in lunch-counter sit-ins and by their quests to help alleviate food insecurity among impoverish populations in the American South. Indeed, when these individuals consciously endeavored to master the three dimensions of a complete life—recognize their agency, honor the interconnectedness of humanity, and seek God’s guidance in doing both—were they able to embody their best selves and demand the realization of a truly democratic nation.
This article uses Black liberation theology (BLIBT) as a framework to theorize “the spirit” in the alternative food and sustainable agriculture movement. While BLIBT was formally named by theologian James Cone, it was born of the struggles of Black people in the United States who believed that God called Black people to be free, and God called Black preachers to preach Black liberation. I argue that Black liberation is a grounded vantage point to understand how some Black people might find freedom through food and agriculture. In the first potion of the paper, I make a claim for the importance of studying spirituality in agrarian and food spaces, whether or not a researcher is spiritually inclined. In the second portion of the paper, I delve deeper into Cone’s articulation of BLIBT, and explore how we might begin to theorize it as an agrarian mandate including: a call for an urgent food source, liberation of the individual Black body, community ownership of land, the spirit of Black religious spaces, an emphasis on land reparations, and the freedom to dream. I conclude with a call for why an attention to BLIBT is called for in our present moment.
Heightened political polarization challenges civic educators seeking to prepare youth as citizens who can navigate affective boundaries. Current approaches to civic education do not yet account for the emotional basis of citizenship. This paper presents an argument for critical affective literacy in civic education classrooms. Drawing from concepts and theories in critical emotion studies, affective citizenship, and agonistic political theory, critical af-fective civic literacy challenges the rationalistic bent of civic education, and offers instructional strategies for educating the political emotions of students. The voices of late-arrival migrant youth enacting affective citizenship are featured in order to help illuminate the contributions of critical affective literacy to social studies research and practice.
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