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Mother of Black Women's Lib

Part A

Long before Women's Lib became popular, courageous black women like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth had already made a reality of the women's liberation movement by striving for freedom. That was over a century ago! But, even more recently, women's liberation was far from news to black women when it hit the newspaper headlines. And no one better symbolizes how far ahead of their time soul sisters were than Fannie Lou Hamer, the woman who has sometimes been described as the mother of the black female political movement.

It was a few years ago, in 1962, that Fannie Lou Hamer was fired from her job as a timekeeper on a Sunflower County plantation and was put out of her home where she had lived for eighteen years—all because she had dared to register to vote.

These occurrences began a remarkable career for Mrs. Hamer and resulted in one of the nation's most significant self-help plans for blacks determined not to depend on whites and to lift themselves out of poverty and helplessness, Fannie Lou Hamer was the ardent leader, the prime mover, the heart and soul of that movement in the most unlikely place in America—the traditional Old South setting of Sunflower County, Mississippi.

Oddly enough, the symbol of that movement is a "Pig Bank". It was Mrs. Hamer's idea, born from the hunger that had plagued the black farmers of Sunflower County through the roughest of sharecropper days and which didn't change with the New Deal, the New Society, or any of the other political promises cast before voters every presidential year. In Sunflower County, seven out of ten black families still were below the so-called poverty line in 1962.

For Fannie Lou Hamer, the youngest of twenty children born to a sharecropper couple and working in the cotton fields since she was six years old, food stamps, welfare, and handouts from conscience-stricken northern liberals were not enough and were not the answer. "You can give a man some food and he'll eat it. Then he'll only get hungry again," Mrs. Hamer reasons. "But give a man some ground of his own and a hoe, and he'll never go hungry again."

And that is what Mrs. Hamer set out to do—starting with a Pig Bank. With some funds from the National Council of Negro Women, she turned her back on the usual approach of buying food and handing it out to the hungry. She put it into a bank—a Pig Bank. She bought forty pigs-thirty-five lady pigs (gilts) and five gentlemen (boars). As each gilt became pregnant, she was loaned to any family who had room to keep her. After the "interest" arrived, in the shape of from nine to twenty baby pigs, each family returned the "principal" to the Pig Bank and kept the "interest."

About thirty-five Sunflower County families shared in the profits from the Pig Bank during its first year, and each kept a promise to give a pregnant gilt to two other families during the next year. In its second year, the Pig Bank put meat into the yards and onto the tables of over a hundred Sunflower County families. Mrs. Hamer stopped keeping records after the bank's third year. By that time, the Pig Bank had benefited at least three hundred families with a net profit of between two thousand and three thousand new pigs. "The idea has caught on so well," Mrs. Hamer reports, "that families all up and down the county are still passing on two pigs every year to friends or neighbors. And it had been going that way years since the bank began."

Again using the notion that it is better to plant seed money instead of eating it up, Mrs. Hamer set up Freedom Farms Cooperative among the farmers of Sunflower County. In 1969, just as the Pig Bank was starting to produce dividends, the Sunflower County folk put out a mailing to lists of likely liberal and conservative contributors—many of whom had been civil rights workers in the state—and got enough money, not to mortgage but to buy outright fifty-nine acres of farm land. Man cannot live by pork alone, they reasoned, so the acreage was quickly planted in butter beans and greens plus just enough cotton to keep memories of the old days alive.

By 1972, the fifty-nine acres had increased to almost seven hundred, with cotton on three hundred and soybeans on another two hundred twenty-nine. The dividends from the sale of these crops make Freedom Farms self-sustaining. The remaining acreage is planted in food crops, and harvesting them is not trouble at all. Anybody in or near Sunflower County who needs fresh vegetables is welcome to help himself.

Today, even many of Sunflower County's poor white families have overcome the historic racial gap of Mississippi living and have gone into the fields of Freedom Farms to reap the harvest of an idea whose time apparently has come.

Part B

As her dream of a Pig Bank and a Freedom Farms Cooperative began bearing fruit, Mrs. Hamer made some other long-held dreams a reality. One was a "Headstart" pre-school program which local established public schools had never wanted to get involved with. "We felt kind of foolish," Mrs. Hamer admits now, sitting down and writing up a two-page proposal calling for $100,000 of federal money for our pre-schools. There wasn't maybe twelve years of schooling together among all of us folks who were struggling to write the proposal.

By 1972, there were four Headstart centers throughout Sunflower County, and one of them is named "The Fannie Lou Hamer Headstart Center." Tending to the Headstart centers—teaching, transporting, cooking, cleaning, supervising—is the largest industry for black workers in Sunflower County at the moment. Second in size is a small garment factory which was also started with the brains and perspiration of Mrs. Hamer. And Freedom Farms Cooperative is providing another dividend—third largest payroll for black workers in the county.

Housing was the next of Mrs. Hamer's targets. And for that, there was no thought given to outside assistance. "All we had to do was organize everybody who lived in a shack—which was most of us," Mrs. Hamer says," and teach them how to take advantage of low-cost government and farm mortgages. Once we got started, we found that so many people wanted to take part we haven't even had time to name the organization yet," Mrs. Hamer chuckles. "We just sort of call it The Co-Op."

The housing effort was launched late in 1969 on paper, and the first families moved in during 1972. Seventy new homes have been built and occupied so far, and for most of the families, it was the first time any of them had unpacked their belongings inside a building which hadn't practically outlived itself already.

Housed are built by local contractors, black and white, and mortgages on a comfortable two-bedroom home can be as low as thirty-eight dollars a month for a couple on Social Security. The most expensive mortgages within The Co-Op is one hundred dollars a month for a family in which both father and mother are employed as teachers.

Asked about comments she's heard locally about her self-help programs, Mrs. Hamer says, "The one kind of remark which really means the most to me is one that I hear frequently outside on really cold mornings." She stands up, awkwardly moves to the window, her legs stiffened by childhood polio, and looks out of her own new house as she continues, "You'll see two men walking out their front doors. One will kind of stop, look around and say, Phew! I didn't realize how cold it was outside!" Mrs. Hamer explains, "Every place they ever lived before, it was always just as cold inside as it was outside."

For the one-time cotton picker, self-help programs which have turned back hunger and long-standing Mississippi racial patterns are a significant personal triumph. She still remembers vividly when plantation workers in Sunflower County, proud and straight, hardworking direct descendants of slaves and sharecroppers, were uprooted and left to wither in the sun first by the mechanical revolution which brought tractors and cultivators and automatic pickers to replace their hands in the cotton fields. Second, blacks were affected by the social revolution which brought civil rights workers and vast numbers of ardent liberals to Mississippi. Their striving to upset generations of traditions about the way black folks and white folks share the earth, in a summer or two of turmoil, served to uproot blacks even more.

When the "outside agitators" left, many of them for secure jobs and comfortable homes in the North, the Sunflower County blacks, whom they came to help, found themselves more helpless than ever. Farmers who once had let the mechanical revolution pass on by, preferring to keep paying dollar-a-day wages for cotton choppers to hoe their acreage and two dollars for a hundred pounds of hand-picked cotton, suddenly chose to mechanize. Gone were the jobs, and, with them, gone were the homes-miserable board shanties that they were. Likewise, gone was credit for groceries at the company stores. Like company stores everywhere, the plantation commissary too often was a thinly disguised device for keeping farm hands all but chained to the cotton fields. But it did put a pot of beans on the table regularly.

As the troubled 1960s wore to an end, the traditional way of living was gone in most of the South, and in particular around Sunflower County. Vainly, Mrs. Hamer and others in the county tried to turn politics into a path for significant racial progress. She was a delegate to three Democratic National Conventions, and her name has been on the ballot for state offices. But the mother of black women's liberation and her many ardent followers soon turned their main attention away from the promise of quick progress via politics and back to the land while they still had roots there.

Mrs. Hamer braved dangers to stay put. Once a house in which she was staying was riddled with shots. But Mrs. Hamer miraculously escaped harm.

She feels there is a future in Mississippi. She's been around the country enough, constantly traveling and speaking at civil rights meetings and seeing the reality of ghetto living firsthand in big cities, to know that there are no easy answers in migration to the North.

The Mississippi of the '70s, still among the most backward states in the nation, is not the same as it was in the '50s and '60s. Based on the remarkable progress in Sunflower County, Fannie Lou Hamer sees hope ahead, hope founded on both hard work and honest striving that can perhaps turn Mississippi into a decent place for both blacks and whites to live together in peace and even economic comfort in the '80s.

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