Lanterns by Marian Wright Edelman

Author:Marian Wright Edelman [Edelman, Marian Wright]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7199-1
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 1999-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

MRS. FANNIE LOU HAMER

In 1977, on a flight to Hanoi with President Carter’s delegation on the Missing in Action (the Woodcock Commission), I received a wire that Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer had died. I mourned at the American ambassador’s home in Vietiane, Laos by singing and playing some of the songs she had sung to keep the light of freedom alive during the dog days of civil rights struggle in Mississippi. A mighty lantern’s flame had been snuffed out.

Mrs. Hamer’s extraordinary life and courageous witness and words have been shared by many co-workers who were with her during countless tumultuous days of struggle. Kay Mills’ fine book This Little Light of Mine chronicles her life and Charles Marsh’s book God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights devotes a chapter to her living theology. Stories by her friends Unita Blackwell, Mrs. Mae Bertha Carter, and other co-workers and my own moving encounters with her keep her spirit alive for me.

Mills tells the story of Mrs. Hamer, the twentieth child born of poor Mississippi sharecroppers, once asking her mother why they weren’t White. She internalized and lived her mother’s answer: “You must respect yourself as a little child, a little Black child. And as you grow older, respect yourself as a Black woman. Then one day, other people will respect you.” And we did respect Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer as a Black woman. And we loved her. I loved her.

I respected and loved her for her courage right after a cruel beating in the Winona, Mississippi jail. In Charles Marsh’s moving account she describes being beaten “with a thick leather thing that was wide. And it had sumpin’ in it heavy. I don’t know what that was, rocks or lead. But everywhere they hit me, I got just as hard, and I put my hands behind my back, and they beat me in my hands ’til my hands … was as navy blue as anything you ever seen.” The blackjack was passed to the second inmate who would be forced to beat a fellow prisoner. “That’s when I started screaming and working my feet ’cause I couldn’t help it.” This enraged her White jailers who “just started hittin’ on the back of my head.” Although the beating left her flesh injured, one of her kidneys permanently damaged, and a blood clot over her left eye that threatened her vision, back in her “death cell” in that Winona jail hurting all over she found her voice which broke free as she sang:

Paul and Silas was bound in jail, let my people go.

Had no money for to go their bail, let my people go.

Paul and Silas began to shout, let my people go.

Jail door open and they walked out, let my people go.

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