Fannie Lou Hamers Revolutionary Practical Theology Racial and Environmental Justice Concerns (Theology in Practice, 9) 9004431454, 9789004431454

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Fannie Lou Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology

Theology in Practice Editors-in-Chief Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (Vanderbilt University) Elaine Graham (University of Chester)

Editorial Board Tom Beaudoin (Fordham University) Joyce Ann Mercer (Yale Divinity School) Eileen Campbell-Reed (Union Theological Seminary, New York City) Claire E. Wolfteich (Boston University) Anthony Reddie (University of South Africa) Phillis Sheppard (Vanderbilt University)

Volume 9

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/thip

Fannie Lou Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology Racial and Environmental Justice Concerns

By

Karen D. Crozier

Cover illustration: Photograph of Fannie Lou Hamer. Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer Collection (T/012), Tougaloo College Civil Rights Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Crozier, Karen Denise, author. Title: Fannie Lou Hamer’s revolutionary practical theology : racial and environmental justice concerns / by Karen D. Crozier. Other titles: Revolutionary practical theology Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2021] | Series: Theology in practice, 2352-9288 ; volume 9 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020027146 (print) | LCCN 2020027147 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004431454 (paperback) | ISBN 9789004438071 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Hamer, Fannie Lou–Religion. | Civil rights workers–Religious life–United States. | African Americans–Religious life–United States. | Civil rights movements–United States–History–20th century. | African Americans–Civil rights. | Mississippi–Race relations. | African Americans–Civil rights–Mississippi. | Christian women–United States–Biography. | Christianity and politics–United States. | Political theology–United States–History–20th century. Classification: LCC E185.97.H35 C76 2020 (print) | LCC E185.97.H35 (ebook) | DDC 323.092–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027146 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027147

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2352-9288 ISBN 978-90-04-43145-4 (paperback) ISBN 978-90-04-43807-1 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

To Katherine Kelley Crozier and David Franklin Crozier (1938–2014), my biological parents, and Mother Dr. Wilma Ardine Lyghtner Kirchhofer (1940–2020), my additional parent

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Contents Foreword xi Rosetta E. Ross Acknowledgements Introduction

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1 Christian and Civic Education: Hamer’s Alternative, Redemptive Training 12 1 Hamer’s Intellect and Training in Perspective 13 2 Family Life and Black Church Training 14 3 SNCC Training and Civic Education 22 4 Christian Biblical and Theological Foundation 27 4.1 Christ 27 4.2 God 31 4.3 The Church and Kingdom of God 36 4.4 Justice and Peace 41 4.5 Land and Labor 45 5 Summary 49 2 Hamer and the Academic Disciplines of Practical, Black, and Womanist Theologies 50 1 Non-Academic and Academic Theologies in Practice 50 2 Roots and Vision of Hamer’s Christian Ministry 59 3 Hamer’s Invitation to White Academic Practical Theologians 69 4 Summary 76 3 Black Prey, White Predator: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Practical Theology of Racial Freedom in the United States “Wilderness” 77 1 Hamer’s Practical Theology of Racial Freedom: A Rich Description 78 2 Contextualizing Hamer’s Practical Theology of Racial Freedom 88 3 Hamer’s Creation Care Advocacy 93 3.1 Land Use and Access 94 3.2 Reproduction and Procreation 103 3.3 Preservation and Conservation 104 4 Hamer’s Corrective and Model 108

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4 Healing the People, Healing the Land: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Theo-Politics of Love 114 1 Love and the Civil Rights Movement: A Snapshot 115 2 Hamer’s Theo-Politics of Love: Four Stages 120 3 Hamer’s Theo-Politics of Love: Analysis and Outcomes 133 4 Healing Vision and Accolades 136 5 Summary 138 5 Revolutionizing the Diversity and Inclusion Paradigm: Hamer’s Leadership for Jubilee and Black Reparations 140 1 Revolutionizing Diversity and Inclusion: A Necessity 140 2 The Powerful Practices of Storytelling and Nonviolent Direct Action 148 3 Hamer’s Paradigm of Jubilee and Black Reparations 166 3.1 Christ’s Freedom 166 3.2 The Cross 170 3.3 Structural, Systemic Renewal 173 3.4 Black Power 179 3.5 Hamer’s Projects 187 4 Hamer’s Diversity Praxis and Practical Theology 190 4.1 Appropriating Hamer’s Thought Leadership 198 5 Summary 199 6 Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology: Sources and Relevance to the Field of Practical Theology 200 1 Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology: Sources 201 1.1 Lived Experience 201 1.2 Scripture 202 1.3 Tradition 205 1.4 Reason 212 2 Hamer as a Protowomanist 216 3 The Relevance of Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology 218 4 Summary 224 7 Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology in and for the Twenty-First Century 225 1 Hamer and Black Lives Matter 225 1.1 General Description and Assessment 225

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1.2 The Church 229 1.3 Religious Institutions, Black Women, and Social Movements Hamer’s International Influence 234

Conclusion Bibliography Index 256

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Foreword When I first learned of Karen Crozier’s intention to develop a practical theology drawn from the life of Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, I did not know the depth of the investigation of Mrs. Hamer’s life, speeches, and interviews Crozier would take on or that under the category “revolutionary” she would develop such a creative and significant analysis that solidly add a woman’s voice to the theological corpus derived from the Civil Rights Movement. It was clear, as I heard from time to time of the research she was conducting, that Crozier was being persistent in pursuit of materials about Mrs. Hamer and that her book would make two important contributions: (1) that it would help overcome the gap in knowledge about and attention to women’s important leadership roles in the United States Civil Rights Movement, and (2) that it would offer focused examination of the reality that many women activists engaged the United States Civil Rights Movement as expressions of their religious and theological views and identities, an area where there has been little scholarly attention. In this book, Crozier carefully explores Mrs. Hamer’s work and words and convincingly constructs a narrative about emergence of Hamer’s “theo-politics of love” to present an evolutionary account of changes in Hamer’s practices and thinking reflected in both the types of activities Hamer undertook or led and in the ever-deepening critically analytical assertions included in her speeches. The exploration chronicles Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer’s movement from a local participant in civil rights protests by responding to SNCC workers’ encouragement to register as a voter, to becoming a leading civil rights figure who articulated the struggle for human rights as a more worthy undertaking than seeking egalitarianism within a society and system in which equality meant acquiring the right to enhance one’s self or advance one’s group while ignoring or benefitting from the lower life circumstances of others. Crozier’s careful construction of a developmental account of what happened to one person as a result of engaging options presented through discursive and practical vitalities of the Civil Rights Movement suggests in microcosm the change that happened macrocosmically in the intergenerational imagination and behaviors of many black persons who, during the mid-twentieth century realized, experienced, and sometimes helped birth an opening in the trajectory of the country’s future. This change in the imaginary sometimes engendered, sometimes collaborated with emergence of cultures of the second wave women’s movement, affirmation of GLBTQ persons, knowledge about realities of differently-abled persons, the Hip Hop generation and a wide range of other diversities which had been marginalized and ignored. And while the

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opening in the trajectory of the country’s future offered new possibilities of inclusion, it has yielded other realities such as the alternative right movement, Tea Party Conservatism, election of the nation’s first African-descended president, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and more which communicate in the present moment the necessity of a legacy of activism and thinking modeled on Hamer’s practical theology through which there is continued advocacy for human rights. Crozier constructs Hamer’s practical theology as a theology of love wherein practices of love include pursuing black self-determination and empowerment, decentering white supremacy, and advocating for a true democracy in which all persons are free to be fully human. An important assertion Crozier makes about Hamer’s theology is that the breadth of the love that was its source included clear understanding of white supremacy as an enemy of love as well as vibrant openness to give love to and receive love from those against whom Hamer had battle intensely “once they came to know themselves, and black people, as human, too.” Interestingly, Crozier identifies Hamer’s theology not as “liberatory,” which would be in keeping with Christian theological constructions that emerged during and after worldwide liberation movements worldwide in the middle of the 20th century. Instead, Crozier uses the rubric “revolutionary” to name Hamer’s theology. Identification of Hamer’s practical theology as revolutionary signals not only the liberative nature of what Hamer did, but also indicates intensity of the dire circumstances in which Hamer operated and the militant anti-colonial thinking and disposition she had to take in the face of those circumstances. Crozier also identifies Hamer’s theology as revolutionary because of its aim to thoroughly transform conceptions of democracy in ways that would find objectionable and would seek to revolutionize the contemporary practices of diversity and inclusion that attempt merely to representationally add persons from the margins into an exclusionary, unfair structure. Fannie Lou Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology not only constructs Hamer’s theology, but it also does what few theoretical treatises do: it takes time to glean in systematic form the theological underpinning of the thinking and activist work by a person who was far removed from the halls of academic theoretical construction. In doing so, Fannie Lou Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology translates and disseminates the complex ideas that fortified a life devoted to continuously challenging the illogic of a social and political order bent on recreating and sustaining structures of injustice and inequality while identifying those structures as Christian, democratic, and good. In selecting Hamer’s life as the source of a practical theological construction, Crozier embodies a kind of egalitarian work of her own insofar as through attention to

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Hamer, whom many would consider a subject unworthy of academic inquiry, Crozier participates in reiteration of what Hamer and others alongside her pursued as they sought, through a “theo-politics of love,” to bring to the center of social and political action and discourse the lives of those most worthy of recognition and attention. Rosetta E. Ross Atlanta, Georgia, 8 November 2018

Acknowledgements This project was originally birthed in 2009 when I served as diversity administrator and practical theology assistant professor of an honor’s leadership course in Christian higher education. Fannie Lou Hamer was incorporated into the course, and then I began to incorporate her prophetic voice, ministry, faith, and leadership into my speeches. Eventually, she emerged as the main subject of conference and sermon presentations. I thank God, and her, for the life she lived, and the lessons she taught. Hence, thank you is due to my former provost, Herma B. Williams, who invited me to co-teach the course and supported my ideas in the designing and implementation of the class. Additionally, I would like to thank the following scholars, many of whom I do not know personally, who nonetheless recovered and resurrected the life and legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer in the twentyfirst century: Lea E. Williams, Maegan Parker Brooks, Davis W. Houck, Charles Marsh, Rosetta E. Ross, and Albert J. Raboteau. Their research and scholarship gave me a solid foundation to stand on and create another rendering of the contributions of Mrs. Hamer. In the spring semester of 2016, I was granted the Issachar Fund (IF) and Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) Sabbatical Writer’s Retreat Grant. A year later in the spring of 2017, IF afforded me the space, time, and financial resources while receiving free housing a stone’s throw from Lake Michigan to focus on a novel idea, Hamer’s creation care leadership ethic. Many thanks to the IF staff of Grand Rapids, Michigan: Kurt Berends, Mike Hamilton, Sara Hohnstein, Sara Merrilees, and Deb Sisson, for believing in me and this project. Assata Zerai, formerly at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and Maimouna Barro, director of the Center for African Studies at UIUC who awarded me a research scholar affiliate status at the Center for African Studies for six-weeks during the summer of 2017. Their leadership, support, office space, and institution’s academic resources propelled me in my research on Mrs. Hamer to greater depths. I was spoiled by the way the librarians took care of me as a visiting scholar. Assata, you went above and beyond in connecting me with local scholars, writing groups, interfaith networks, and Christian faith communities to share my research. I was welcomed with open-arms in unforgettable ways. The King Center staff of Atlanta, Georgia accommodated my research request on the day it was made. The service and resources were phenomenal and I wish my time there could have been extended.

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Thanks are due to my colleagues, mentees, dear friends, and/or Sistahs who read and provided feedback on at least one chapter. They are Hope Nisly, Angela Paula Hernandez, Anna A. Berardi, Marcel Woodruff, Colleen Windham-Hughes, Phillis I. Sheppard, Rosetta E. Ross, Mother Dr. Wilma Ardine Lyghtner Kirchhofer and the black women of Atlanta who gathered in the reading circle in March of 2017. Rosetta, you were my guardian angel by providing the necessary encouragement and freedom to persevere. From the beginning, you were intrigued by and excited about this project and they never waned. Hope, you did double duty by participating in the writing group with Angela and me as well as serving as my copyeditor. I am grateful for the way each of you celebrated earlier versions of this work and encouraged me to keep writing. My mother Katherine Kelley Crozier has been anticipating this book, and she has been an avid supporter of her baby girl alongside my sisters Patrice Crozier Keenan and Charlene Crozier McClain. My youngest brother Rodney Crozier, Sr., provided a wonderful meal and gathering of extended family before I went on my sabbatical to Michigan. Thank you, family, for your undying love. I am humbled by the fact that my academic life is supported and embraced by you. I know the Ancestors are smiling!

Introduction Liberation, freedom, healing, love, justice, education, and reparations were integral to Fannie Lou Hamer’s religious thought and practice. As a Christian black poor woman of rural Mississippi born in 1917, Hamer emerged as a formidable force during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Her Christian praxis was formed in the crucible of white domination and hostility, and her faithful way of being in the world enabled Hamer to bear witness to values and practices that affirmed and cultivated life and human flourishing. For Hamer, liberation and freedom were not merely abstract ideals, but were enacted and envisioned in her daily, lived experience encompassing various roles in religious and public life. Her critical analysis of United States democracy, racism, sexism, classism, and Christianity reflects the wisdom of one who was intimately engaged in the struggle for freedom and justice. In the process, she articulated and exhibited a clear, cohesive practical theology that inspired friends and communities, challenged foes, and changed the socio-political landscape of a nation. The fresh interpretation of Hamer’s life and legacy as a revolutionary practical theologian joins a reawakening of scholarship on Fannie Lou Hamer in the twenty-first century. Her contribution to the civil and human rights movements are documented by political scientist Earnest N. Bracey, womanist religious ethicist Rosetta E. Ross, and historian of religion Albert J. Raboteau clearly acknowledge and affirm the significance of her faith in public life.1 Bridgett A. Green’s womanist New Testament and early Christianity study positions Hamer as a protowomanist through the analysis of one of her speeches, and the insights gleaned provide Green with a hermeneutic to interpret gender and class injustice as found in Luke 18:15–17, a story about children in relation to the divine’s inclusive, redemptive reign and values.2 Hamer’s leadership 1 Earnest N. Bracey, Fannie Lou Hamer: The Life of a Civil Rights Icon (Jefferson, NC and London, UK: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 2011); Rosetta E. Ross, “Religion and Civic Life: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as a Metaphor for What Love Requires,” Quarterly Review: A Journal of Theological Resources for Ministry 20, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 125–39; Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003); Albert J. Raboteau, American Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals & Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice (Princeton, NJ and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press, 2016). 2 Bridgett A. Green, “‘Nobody’s Free until Everybody’s Free’: Exploring Gender and Class Injustice in a Story about Children (Luke 18:15–17),” in Womanist Interpretations of the Bible: Expanding the Discourse, eds. Gay L. Byron and Vanessa Lovelace (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2016), 291–309.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004438071_002

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in the African American freedom struggle by rhetorical and communication scholar Maegan Parker Brooks underscores Hamer’s keen, intentional oratorical and communication skills to move people to action.3 Brooks and Davis W. Houck’s edited volume of Hamer’s speeches recover and transcribe the spoken, prophetic word of Hamer, from 1963–1976, for contemporary scholars and audiences.4 In addition to Hamer’s faith in the public square and rhetorical and communication skills, community economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard and environmental justice and studies scholar Monica M. White provide an in-depth analysis of Hamer’s founding and leading of Freedom Farms, Inc.5 Nembhard and White highlight how Hamer’s political work was coupled with economic and community development, land acquisition, and subsistence agriculture as a form of resistance. Other aspects of Hamer’s leadership in early childhood education, social services programs,6 and involvement in WIMS or Wednesdays In Mississippi (an interracial, interfaith, crossregional collaborative of women organized by Dorothy Height president of the National Council of Negro Women in 1964) illuminate the vastness of her commitment to people that transcended electoral politics.7 Undoubtedly, current scholarship on Hamer includes yet expands the leadership contributions of Hamer beyond her more well-known voting rights activism and speech to the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, NJ, that catapulted her to the national stage. In the late twentieth century, two major book-length biographies of Hamer are significant in laying the foundation of remembering and recovering the life and legacy of Hamer. Journalist Kay Mills spotlights the significance of freedom songs and African American spirituals in her title, and what is believed to be Hamer’s favorite Christian hymn, This Little Light of Mine.8 Historian Chana

3 Maegan Parker Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir an Army: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rhetoric of the Black Freedom Movement (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2014). 4 Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck, eds., The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011). 5 Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2014); Monica M. White, “‘A Pig and a Garden’: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Freedom Farms Cooperative,” Food and Foodways: Explorations in the History and Culture of Human Nourishment 25, no. 1 (2017): 20–39. 6 Brooks, Ibid.; White, Ibid. 7 Debbie Z. Harwell, “Wednesdays in Mississippi: Uniting Women Across Religious and Racial Lines, Summer 1964,” The Journal of Southern History 76, no. 3 (August 2010): 617–54. 8 Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (New York, NY: Dutton/ Penguin Publishing Group, 1993).

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Kai Lee9 provides an academic historical reconstruction of Hamer’s leadership for freedom and justice. Both biographical accounts affirm and legitimize Hamer’s role in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s that scholars such as Brooks and Raboteau draw heavily upon. Fannie Lou Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology builds on book, journal articles, and chapter-length biographies on Hamer across various academic disciplines that acknowledge her Christian faith, and yet it attempts to do something more and different. From the lens and academic discipline of practical theology, the Christian thought and practices behind the more visible political and social activist, leader, and grassroots organizer are explored and examined. The analysis and contribution of the religious thought of Civil Rights Movement leaders has been identified by theologian Charles H. Marsh as a needed area of inquiry and scholarship.10 He pushes for an exploration of the lived, embodied experience and theological and doctrinal claims that emanated from the Civil Rights Movement thinkers and participants like Hamer. Marsh’s admonition is taken seriously in this examination and analysis of the religious thought and practice of Hamer. Arguably, this text could also serve as another contribution to historian Clarence Taylor’s project that calls for more scholarship on black religious intellectuals’ interpretation of history.11 As one who took her religion seriously, it will be demonstrated that Hamer’s Christian praxis as a practical theologian informed her way of being in the world that reflected and embodied liberation, freedom, justice, healing, love, education, and reparations. The operational view of Hamer as a practical theologian represents an innovative way of examining Christian practices on one hand, and the integration of thought and practice, or Christian praxis on another hand. Hamer is the object of study while simultaneously functioning as the subject because her meaning-making, analyses, critiques, and faithful ways of service, as a church woman of the Black Church tradition and preacher’s daughter, constitute the core sources and content of the examination. Drawing mainly from primary sources of Hamer’s speeches, oral history interviews, autobiographical accounts and writings, and human rights work, Hamer’s religious thought and practice, or practical theology, is reconstructed.

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Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999). Charles Marsh, “The Civil Rights Movement as Theological Drama,” in The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights South, ed. Ted Ownby (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 19–38. See Clarence Taylor, Black Religious Intellectuals: The Fight for Equality from Jim Crow to the 21st Century (New York, NY and London, UK: Routledge, 2002).

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This interpretation and creative construction of Hamer as a practical theologian showcase her seemingly fluid connection between professed beliefs and action while engaging concrete problems such as systemic, social, and interpersonal white violence against black lives and bodies. Hamer’s existence outside of the academy,12 the traditional pulpit, and mainstream politics did not preclude her from influencing and shaping freedom movements and their respective participants. Hence, it is shown that Hamer’s revolutionary practical theology challenges contemporary theological scholars, researchers, educators, pastoral leaders, and legislatures to see afresh how black Christianity, as practiced and articulated by Hamer, positively informs and transforms people, political machines, policies, and practices in society. The move to focus on a black female layperson in religious and public life instead of an institution (congregation or denomination) or pastoral clergy office as a project in practical theology is primarily done to showcase Hamer’s religious thought in action. Because practical theology is both an academic discipline and activity of confessional Christians,13 there is plenty of room to situate Hamer as a confessional, non-academic practical theologian.14 Furthermore, by situating Hamer as a practical theologian it is shown that Hamer amplifies and integrates aspects of academic practical theology that are usually perceived as polar opposites such as thought and practice, theology and ministry, and faith and politics. While not occupying an academic post, Hamer, nonetheless, attended to what academic practical theologians give attention

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See Brooks, 210. Although Hamer was not an official member of the academy as a fulltime faculty member, she received honorary degrees from Tougaloo, Shaw, Howard, and Columbia. Moreover, she was invited to teach a three-week lecture series, and accepted, at Shaw University, an Historically Black College and University (HBCU), on the topic The Black American in the 20th Century. At Simpson College in Indianola, IA, she taught on the civil rights for a one-month in-depth course. Bonnie Miller-McLemore and Joyce Ann Mercer, “Introduction,” in Conundrums in Practical Theology, eds. Joyce Ann Mercer and Bonnie Miller-McLemore (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2016), 1. In their introductory chapter, Miller-McLemore and Mercer provide a much richer, multivalent meaning of practical theology than I do here. My goal is not to repeat the diverse, complex meaning of practical theology but to set the stage for how the term is employed in reference to Fannie Lou Hamer. To situate and describe Hamer as a non-academic practical theologian should not be perceived as non-intellectual or anti-intellectual. Instead, as is more fully demonstrated in chapter 2, the aim is to demonstrate the ways that non-academic practical theologians such as Hamer can speak to academic practical theologians. Many scholars in practical theology assume that they exist to serve and enlighten the church without recognizing how the church and confessional Christians can serve and enlighten the field of practical theology too.

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to such as concrete problems, existential experiences, and the significance of religious and spiritual practices and tradition for encouraging and cultivating Christian faith and life, on one hand.15 On another hand, Hamer gave attention to the problems and experiences in a similar way that academic black practical theologians do by privileging issues and concerns of race and racism as a necessary starting point towards a liberative theology in practice for the black church which has not been the case of academic practical theology.16 Additional academic black “practical”17 theologies include black liberation contextual theologies, and womanist theoretical or methodological approaches for academicians who prioritize the experiences of black women.18 Like the scholars of African descent in the United States and African diaspora, Hamer’s practical theology legitimizes the sacred place and practice of racialized black Christian faith by refuting the dehumanization and perceived savagery of black people and critiquing assumed dominant white norms of Christian faith while simultaneously articulating the unique lived faith experience of black people.

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Miller-McLemore and Mercer, Conundrums in Practical Theology, 1. Dale P. Andrews, Practical Theology for Black Churches: Bridging Black Theology and African American Folk Religion (Louisville, KY and London, UK: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002); Robert London Smith, Jr., From Strength to Strength: Shaping Black Practical Theology for the 21st Century (Bern: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 2007); Anthony G. Reddie, “Not Just Seeing, But Really Seeing: A Practical Black Liberationist Spirituality for Re-Interpreting Reality,” Black Theology 7, no. 3 (2009): 339–65; Mark Gawaine Harden, “Toward a Practical Black Theology and Liberation Ethic: An Alternative African-American Perspective,” Black Theology 9, no. 1 (2011): 35–55; Anthony G. Reddie, “Beginning Again: Rethinking Christian Education in Light of the Great Commission,” in Teaching All Nations: Interrogating the Matthean Great Commission, eds. Mitzi J. Smith and Jayachitra Lalitha (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014), 239–52; Dale P. Andrews and Robert London Smith, Jr., eds., Black Practical Theology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2015). Here, the term “practical” is placed in quotes which follows the logic of Kathleen A. Cahalan and Gordon S. Mikoski who assert that theological academicians whose work overlap with practical theology, and vice-versa, do not self-identify as practical theologians and are not seen as such by practical theologians. See “Introduction,” in Opening the Field of Practical Theology: An Introduction (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 7. For example, as is shown in chapter 2, both black and womanist theologians deem their theologies to be practical although they do not self-identify as practical theologians. Evelyn L. Parker, “Womanist Theory,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, ed. Bonnie Miller-McLemore (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), 204–13; Phillis I. Sheppard, “Raced Bodies: Portraying Bodies, Reifying Racism,” in Conundrums in Practical Theology, eds. Joyce Ann Mercer and Bonnie Miller-McLemore (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2016), 219–49.

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Fannie Lou Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology incorporates and engages scholarship in academic practical theology, black practical theology, and womanist theoretical approaches in practical theology towards a more comprehensive recovery of a black churchwoman’s civil and human rights activism, and the Christian praxis that informed such leadership. Furthermore, the text broadens existing scholarship in black practical theology by starting with a marginalized member of, and in, the black church to reclaim a voice from the pews who articulated and exhibited a radical Christianity comparable to that of many black male religious leaders. This orientation from below, that also privileges black women’s experience, is consistent with a womanist theoretical or methodical approach to the study of religion or theology.19 This book reflects an expression of how the twenty-first century Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has created a broader socio-political, communal, transnational, and spiritual space for me to acknowledge, and assert, that “I Matter” too. As an independent academician, ordained minister of three Christian denominations (Church of God, Anderson, Indiana, a local black Baptist church, and Pentecostal church),20 and a post modern-day Civil Rights child born in 1969, I am grateful to and for the younger black generation of twenty and thirty-year-olds who lead the contemporary BLM movement in the spirit of Ella Baker, a major black female architect of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.21 Although they have by-and-large become disaffected with the

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I am pro-black women and girls’ liberation and survival and quality of life though I do not self-identify as a womanist practical theologian. Moreover, even though I am pro-black people and assisting the black church in responding in a redemptive, liberative manner to the urgencies of race-based injustice and oppression, I do not self-identity as a black practical theologian. I am a practical theologian of a darker hue who appreciates the scholarly contributions of black and womanist theologians yet who desires an academic theology that is more grounded in the life of the people and church, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, ability, or national origin. I was ordained by a local black Baptist congregation who acknowledged my, and other women’s, call to the pastoral ministry. However, I am not acknowledged by the broader body which is the National Baptist Convention. The other two ordination credentials are acknowledged nationally. See Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003) and Ella Baker, “‘We Need Group-Centered Leadership,’” in Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal: An African American Anthology, eds. Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009), 375–6. Ella Baker asserted “strong people don’t need strong leaders” and fostered a leadership model that did not evolve around one charismatic leader or personality. The BLM movement resembles Baker’s belief and paradigm and is accused of being leaderless. The media and

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institutional black church due to their sexual and gender identities and politics, in many ways, they represent dismissed and forgotten members of the body of Christ like black churchwomen. Their nationally televised leadership presence, though far too often misunderstood and misrepresented, assisted my leadership in the academy, church, and community to dispel and disrupt the national rhetoric of the United States being a post-racial nation. The exercise and assertion of declaring “I and WE MATTER” as darker-hued human beings in the United States was not necessarily intended as an announcement to the white male political and economically elite power structure to be aware. Rather, for me, it signaled more of a deepening sense of self-love, and communal, socio-political, and transnational commitment to bear witness to LOVE as I move, live, and have my being in the divine, my ultimate source and ground of love. Undoubtedly, the twenty-first century BLM movement elevated and infused gender and sexuality justice in the protracted black freedom struggle in creative, explicit ways that had yet to be done. The young people of the contemporary BLM movement have invoked, more so, black female leaders such as Hamer and Baker in ways that resonate with me while not dismissing or denigrating the strength yet limitations of the black male cleric and congregational leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. Like many of the young people of the contemporary BLM movement, Hamer experienced an anemic black church and racially segregated churches of Mississippi that did not provide her with a viable ecclesiology or Christianity to disrupt and transform the various forms of violence and injustice. Yet, she did not give up on the church or the Christian religion. As will be shown, Hamer experienced and encountered the church and the kingdom of God through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and provided a richer interpretation of the faith that included liberation, freedom, and openness in the here-and-now. Fannie Lou Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology is not a chronological biography through the lens of practical theology. Rather, it is a narrative retelling of her Christian thought and practice that recovers and analyzes various themes and ideas which are deemed integral to her practical theology while engaging issues of racial and environmental justice in her day that provides inspiration, instruction, and correction for today. Hence, Hamer is recovered and constructed as more than just a voting rights activist. With attention to the descriptive and recovery tasks, chapter 1, “Christian and Civic

broader public are not aware of the organizing skills, competencies, and spirit of one such as Ella Josephine Baker.

8

Introduction

Education: Hamer’s Alternative, Redemptive Training” focuses on the significance of traditional institutions such as the black family and black church, and newly formed, organic justice-seeking organizations such as SNCC’s Freedom Schools and Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) Citizen Education Program. The unique educational context, content, and instructional process that nurtured Hamer’s revolutionary practical theology are discussed. In addition, Hamer’s biblical and theological foundation is presented which become necessary to understanding her praxis in subsequent chapters. From Hamer’s redemptive, alternative training or education, she proclaimed “… whether you got a degree or no degree, all knowledge and wisdom come from God.”22 Chapter 2, “Hamer and the Disciplines of Practical, Black, and Womanist Theologies” identifies and describes Hamer’s non-academic practical theology by referencing certain themes and issues discussed in chapter 1 as well as comparing Hamer’s non-academic theology in practice to certain aspects of academic theologies in practice. In addition, the roots of Hamer’s Christian ministry and work are discussed, and the ways she is instructive to and for academic practical theology. More than anything, this chapter lays the groundwork for understanding subsequent chapters that are more heavily engaged with practical, black, and womanist theologies. Chapter 3, “Black Prey, White Predator: Hamer’s Practical Theology of Racial Freedom in the United States Wilderness,” focuses on Hamer’s experience of being hunted once she became a public, transformed non-conformist to unjust laws in both private and public spaces. The religious thought and existential experience of Hamer is recast in the linguistic discourse of religion and ecology to underscore her relationship to the environment that is diametrically opposed to white mainstream values and relationship to the environment. Moreover, the chapter includes a discussion on how Hamer is instructive for creation care advocates, white evangelicals who employ the bible as a primary lens in addressing the climate crisis. It is argued that a right anthropology must be adopted to care for all of creation instead of operating on the assumption that everyone privileges human beings over non-human life forms in creation or the environment, as many creation care and environmental advocates do. Through Hamer’s life as a sharecropper and only two generations removed from the institution of slavery, anthropocentricism is deconstructed, and the 22

Fannie Lou Hamer, “‘The Only Thing We Can Do Is to Work Together,’ Speech Delivered at a Chapter Meeting of the National Council of Negro Women in Mississippi, 1967,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is, eds. Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 73.

Introduction

9

victims of colonialism, environmental violence, and global warming are given voice as humans who have intimate knowledge about and care for both humans and non-humans in particular spaces and places. Hamer’s experience is like many black people who currently live in the United States “wilderness,” and the retelling of her narrative within this vein is instructive and empowering on how black people, both historically and in the present, contend with environmental predatory forces of the symbolic, ideological, and practices of white supremacy.23 Chapter 4, “Healing the People, Healing the Land: Hamer’s Theo-Politics of Love” is Hamer’s developmental, relational understanding of love and how her maturation contributed to the healing and liberation of many people in the United States. The role that love played in the broader Civil Rights Movement is discussed especially among SNCC members to situate Hamer within the broader movement. Chapter 5, “Revolutionizing the Diversity and Inclusion Paradigm: Hamer’s Leadership for Jubilee and Black Reparations” explores Hamer’s vision and practices of integration that focused on engagement and embrace of difference while being committed to changing structures and systems that would reflect freedom and justice for all. Although Hamer lived before the emergence of diversity and inclusion, her practices, processes, projects, paradigms, and policy engagement of integration for jubilee and black reparations are used to inform and instruct the contemporary discourse on diversity and inclusion. What Craig Steven Wilder’s (2013) Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled Histories of American Universities has done in provoking some higher education institutions to acknowledge and implement restitution, hopefully, Hamer’s leadership for jubilee and black reparations can do the same for the theological academy and church. Chapter 6, “Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology: Sources and Relevance” uses the Wesleyan quadrilateral to discuss key sources that informed Hamer’s Christian praxis. Furthermore, Hamer is positioned as a womanist, too, as defined by womanist scholar Layli Maparyan24 to demonstrate the significance and relevance of Hamer’s thought, and not just her practice, for the 23

24

Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan’s edited volume The Sky is Crying: Race, Class, and Natural Disaster (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2006) is a contemporary poignant racial and environmental justice critique through the lens of academic and pastoral theologians on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana. Although Hamer never experienced a hurricane in Mississippi, the experience, challenges, and invisibility of black poor folks both before and after Hurricane Katrina are similar to Hamer’s experience of Mississippi natural and white people generated disasters. Layli Maparyan, The Womanist Idea (New York, NY and London, UK: Routledge, 2012).

10

Introduction

theological academy. The chapter ends with Hamer in dialogue with black practical theology to examine how Hamer’s Christian praxis is instructive to address the chasm that exists between academic black theology and the black church as defined by Dale Andrews. Chapter 7, “Hamer In and For the Twenty-First Century” places Hamer’s revolutionary practical theology in dialogue with some theological aspects of the contemporary Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. While Hamer has been invoked by BLM activists especially for her fearlessness against white domination and violence, when considering a closer examination of her thought, Hamer provides a deeper and unsung theological perspective of the Civil Rights Movement than the one that is critiqued and understood by certain BLM advocates. Then, Hamer’s impact during Iran’s Arab Spring of 2010 is discussed to show her international appeal in contemporary struggles for freedom and justice. Fannie Lou Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology offers fresh insights on Hamer in at least four significant ways. First, it privileges and analyzes her Christian thought and the way it informed her development as a freedom fighter, civil and human rights leader, and grassroots community organizer of the Mississippi Delta and beyond. Second, it demonstrates her sense of a redemptive belonging and christianized human identity in a brutal, oppressive environment in ways that constantly acknowledged, and yet transcended, her social location based on race, class, and gender. Third, its descriptive, dialogical, and constructive tasks and foci honor Hamer’s story and the time in which she lived without leaving her fixed in the past. Her religious life and thought are described in her own words and then constructed to project a Christian black poor woman who had intellectual depth coupled by a faith in self, God, and change that deserve academic examination. Using Hamer’s voice and autobiographical writings is similar to the method employed by Catholic practical theologian Claire E. Wolfteich in Mothering, Public Leadership, and Women’s Life Writing.25 In the current study, Hamer’s life writing is examined which includes more transcribed oral speeches and oral history interviews than the texts she actually wrote. Nonetheless, like Wolfteich who “seeks to bring to visibility several [women] authors who are not elites, who are rather at the margins of their social contexts and the purview of theologians,”26 this study sets out to do the same for Hamer who existed in social margins though who became an early source for womanist theologians. 25 26

Claire E. Wolfteich, Mothering, Public Leadership, and Women’s Life Writing: Explorations in Spirituality Studies and Practical Theology (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2017). Wolfteich, 14.

Introduction

11

Fourth, this book engages Hamer’s religious thought and practice in response to concerns such as violence, post-colonialism, environmental degradation, creation care, reparations, and diversity and inclusion. This creative retelling of Hamer’s life and legacy not only analyzes Hamer’s religious thought and practice, but also makes her applicable to twenty-first century challenges, problems, and conflicts on the fault lines of race, gender, and class. When I began this project, the goal was to amplify and articulate Hamer’s Christian praxis and situate her within the field of practical theology to primarily privilege and analyze her Christian thought because I considered the scholarship to date either minimized her Christian identity or overemphasized her political activism. My intent was, and is, to present Hamer as a practical theologian who speaks from her particularity with authenticity. In the process, she cultivated practical ways of knowing and being that are accessible to the church, theological academy, and society. While some suggestions are made on how to engage and import Hamer, this is not a prescriptive text. Hence, there is work that each scholar, religious or theological educator, graduate or undergraduate student, seminarian, pastoral leader, and/or activist must do in addition to what is given. In the end, it is my hope that the descriptive centering of a poor woman’s ideals who happened to be both Christian and black expands the field of academic practical theology by defining and locating Christian beliefs and practices within the lived experience, lay-leadership, and transecclesial orientation of a twentieth century Christian freedom fighter.

Chapter 1

Christian and Civic Education: Hamer’s Alternative, Redemptive Training The biographers of Fannie Lou Hamer laud her ability to speak truth to power and to the people with her six years of formal education. Most attribute her faith and intellect to her family and black Christian religious tradition which instilled in Hamer self-pride, self-respect, and an undying thirst for righteousness.1 However, it was not until Hamer’s encounter of, and involvement with, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as a field secretary and participant in the Freedom Vote and Freedom School that she gained a local and national platform to exercise, and articulate, her faith and intellect in the struggle for racial freedom and justice. Moreover, I contend, SNCC also provided Hamer with a liberatory, democratic education in its content, curriculum, context, and critical pedagogy that far outweighed what she would have received in Mississippi underfunded public schools. Hence, Hamer’s alternative, redemptive training in her family, church, and grassroots affiliations provided her with the necessary and appropriate education to be a revolutionary practical theologian. What constituted her alternative educational experiences is the focus of this chapter while also being inclusive of Hamer’s biblical and theological foundation. First, Hamer is briefly positioned within a larger leadership framework on addressing “the problem of the color line.” This is to demonstrate those who came before her while highlighting similarities and differences between Hamer and her black freedom struggle predecessors. Second, the teaching-and-learning experiences she received, in her family and church followed by civic training from SNCC, are discussed. The fourth and final part focuses on Hamer’s biblical and theological foundation through the following five categories: 1) Christ, 2) God, 3) the church and the kingdom of God, 4) justice and peace, and 5) land and labor.2

1 Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (New York, NY: Plume Publishing, 1993); Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Maegan Parker Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir An Army: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rhetoric of the Black Freedom Movement (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2014). 2 The five theological categories were chosen for two primary reasons. First, in my research of Hamer’s speeches, biographers, and oral interviews, God, Christ, and the church and king© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004438071_003

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13

Hamer’s Intellect and Training in Perspective

Hamer did not receive an extensive, formal education. Yet, her intellectual prowess and theological, sociopolitical insights far exceeded the sixth-grade education and four-months long school years she received from a racist, oppressive Mississippi public school system. Possibly, she was confident in her God who, to Hamer, was the source of all knowledge and wisdom regardless of one’s academic pedigree. As one who was apparently taught by God, Hamer was able to teach others to be believe in and enact life, freedom, and justice.3 Arguably, Hamer should be acknowledged as an intellectual, too, along with her freedom fighting predecessors such as Ida B. Wells, an investigative journalist who launched an anti-lynching national and international crusade to address the mob lynching of black men and women, and W. E. B. Du Bois, the first black Harvard doctoral graduate whose classic The Souls of Black Folk (1903) still informs black life and thought today. From Hamer’s critical and succinct speeches, from her broad engagement of people, issues, topics, and needs, and from her oral history interviews, one will come to understand her epistemological depth and breadth that flowed from an innate knowledge that could not be found in textbooks even if she would have had extensive access to them. What she received and perceived, and then passed on to others invite practical theologians and theological educators to think broader when speaking of the lettered and unlettered. As is presented and argued below, Hamer was lettered in the things that mattered the most to and for the people, and she was able to convey truth and knowledge in ways that pierced the hearts and minds of the people. Hamer’s thought leadership in the latter part of the twentieth century was informed by alternative, redemptive models of education, primarily Christian and civic, that contributed to her revolutionary practical theology. dom of God were prominent though not extensive or engaged systematically. What Hamer shared about these topics that were mostly framed in her work as a political activist, was nonetheless significant and worthy of note in constructing her Christian thought and practice. Second, the categories of justice and peace, and land and labor were chosen because as I became sensitized to Hamer’s relationship to the land, I assessed she was a figure to speak in and to a current context that asserts that black people do not care about various climate/environmental challenges. 3 The phrase of Hamer being “taught by God” is drawn from Karen Marie Yust (professor of Christian education) and E. Bryon Anderson’s (professor of worship and ministry) Taught By God: Teaching and Spiritual Formation (Atlanta, GA: Chalice Press, 2006). Yust and Anderson focus on how Christian educators in the church and academy should be taught by God as they are teaching others. In addition, they provide models/approaches of being taught that draw from spiritual disciplines and spirituality studies particularly for Protestant Christians. While Hamer does not fit within any of the models they discuss, she provides a new way for Catholic and Protestant Christians to consider the organic, indigenous familial and communal ways of learning and being taught by the divine.

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Chapter 1

Family Life and Black Church Training

As the youngest of twenty children (six girls and fourteen boys) in a sharecropping family, and granddaughter of a formerly enslaved African, Hamer was birthed into the two-parent home of James Lee and Lou Ella Townsend. To many black, rural southerners, the sharecropping system was another form of slavery due to the following factors. First, the white landowner dictated all the terms and conditions for the supposedly-free black labor force. For example, in exchange for labor, the landowner provided a parcel of land, a shack to reside in with no electricity or running water, seed, fertilizer, and farming equipment.4 Second, in name only, “sharecropping” was intended to be a split of the harvest crop financial yield, usually cotton, between the sharecropper and the landowner. However, due to the unjust pricing and compensation system of the landowner, and the credit for rent, seed, fertilizer, and farm equipment, the sharecropper never cleared enough money to get out of debt. Hence, in practice, the sharecropping system represented a state of perpetual debt for the worker. Third, the limited formal education of the freed slaves, and their offspring, in reading, writing, and arithmetic made them even more vulnerable to the landowner’s cheating and exploitative labor and economic practices. Fourth, there was little to no political or legal recourse for the sharecropper because the southern states, such as Mississippi, enacted and enforced their own laws and legislation in opposition to, and despite, federal policies, and regulations on one hand. Then, on another hand, according to J. Todd Moye, an historian of the Civil Rights Movement, the Mississippi Delta became a substation of the federal government which dictated “what to plant, when to plant it, where to plant, whom to hire, how to house the farm workers, how to finance the farm, not to mention public welfare, and the list goes on.”5 At the local, state, and national levels, the black sharecroppers were institutionally and systemically being entrapped by the economic and political landowning elite. Fannie Lou is one among many examples of the entrapment of the sharecropping system. She recalled how she started picking cotton at the age of six when the landowner enticed her to pick at least thirty pounds of cotton a week in exchange for some food and candy items, that he knew the young Fannie

4 Smithsonian Institute, 2015, 5. 5 J. Todd Moye, Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945–1986 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 19, 68.

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Lou loved, from his store.6 She accomplished that goal and was compensated for her efforts, but then she was forced to pick twice as much the following week, and by the age of thirteen, she was picking two to three hundred pounds of cotton.7 In another interview in recalling her childhood entrance into the cotton field, she realized, “… I found out what actually happened was he was trapping me into beginning the work I was to keep doing and I never did get out of his debt again.”8 Though she and her family, and other black families would perform the necessary labor of tending to the land, they rarely received sufficient funds to live during the winter months when field labor was not required and no other income was available. Here is an account of one of those harsh and brutal winters of starvation and malnutrition when Hamer notes at length, I used to watch my mother try and keep her family going after we didn’t get enough money out of the cotton crop. To feed us during the winter months mama would go ‘round from plantation to plantation and would ask the landowners if she could have the cotton that had been left, which was called scrappin’ cotton. When they would tell her that we could have that cotton, we would walk for miles and miles and miles in the run of a week. We wouldn’t have on shoes or anything because we didn’t have them. She would always tie our feet up with rags because the ground would be froze real hard. We would walk from field to field until we had scrapped a bale of cotton. Then she’d take that bale of cotton and sell it and that would give us some of the food we would need.9 As Hamer remembers, the life of her black sharecropping family was fraught with numerous insecurities and challenges. Inadequate food, physical protection, and access to work were normal conditions that plagued her nuclear family of twenty-two. From working for the white male landowner to begging from the white male landowner, her experience could have caused irrevocable damage on the young mind and spirit of Hamer. As she recalled in her adulthood, the cruelty of sharecropping was multilayered. For example, Hamer claimed,

6 Fannie Lou Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges,” in Mississippi Writers: Reflections of Childhood and Youth, Volume II: Nonfiction, ed. Dorothy Abbott (Jackson, MS and London, UK: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 321. 7 Hamer, Ibid. 8 Fannie Lou Hamer and Jack O’Dell, “Oral History/Interview: Life in Mississippi,” Civil Rights Movement Veterans, http://www.crmvet.org/nars/flh1.htm. Accessed on March 17, 2017. 9 Hamer and O’Dell, Ibid.

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Number one, what I found since I been old enough, it [sharecropping] always had too many ‘its’ in it. Number one, you had to plow it. Number two, you had to break it up. Number three, you had to chop it. Number four, you had to pick it. And the last, number five, the landowner took it. So, this left us with nowhere to go; it left us hungry. Because my family would make sixty and seventy bales of cotton and we would pick all of the cotton and then, after we was finished picking the cotton, we would sometimes come out in debt. We never had so many days in my life that we had cornbread and we had milk and sometimes bread and onions. So, I know what the pain of hunger is about.10 The bedrock in Hamer’s life that enabled her to overcome hunger and racial injustice was her mother, who modeled how “to make a way out of no way.” Fannie Lou spoke highly of her mother. Hamer praised her mother when she stated, “My mother was a great woman. She went through a lot of suffering to bring the twenty of us up, but still she taught us to be decent and to respect ourselves, and that is one of the things that has kept me going.”11 Fannie Lou’s awareness of the self-giving life of her mother who had to suffer the racial, gender, and class hostility to raise a family of twenty inspired Hamer to give her life unto others, including her mother. Hamer cared for her ailing, blind mother in Mrs. Townsend’s final years. In addition to self-respect, Fannie Lou’s mother instilled within her a deep sense of black pride and worth. In Chana Kai Lee’s historical biographical dissertation study on Hamer, she notes, “By Hamer’s own admission, Lou Ella Townsend certainly was a woman who believed deeply that Black was beautiful and not a shade less than beautiful.”12 When the young Fannie Lou was disheartened by the hard work that did not translate into proper food, clothing, shelter, health care, and transportation, and the lack of work by white people that somehow guaranteed them plenty to eat, and fine clothing and cars, she told her mother that she wanted to be white.13 According to Hamer, her mother said, “Don’t ever say that again. Don’t feel like that. We are not bad

10

11 12 13

Fannie Lou Hamer, “‘Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either,’ Speech Delivered at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, January 1971,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is, eds. Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 123. Hamer and O’Dell, “Oral History/Interview: Life in Mississippi.” Chana Kai Lee, “Passionate Pursuit of Justice: The Life and Leadership of Fannie Lou Hamer” (PhD Diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1994), 78. Hamer and O’Dell, “Oral History/Interview: Life in Mississippi.”

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because we’re black people.”14 The young Hamer learned at least four valuable lessons. The most obvious one is that black people do not represent a vice, or an inherent deficiency among humanity. Second, white people were not inherently good, or better than black people, just because they acquired basic human needs at the expense of black labor. Third, one’s morality, good or bad, is not contingent upon the color of one’s skin. Fourth and possibly the most important, the young Fannie Lou was encouraged to embrace her darker-hued skin. To assist her youngest child in this development, Mrs. Townsend gave the young Hamer a black doll, and she was the first and only child in her Ruleville community that had one.15 While eavesdropping in her mother’s belongings during fieldwork, the young Hamer discovered a gun in her mother’s basket that was used while picking cotton. Although she never mentioned ever seeing her mother using the gun, she does vividly recall how as an eight-year-old, guns were used as a tool of self-defense against white individuals and lynch mobs who attempted to exert absolute power over black people. Hence, the young Hamer learned that guns were not to be used as a pre-emptive strike to take another life at will. Moreover, as will be shown in chapter 4 in her theo-politics of love, neither did she believe that guns and violence could solve the deep-seated national problems of racism, poverty/materialism, and militarism. Another major contribution of Lou Ella to her daughter was the gift of song to overcome the doggedness of hunger, hard work without proper compensation, and subjugation. In Fannie Lou Hamer: Songs My Mother Taught Me, a compilation of Hamer singing black spirituals and hymns, and folksongs, and her commentary on life in Mississippi, Hamer pays tribute to the woman whom she lauds as “… a honest and remarkable woman that taught us to stand up regardless of the odds that was against us.”16 Singing was at times a panacea, and other times a window into the sorrow and pain of her mother. Oh Lord, You Know Just How I Feel is a selection that Hamer recalls her mother singing after being in the field as early as 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. until late in the evening to dispel the loneliness and holding out hope for a better world in the present age. A song that Hamer’s mother taught her, but did not make the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and African American Legacy Recordings is When I Can Read My Title Clear. Hamer identifies the 14 15 16

Hamer and O’Dell, Ibid. Lee, “Passionate Pursuit of Justice: The Life and Leadership of Fannie Lou Hamer,” 77. Hamer, Fannie Lou Hamer: Songs My Mother Taught Me (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Folkways Recordings, 2015), 5. https://folkways.si.edu/fannie-lou-hamer/ songs-my-mother-taught-me/african-american-gospel-struggleprotest/music/album/ Smithsonian. Accessed on March 3, 2017.

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composer as Dr. Isaac Watts, a British minister and composer, and frequently mentioned the verse, though not the title, at the end of her speeches. The verse cited by Hamer is: “Should earth against my soul engage, and hellish darts be hurled, but when I can smile at Satan’s rage and face the frowning world.”17 She was inviting her audience to stand up against any odds as her mother had taught her. Fannie Lou’s father, James Lee, was a minister in addition to being a sharecropper. There exists limited known accounts of Hamer’s mentioning of her father. Possibly, she was a mama’s girl. Lee documents that when Fannie Lou would get into mischief and her father would attempt to discipline her, Lou Ella would always come to Fannie Lou’s rescue.18 The protection she received from her mother, and the apparent closeness they shared (Hamer cared for her ailing and aging mother in 1953 by moving her in with her family several years before Lou Ella died in 1961) possibly could explain Hamer’s limited references to her father. Nevertheless, she recalled, “but my father, year after year, didn’t get too much money and I remember he just kept going.”19 The fortitude and perseverance of her father to help raise twenty children, and to feed twenty-two people, as a sharecropper, was undoubtedly challenging and unjust though not insurmountable. James Lee did lead his family out of perpetual debt one year by making enough money to buy some wagons and cultivators, plow tools, mules, and a car.20 Fannie Lou experienced the difference between sharecropping and creating a life because she claimed, “We were doing pretty well. He even started to fix up the house real nice.”21 Unfortunately, Mr. Townsend’s dreams to produce a better life for him and his family were short-lived. According to Hamer, a white male poisoned their livestock one night and when they discovered the animals, it was too late to save them.22 Consequently, Hamer’s family never recovered and returned to the rigged sharecropping system to survive. Fannie Lou remembered her father as one who read scripture to his family, and therefore he had some basic reading skills. One verse that James Lee used 17

18 19 20 21 22

Hamer, “‘I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,’ Speech Delivered at a Freedom Vote Rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, Fall 1963,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is, eds. Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 6. Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 7–8. Hamer and O’Dell, “Oral History/Interview: Life in Mississippi.” Hamer and O’Dell, Ibid. Hamer and O’Dell, Ibid. Hamer and O’Dell, Ibid.

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to read, as recalled by the adult Hamer, was “Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.”23 The ability to envision a different world, and to trust in God and self, fueled the life and leadership of Fannie Lou. Biographers of Hamer document how her parents were proud of Fannie Lou’s reading, speaking, poetry writing, and spelling abilities.24 Often, they placed her on the table to read, and recite poetry to family members and neighbors as the supportive, affirming audience. In addition, Brooks connects the brilliant, rhythmic storytelling of Mr. Townsend, which occurred after a long day in the field while eating roasted peanuts, that influenced Hamer’s oratorical skills in communicating difficult content that was both humorous and poignantly stirring. Hamer contended that her parents, and other black parents, taught their children to love. Hamer seemed to have understood learning to love as an educational and cultural experience shared by black Mississippi, when she noted, We were taught something in Mississippi I’m not ashamed of today. We were taught to love. We were taught to not hate. And we were taught to stand on principle, stand on what we believe. I often remember my mother telling me ‘If you respect yourself, one day somebody else will respect you.’25 Hamer was proud of the love she had for herself and all of God’s human creatures. Loving her white enemy and oppressor was neither embarrassing nor hidden. Furthermore, it included self-respect, black pride, and standing up and for beliefs even if they differed from one’s white enemy and oppressor. The first-generation sharecropping parents of Mississippi transmitted a power and practice that protected Hamer, and many other black children, from bitterness, self-destructive rage, hatred of white people, and violent retaliation toward white people. Like the limited references to her father, Hamer rarely referred to the positive role the black church played in her childhood and adult life. As a child, she attended Stranger’s Home Baptist Church, and was baptized in the Quiver

23 24 25

Fannie Lou Hamer, “Foreword,” in Stranger at the Gates: A Summer in Mississippi, Tracy Sugarman (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1966), ix. See Lee, For Freedom’s Sake and Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir An Army. Hamer, “Foreword,” viii.

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River when she was twelve years old.26 As an adult, she credited the church for being a place and space that helped to resist the temptation of bitterness. More specifically, she stated, “The reason that we Negroes in Mississippi are not bitter is because most of us were brought up in church from an early age. A child has to be taught to hate. We were taught to love and to have faith.”27 What Hamer had learned from her family, to love and have faith, was reinforced in the church, and vice-versa. The continuity and consistency of two pillars of strength within her black family and church fashioned Fannie Lou to withstand various trials and conditions of suffering, sorrow, and injustice. For example, she received a sterilization, in 1961, without her permission when she entered the hospital for a simple routine of the removal of a benign tumor on her stomach.28 Religious, sociological, historical, and multidisciplinary scholarship on the black church convey this institution as the only independent, empowering entity in black life and culture.29 Hamer felt the same. She stated, “The only thing we’ve had in Mississippi that we could really call our own is the church.”30 However, in several of her speeches and writings, she was hard on black preachers and other black middle-class folks such as educators who, in her mind, either wanted to be white or were afraid to fight for freedom. She had grown weary of black church leaders “selling out to the white power structure.”31 She explained the depth of her frustration when she claimed, “Some-

26 27 28 29

30 31

Hamer cited in John Egerton, A Mind to Stay Here: Profiles from the South (New York, NY: Macmillan Press, 1970), 96. Hamer, Ibid. Lee, Passionate Pursuit for Justice, 199. See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, NY: Bantam, 1989) [originally published in Chicago, IL: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903] and The Negro Church (Atlanta, GA: Atlanta University, 1903); Carter G. Woodson, The History of the Negro Church (Washington, DC: The Associated Publishers, 1921); Elijah B. Mays and Joseph William Nicholson, The Negro’s Church (New York, NY: Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1933); E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America (Liverpool, UK: University of Liverpool); Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1978); Peter J. Paris, The Social Teachings of the Black Church (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1985); C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990); Barbara Diane Savage, “Biblical and Historical Imperatives: Towards a History of Ideas about the Political Role of Black Churches,” in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (New York, NY: Continuum, 2001), 367–88; Anne H. Pinn and Anthony B. Pinn, Fortress Introduction to Black Church History (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2002); Henry H. Mitchell, Black Church Beginnings: The Long-Hidden Realities of the First Years (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004). Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges,” 327. Hamer, Ibid.

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times I get so disgusted I feel like getting my gun after some of these school teachers and chicken eatin’ preachers.”32 What Hamer felt like doing and what she actually did are two different things. Hamer never killed anyone.33 Nonetheless, her feelings of frustration and disgust with black preachers can be understood in the context that she wanted to protect and preserve the only space and place that belonged to black people—the sacred site in which they gathered to worship and commune with self, each other, and the divine without direct white interference. Hamer was committed to sustaining the place that reinforced love for self and others in the midst of such hostility, hate, and violence. Although Hamer learned to love from the black church and was encouraged to read and recite scriptures in both the family and the church, she accused people in black and white churches of being hypocrites.34 In her critique of those who occupied the pews, Hamer had wished that their understanding of Christian love would break the barrier of the color-line, and that many more Christians (lay and clergy) would get involved in the Civil Rights Movement. However, as has been shown, she was hard on the ministers’ refusal to participate in the liberation, freedom, and dignity of all people. Another public denouncement included, “So we are telling the ministers, we are going to start singing some songs for them and some of the songs is going to be ‘Shall We Gather at the River,’ and we going to leave them there!”35 Hamer’s harsh critique was not without hope for the ministers for she stated, Maybe if all of the ministers in this nation—black and white—would stand up tonight and say, ‘Come, earth’s people, it is not too late. God have given us time!’ Perhaps we could speed up the day when all men can feel as I do. I am not afraid tonight. Freedom is in my soul and love is in my heart.36

32 33

34 35

36

Hamer, Ibid. More is said on why Hamer had problems with black professionals such as teachers in chapter 4. Here, attention is given to the black male ministers. Hamer threatened to kill Aaron Henry, a co-delegate of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. When Henry wanted to accept a compromise that the majority of the MFDP delegates had refused, Hamer informed him of the consequences if he did. See Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 99. Hamer, “America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,” 125. Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’ Speech Delivered at the Vietnam War Moratorium Rally, Berkeley, California, October 15, 1969,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 101. Hamer, “‘Is It Too Late?,’ Speech Delivered at Tougaloo College, Tougaloo, Mississippi, Summer 1971,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 133.

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Hamer learned the good, the bad, and ugly from, and about the church. Interestingly, when she initially became involved in the Civil Rights Movement and evicted off of the white man’s plantation, she identified that as the point when she started to work for Christ.37 This suggests that prior to trying to register to vote and becoming homeless, Hamer was not consciously involved with advancing the aims of Christ. While being in perpetual debt to a white male landowner without access to resources to move beyond his control or the Jim Crow system, it was clear to Hamer that she was not working for Christ. There was no dignity or freedom in such unjust labor. Was this Hamer’s way of saying that black people could not have two masters in Christ and the white landowner? Was this Hamer’s way of intimating that the church, by and large, was not working for Christ because of its acceptance of the status quo through the championing of segregation and white supremacy by many white Christians, and the inability of black Christians to disrupt the system? Possibly, like the black women in Carla Peterson’s “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880), who were excluded from leadership in the local and institutional church, Hamer understood the ONE to whom she belonged, and whose ends she was working to achieve once she was ejected from the plantation.38 Like some of her northern black female predecessors in the person of Sojourner Truth, Maria Stewart, Jarena Lee, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Hamer was not totally limited by the male-dominated, sexist religious institution known as the church. Hamer discerned the activity and presence of Christ regardless of the racial and gender exclusion and injustice in the church.

3

SNCC Training and Civic Education

Hamer encountered SNCC in 1962, eighteen years after she married Perry “Pap” Hamer, and two years after its founding in 1960. It was at a mass meeting held at William Chapel Missionary Baptist Church pastored by Reverend J. D. Story. SNCC was comprised, predominantly, of black college students, and young and seasoned college educated leaders who engaged and inspired indigenous rural undereducated and miseducated black people in the South to speak their truth, envision change, and enact justice. Organized and founded by Ella Baker, a veteran civil rights worker and freedom fighter, and former 37 38

Hamer, “‘I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,’ Speech Delivered at a Freedom Vote Rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, Fall 1963,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 4. Carla Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Writers and Speakers in the North (1830–1880) (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995).

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executive director and organizer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), SNCC became a radical grassroots presence for civil and human rights.39 Baker believed in and practiced the motto: “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.”40 Hence, SNCC nurtured democratic, group values and processes to move the local people and the nation towards a moral and just society. The socratic method of questioning, probing, and reflecting were integral to Baker’s leadership style that created healthy space for people like Hamer to enter and find community, belonging, and a platform to voice their yearnings for freedom.41 Hamer had a deep admiration for SNCC and even acknowledged the political organization led by black college students under the leadership of Baker as a model of Christianity. With clarity and depth, Hamer stated, I think that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee has been more to me, closer to Christianity than any [emphasis is Hamer’s] church I ever walked in because here was educated young people that came to Mississippi that never looked down at a person, especially in the rural communities of Mississippi. But really got out there to say, you know what’s happening. Get up and say it yourself. It was people like that made me be what I am today. It was things I have always wanted to say, but they gave me confidence. This happened and hadn’t happened in this country before. And I think the country had its best at that point.42 Hamer’s experience of SNCC as a model of the Christian church and the kingdom of God is discussed in more detail in the next section on her biblical and theological foundation. Her poignant observation and experience strongly suggest that SNCC had reinforced what she had learned from her family: selfrespect and pride. She learned that her voice matters to people who were strangers, younger, non-rural, more formally educated and economically secure. She learned that black and white, young and seasoned, and female and male could create a different life together beyond the socially constructed lines that kept them estranged and in bondage. 39

40 41 42

Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, eds., Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal, An African American Anthology (New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 371. Baker cited in Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 188. Lea E. Williams, Servants of the People: The 196-s Legacy of African American Leadership, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 167–8. The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer: Never Turn Back, directed by Bill Buckley (Newport, CT: Rediscovery Productions, 1983).

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Hamer was captivated with SNCC and SCLC in 1962 at the first mass meeting she ever attended. Specifically, the preaching of Rev. James Bevel of the SCLC who preached from Luke 12:56 on “Discerning the Signs of the Time.” Hamer learned that she needed to take responsibility for discerning, and acting on, her social, cultural, and political epoch.43 According to Albert J. Raboteau, Rev. Bevel’s “sermon was effectively arguing, in concrete agricultural images the congregation well understood, that the time for change was now.”44 As James Forman, leader of SNCC, connected Rev. Bevel’s sermon theme to the constitutional right to vote and how voting provided local black Mississippians a chance to enact change, Hamer stated, “that was the next strange thing to me. I never heard about that.”45 At forty-four years of age, Fannie Lou Hamer did not know that she had the right to vote as guaranteed in the United States Constitution. The creative homiletic approach of Rev. Bevel coupled with the socio-political constitutional commentary of James Forman were the catalyst to join field organizers of SNCC, SCLC, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and seventeen other local people to go attempt to register to vote on August 31, 1962. Upon returning from a failed attempt to register to vote, Hamer received an eviction notice. Although she was displaced from Marlow’s plantation, subpar housing, and her menial, exploitative job, Hamer understood that she was downtrodden, but not in despair.46 SNCC eventually recruited her to work fulltime as a field secretary in voter registration, and a symbiotic relationship developed that was mutually beneficial. Brooks notes “Her [Hamer’s] rhetoric reflected her connection to the spaces of invention she inhabited, as the education she received would echo through the substance of her discourse for the remainder of her activist career.”47 To many, Hamer embodied what SNCC had desired to achieve among the poor, black, female, and rural populace that was different from the mainstream civil rights organizations that usually catered, consciously or not, to the needs of black men and the black middle-class. Bernice Johnson Reagon, a SNCC member and Freedom Singer stated this about Hamer, “The first time I saw Fannie Lou Hamer she came up to me and thanked me for everything we had done for her.”48 Reagon confesses that, 43 44 45 46 47 48

Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir An Army, 37. Albert J. Raboteau, American Prophets: Severn Religious Radicals and Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice (Princeton, NJ: Oxford University Press, 2016), 168. Hamer cited in Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir An Army, 37. Brooks, Ibid., 41. Brooks, Ibid., 42. Reagon, “Women as Culture Carriers in the Civil Rights Movement: Fannie Lou Hamer,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965, eds. Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing Inc., 1990), 204.

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initially, she was perplexed by Hamer’s expression of deep gratitude because Hamer was the woman from Mississippi who helped SNCC gain national attention through her courage and keen articulation of the political injustice endured by black Mississippians. Reagon believes that she should have been thanking Hamer instead of Hamer thanking her. Though it took Reagon a while to grasp the depth of Hamer’s gratitude, she finally came to understand “She [Hamer] was talking about the young people who made up the staff of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.”49 The young people in the movement provided Hamer with “… the opportunity to become, for her time and her community and her people, more like herself.”50 To experience the space to be valued, to share and act on the deep yearnings of one’s heart for freedom and justice while being received is reflective of the Christian communities in which Jesus of Nazareth is believed to have led. As a field secretary of SNCC, Hamer participated in SNCC’s voter registration, Freedom Summer, and Freedom School. Bob Moses, a Harvard-trained math teacher and lead organizer of SNCC, and co-organizer of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), stated, “Through the Freedom Schools, we tried to develop the idea of alternative education, that is, that what’s important is that the young people in Mississippi have a forum in which they could really think through and discuss problems which were really important for them.”51 Although Freedom School was designed for the children of Mississippi, youth and adults were accommodated as students, too. Its curriculum was based on the following seven principles: 1. The creation of an honest and egalitarian relationship between teacher and student, 2. The valuing and naming of the students’ own experience, 3. The asking of open-ended questions, 4. The presentation to students of an authentic and empowering view of themselves and their history, 5. The vision of the arts as a transformative force, 6. The emphasis on skills necessary for action and effective participation in the world, and 7. The establishment of a direct line from classroom to community.52 49 50 51

52

Reagon, Ibid. Reagon, Ibid. Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer with Sarah Flynn, Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1990), 194. Kathy Emery, Sylvia Braselmann, and Linda Gold, Freedom School Curriculum: Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964 (2004), 23. http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCpdf/ CurrTextOnlyAll.pdf. Accessed on March 5, 2017.

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In linking education to personal, social, political, and economic change for justice, Freedom Schools throughout Mississippi built on the philosophy and processes of Myles Horton’s Highlander Folk School, Septima P. Clark’s Citizens’ Education Program of SCLC, and James Lawson’s nonviolent direct action with black college students.53 These alternative forms of education and human formation were similar to what Paulo Freire, a Brazilian adult literacy educator of peasants, for social change and justice, was doing in Central and South America.54 In short, Hamer was participating in SNCC at a time when she read the word, and the Bible, the word of God, to reread the world in a way that helped her to accurately interpret “the signs of the times” as Rev. James Bevel had proclaimed at her first mass meeting at William Chapel Baptist Church. Two educational principles within Freire’s framework are that education is inherently political, and the “banking” model of education, the process in which the student receives all knowledge from the teacher, is inherently bankrupt.55 Hamer experienced both the depoliticization of black people in education, and the bankruptcy of Mississippi public education. In many of her speeches, Hamer identified how black history and culture were excluded from the curriculum, and the travesty of the exclusion. For example, she exclaimed, We have to work to make this a better place and we have to deal with the politics and the history of this country that’s not in the books. You know we’ve been reading about what was in the book, you know about ‘Columbus discovered America.’ And when he got here there was a black brother walked up there and said, ‘Let me help you, man.’ And there was some Indians here too. So how could he discover what was already discovered? The education has got to be changed in these institutions.56 Hamer had acquired knowledge, wisdom, and information from participation in SNCC and a growing awareness of her lived experience that enabled her to recover and reclaim black history and culture for an empowering, hopeful present and future. She learned that before Columbus encountered, and not discovered, “the new world,” black and red people extended to him, and his

53 54

55 56

Emery et al., Freedom School Curriculum, Ibid. See Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. 30th Anniversary ed. (New York, NY: Continuum, 2000) and Education for Critical Consciousness (New York, NY: Continuum, 1973). Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Hamer, “‘Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either,’” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 129–30.

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crew, a radical hospitality that was more akin to the life and teachings of Jesus. Hamer learned that a true retelling of United States history was needed in public education, a retelling that emphasized a people who belonged to the land, who placed no value on individually conquering, colonizing, owning, and monopolizing the land, and who welcomed the lighter-skinned European strangers. Amzie Moore, a farmer, civil rights leader, and head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Cleveland, Mississippi, chapter, shared a similar laudatory sentiment of SNCC as did Hamer. He claimed, “I’ll tell you one thing—the only thing in the twentieth century that gave courage and determination to the blacks in the South is SNCC.”57 The role that SNCC played in Hamer’s life, and in the lives of so many other black Mississippians, and white college student volunteers, regardless of their socioeconomic status, was a religious and spiritual experience for many. Sandra “Casey” Carson, a white student staff of SNCC acknowledged, “SNCC helped me realize that movements grew by creating a small community that lived its values and thus attracted others.”58 Hamer experienced SNCC as a form of Christian community unlike any other church or faith community. Although SNCC morphed into something different than what Hamer originally had encountered by the time of its demise in 1970, the profundity of SNCC in her life cannot be overstated.

4

Christian Biblical and Theological Foundation

In describing Hamer’s Christian biblical and theological foundation, the following key categories are identified and discussed: 1) Christ, 2) God, 3) the church and kingdom of God, 4) justice and peace, and 5) land and labor. 4.1 Christ Luke 4:18–20 was Hamer’s text for her first recorded speech, and Hamer’s selfidentification as a prophetic movement orator at a Freedom Vote Rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1963.59 The biblical passage narrates Jesus’ time in his native town on the Sabbath in a synagogue worship service when he stood up to read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah that said: 57 58 59

Hampton et al., Voices of Freedom, 141. Wesley C. Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of Chapel Hill, 2007), 110. Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir An Army, 44.

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The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.60 Hamer and Jesus announced to their respective indigenous audiences the clear nature and scope of their public work: the Lord’s Spirit appoints, affirms, and empowers their person and work. Though the black Mississippians did not want to immediately kill Hamer like Jesus’ fellow kin of his day, it was the white Mississippians who had terrorized and brutalized her in a Winona jail, and had her under constant surveillance throughout her prophetic leadership. Like Jesus, Hamer lived under the constant threat of death and had to be wise as a serpent, and harmless as a dove (Matthew 10:16) to overcome the fear that could have easily negated the divine life-giving force that she believed was operating on and in her. She was sent out as a sheep amongst the wolves and had to depend on the ONE who had anointed her, and the people who would receive her message. Linda E. Thomas, a womanist and cultural anthropologist, argues that Jesus’ sending of his disciples to spread the good news was antithetical to the European missionary model of conquest, expansion, colonialization, and subjugation.61 Jesus modeled a way of encountering the neighbor and stranger from a posture of humility and interdependence. Hamer, like the first century disciples of Jesus according to Thomas, proclaimed the good news in ways that honored the people while inviting them to accept a life of freedom from segregation, oppression, and dispossession. As she entered the different towns and counties of rural Mississippi, Hamer invited the predominantly black sharecroppers, maids, manual workers, and tenant farmers to become workers for freedom and to plow the ground to create different conditions than political exclusion, hunger and malnutrition, and economic exploitation. She encouraged them to be illuminating and illustrative of the light of Christ when she said, “‘a city that’s set on a hill cannot be hid.’ I do not mind my light shining; I don’t hide that I’m fighting for freedom because Christ died to set us free. And he stayed here until he got thirty-three years old, letting us know how we would have to walk.”62

60 61 62

NRSV. Linda E. Thomas, “Anthropology, Mission, and the African Woman: A Womanist Approach,” Black Theology 5, no. 1 (2007): 11–19. Hamer, “‘I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,’” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 6.

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To Hamer, Jesus was not only someone to be worshipped, but also a figure who must be emulated. She contended, “Christ was a revolutionary person, out there where it was happening. That’s what God is all about, and that’s where I get my strength.”63 To assert Christ as a revolutionary was a bold and creative hermeneutic because many black Christians were taught to accept the current life of subjugation with hope of a better life after death in heaven. Hamer, possibly unbeknownst to her, was part of a black folk biblical hermeneutic tradition that understood, and experienced, Jesus as a companion, waymaker, and radical.64 According to black theologian and black religious historian Gayraud S. Wilmore, in “… black intellectual history …, radicalism had to do with the assumption that race and color are at the root of the problems of Western civilization and that the only lasting solution would require a transformation of human relationships …”65 Undoubtedly, Hamer sought not only the transformation of human relationships but also ideals and the conditions that promoted racial violence and injustice. Vincent Harding, scholar of religion and social transformation said this of Hamer, “That was what she was constantly doing, creating new realities, responding to the transformative power of the movement with audacious transformations of the text.”66 Hamer’s innovative biblical interpretation combatted the myopic white interpretation on the suffering of Christ that the white land owner and segregationist wanted black people to accept uncritically. Black Mississippians were taught one had to be docile and submissive to the master on Earth, and if so, they would receive their reward in heaven. In separating herself from the faulty Christology of many white Christians, Hamer asserted, We have been always taught that we had to suffer as Christ suffered, he was killed and all of his followers was persecuted. But I think in terms 63 64

65

66

Hamer cited in Edwin King, “Go Tell It on the Mountain: A Prophet from the Delta,” Sojourners (December 1982): 20. See Gayraud S. Wilmore’s Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of Afro-American People, 2nd edition, revised and enlarged (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994). Ibid., xii. Wilmore connects W. E. B. Du Bois to this understanding of radical in black intellectual history and shows how the black church, at times throughout history, exhibited the radical conception. Although Wilmore does not acknowledge Hamer’s religious thought as connected to Du Bois’s radical view in black intellectual history, it is shown throughout the text that she does stand in this tradition alongside Du Bois, her predecessor. Vincent Harding, “The Anointed Ones: Hamer, King, and the Bible in the Southern Freedom Movement,” in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures (New York, NY: Continuum, 2001), 544.

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of what David had to do. David was a shepherd boy, but he was giving service to his people. But there did come a time in his life, he had to slay Goliath.67 Both [King] Jesus and [King] David served the people in Hamer’s Christology. Furthermore, she does not deny the suffering of Christ, but she does reposition it in the context of service and resistance in carrying out one’s role in caring for the people. Christ suffered while in active service to, with, and for the people—“out there where it was happening.” In a closer examination of Hamer’s revolutionary leanings, one can see her practical yet principled approach. For example, Hamer claimed, “Christianity is being concerned about your fellow man, not building a million-dollar church while people are starving right around the corner.”68 As a revolutionary, one is not only concerned about changing ideologies and attitudes, but also exhibiting practices that reflect the inbreaking of transformed priorities in caring for people, and the righteous distribution of resources. As Christ exemplified, a Christian is a revolutionary who engages the abandoned and dismissed people, places, and spaces of empire by being out there where it was happening. For Hamer’s Mississippi Delta context, this meant, entering places, and dens of iniquity, to root out the evil of various forms of violence such as racism, terrorism, segregation, subjugation, discrimination, starvation, malnutrition, and terrorism. The anticipation of living out her human vocation that transcended the political disenfranchisement, social humiliation, and economic exploitation was integral to Hamer’s understanding of Christ. The divine was her strength, and Christ was her model as he lived on Earth. Hamer’s keen insight on the necessity of a revolution, and not a mere reformation, can be summed up when she stated, The question for black people is not, when is the white man going to give us our rights, or when is he going to give us good education for our children, or when is he going to give us jobs—if the white man gives you anything—just remember when he gets ready he will take it right back. We have to take for ourselves.69 With wisdom, hope, power, and love, Hamer admonished her black audience to move beyond the mentality of expecting those in political, social, and eco67 68 69

Hamer cited in the film The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer: Never Turn Back. Hamer cited in Edwin King, “Go Tell It On the Mountain,” 20. Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges,” 17.

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nomic control to precipitate black liberation. She was moved by the notion that the struggle for freedom had to begin with black people on the ground envisioning and enacting a revolutionary paradigm to create a nation that affirmed the value of black lives too. 4.2 God Hamer, in a public retelling of one of her conversations with God, framed the divine communion and intervention as the reason she was working for Christ in the freedom struggle. In a transparent and earthy manner, she recalled, “And I have asked God, I said, now Lord—and you have too—ain’t no need to lie and say that you ain’t. Said, open a way for us. Said, please make a way for us Jesus. Said, where I can stand up and speak for my race and speak for these hungry children.”70 Charles McLaurin, a foot soldier in the Civil Rights Movement as a member of SNCC, and close friend of Hamer’s, stated “she told me that she had always wanted to get involved with something to help her people but she just didn’t know exactly how or what to do.”71 For Hamer, God had provided SNCC as the primary vehicle for her to live out her sense of righteousness and justice in a bold and courageous way. Hamer unabashedly claimed, “If SNCC hadn’t of come into Mississippi, there never would have been a Fannie Lou Hamer.”72 As the Hebrew Jacob wrestled with the Angel of God (Gen 32:22–32), Hamer’s retelling of her conversation with God can be seen as her relentless effort of not letting God rest until a way was made for her to address the social sins and injustices. God, as the supreme authority over life and death, ushered Hamer into a life that was not for the faint-hearted or those of little faith. She understood that God made it plain to her and the black Mississippians because the divine “sent a man in Mississippi with the same name that Moses had to go to Egypt. And tell him to go down in Mississippi and tell Ross Barnett to let my people go.”73 Applying biblical narrative, imagery, and allusion to her contextual reality, Hamer proclaimed “as I walk alone, I walk with my hand in God’s hand.”74 In Hamer’s life, God was an active, present force and companion who constantly led her through the valley and shadow of death and delivered her from the throes of death. She shared,

70 71 72 73 74

Hamer, “‘I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,’” 5. Charles McLaurin cited in Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 41. Hamer cited in Kay Mills, Ibid. Hamer, “‘I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,’” 5. Hamer, Ibid.

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And I have walked through the shadows of death because it was on the tenth of September in ’62 when they shot sixteen times in a house and it wasn’t a foot over the bed where my head was. But that night I wasn’t there—don’t you see what God can do?75 Here, Hamer amplifies the power of God and attempts to dispel the fear of black Mississippians by sharing both the danger and protection in working for Christ. She was bearing witness to a God who is bigger than fear, and who was with the people in their struggle for freedom and justice. Moreover, death was not a deterrent for Hamer for at least two reasons. On one level, she proclaimed, “Quit running around trying to dodge death because this book said, ‘He that seeketh to save his life, he’s going to lose it anyhow!’”76 For Hamer, Christ and the bible taught that life was inextricably linked to following the way of Jesus, the Anointed One. Hence, life should not be lived in fear or in hiding. She was inviting and challenging the black Mississippians to stay, and not migrate to the northern cities and slums, so that they could participate in cultivating new life on the southern soil of Mississippi. On a much deeper level regarding death, Hamer said, “We don’t have anything to fear. I don’t know today, I don’t know tonight whether I’ll actually get back to Ruleville, but all that they can destroy is the Fannie Lou that you meet tonight, but it’s the Fannie Lou that God hold will keep on living, day after day.”77 The eternal sustainer of life in whom Hamer “lived, moved, and had her being,” was able to protect her from fear of living and dying for freedom and justice and created an immortal consciousness and freedom within Hamer as she walked through the valley and shadow of death. It was this tenacious, steadfast faith in God that encouraged her to return to her home in Ruleville after being expelled from the plantation and hunted like a prey. Hamer informed her niece, who housed Hamer in another Mississippi town and county, “I’m going back to Ruleville today. I’m not a criminal; I hadn’t committed a crime, and I don’t have no right to be dodging nobody.”78 She was a child of God who had learned to be secure in the hand of God. Although God and Christ were accessible and active in history, Hamer believed in divine and human collaboration. She referenced Simon of Cyrene assisting Christ in bearing the cross so that he would not have to bear it alone 75 76 77 78

Hamer, “I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,” 5–6. Hamer, Ibid., 6. Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’ Speech Delivered at a Mass Meeting in Indianola, Mississippi, September 1964,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 53. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 109–10.

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as a way to encourage black Mississippians to join Christ in the work of freedom. Hamer’s creative interpretation in reading and citing scripture was also applicable to her singing and citing songs and hymns of the faith. For example, her revision of Must Jesus Bear This Cross Alone? went as follows, When Simon [of] Cyrene was helping Christ to bear his cross up the hill, he said; Must Jesus bear this cross alone and all the world go free? He said, ‘No, there’s a cross for everyone and there’s a cross for me. This consecrated cross I’ll bear, till death shall set me free. And then go home a crown to wear, for there’s a crown for me.’79 Reagon heard Hamer give that speech, and Reagon knew that Simon of Cyrene did not utter those words. Yet, she did not miss the deep meaning of Hamer’s sermon. Reagon expounds on Hamer’s sermon by noting, “She [Hamer] is saying that she is charged to do the work from the highest source she has operating in her life. The preaching of the gospel, and the anointing, and the giving of sight to the blind are activities that Jesus did.”80 As God enabled Christ, and as Christ modeled for others, Hamer knew God enabled her, and others, too. The divine must not work alone, and humans who confess to be Christian must follow the example of Christ. It is unclear if Hamer saw helping Jesus bear the cross as an expression of treason, or an explicit, intentional announcement of her political allegiance to God whom Christ revealed, and not the gods of white supremacy, Jim Crow, racial hatred, terror, and suppression. James H. Cone’s (2010) The Cross and the Lynching Tree is a clear articulation on how empire, in both Jesus’s and Hamer’s day, employed the cross as a site of invoking terror and maintaining submission of the masses, and how Jesus subverted the power of the Roman Empire. Possibly, Hamer saw the cross as a way to incite commitment to face the difficult though necessary road. After including the voice of Simon of Cyrene in the song, she then proclaimed, “And it’s no easy way out. We just got to wake up and face it, folks. And if I can face the issue, you can too.”81 In Hamer’s imagination, the cross seemed to have been a physical manifestation of one’s commitment to sharing in the suffering of Christ and facing the challenge of changing one’s current oppressive reality. 79 80

81

Hamer, “‘I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,’” 4. Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Women as Culture Carriers in the Civil Rights Movement: Fannie Lou Hamer,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965, eds. Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing Inc., 1990), 211. Hamer, “‘I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,’” 4.

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As will be explained in more detail in chapter 3, Hamer frequently cited Acts 17:26 (KJV) during jail time and in speeches: from one blood, God created all people. God was no respecter of person even though white segregationists who confessed to be Christians felt otherwise. Hamer knew of her divine, moral right to be respected and acknowledged as a human being by belonging to the Parent of all, regardless of race or national origin. This aspect of her theology informed her attitude towards, and relationship with, an environmental wilderness of ideological white supremacy, and lighter-hued people. Although white people removed black people from their moral field of compass, Hamer navigated and negotiated spaces, places, institutions, and individuals, that were filled with the toxins and predatory practices of whiteness and maleness. Ella Baker, founder and advisor of SNCC and co-worker with Hamer said this of her, “She knew life. She had lived it. She had experienced things that many of us could never think of facing and yet, she could smile, she could shout, she could make other people happy, and she, if necessary, could cuss ‘em out.”82 Hamer’s ability to act on her environment as subject, as agent is in alignment with Howard Thurman’s interpretation of Jesus and the Jewish oppressed masses in Jesus and the Disinherited (1949). For Jesus, according to Thurman, “the urgent question was what must be the attitude toward Rome. Was any attitude possible that would be morally tolerable and at the same time preserve a basic self-esteem—without which life could not possibly have any meaning?”83 Because Rome was the enemy, the seat of social, political, and economic control and power which prohibited Israel from being a selfdetermining people, Rome had to be dealt with morally or ethically. If this question is never faced or adequately addressed, Thurman poignantly asserts, “he cannot inform his environment with reference to his own life, whatever may be his preparation or pretensions.”84 Reaping or harvesting of the injustices that were sowed by white America was inevitable because God was just and would not be mocked in Hamer’s eyes. In her inaugural speech, I Don’t Mind My Light Shining, Hamer recounted how she told one of the police officers who falsely arrested her, and then severely beat her, “It’s going to be miserable when you have to face God. Because one day you going to pay up for the things you have done.”85 Although Hamer 82 83 84 85

Hamer cited in the film The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer: Never Turn Back. Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1981), 22 [originally published in Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1949]. Thurman, Ibid., 23. Hamer, “‘I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,’” 5.

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operated from a place of divine justice and retribution, it must be restated, she also contended that one must co-operate with God in fighting for freedom and justice on one hand, and on another hand, black self-defense against white lynch mobs was not immoral. Nevertheless, she frequently would invoke the biblical passage, ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand’ in reference to the United States and pronounced the crumbling of the nation if white America refused to treat black people as human beings. In a sermonic fashion, she listed the sins and injustices of white America by preaching to a black audience in Indianola, God is not pleased at all the murdering, and all of the brutality, and all the killings for no reason at all. God is not pleased at the Negro children in the state of Mississippi suffering from malnutrition. God is not pleased because we have to go raggedy each day. God is not pleased because we have to go to the field and work from ten to eleven hours for three lousy dollars.86 God was the divine judge who was overseeing the current unfortunate conditions. God was not silent about, or supportive of, the hell on earth that was being experienced by black people. In the end, God could be trusted to fight the good fight of faith for freedom and justice. Standing up to the system in the power of God was Hamer’s call. Waiting for things to change was no longer acceptable, Hamer implored, “because as long as they can keep their feet on our neck, they will always do it.”87 Hamer was clear that black people must assume responsibility in either removing the foot of “the white man” so people can rise or acting in ways that make it impossible for “the white man” to maintain his posture. She was convinced, “salvation of this nation, in more ways than one, rest in the hands of the Almighty God and the black striving politicians attempting to save His people and thus free the world.”88 God and black politicians would play a key role in ushering in the salvific will of God that interestingly had cosmic implications, too, for Hamer. Eventually, Hamer began to lose faith in adults in her generation, and saw God active in raising up a people, a nation, among the young people. Hamer considered many people of her generation as hopeless cases and though she 86 87 88

Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 52. Hamer, Ibid., 54. Hamer, “‘If the Name of the Game Is Survive, Survive,’ Speech Delivered in Ruleville, Mississippi, September 27, 1971,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 143.

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was in her fifties, she claimed to have the energy, vision, and more radical mindset of the younger generation.89 It was the younger generation of both black and white people that provided Hamer with hope and encouragement for a just, healed nation. She stated, “So the young people that’s out here today [1971], that’s fighting for justice for all human beings, I believe are the chosen people that’s going to lead this country out if it’s not too late.”90 Hamer was conscious of the urgency of the moment for the people and the nation. Possibly, she was saying that the younger generation was demonstrating itself as a chosen people, an obedient people, and God was working through them because of the younger generation’s practice of care for all human beings. Jesus even informed his followers and disciples that his kin are those who do the will of God which transcended, yet included, the Judaic bloodline (Mark 3:35). From the younger generation, Hamer saw righteousness exhibited which exalts a nation that gave her hope to overcome the reproach of the nation through its various race-based sins and injustices. Through it all, Hamer believed “God is on the throne today; He is keeping watch on this nation and marking time.”91 Although the nation and the people were running out of time for healing and justice, for Hamer, hope was in a God who was present in time, but also transcended time. While Hamer understood that it may have been too late for the people and the United States, it was never too late for God. 4.3 The Church and Kingdom of God In a more poignant fashion, Hamer identified the significance of SNCC during what is commonly known as Freedom Summer in 1964 when she claimed, “to me, the 1964 Summer Project was the beginning of a New Kingdom right here on earth. The kinds of people who came down from the North—from all over—who didn’t know anything about us—were like the Good Samaritan.”92 Using the language of a system and order that breaks in on the oppressive status quo, Hamer points to the revolutionary nature of white and black college students’ descent into Mississippi to join Bob Moses, and others, of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the black sharecroppers, maids, and manual workers of Mississippi. Understanding the magnitude of the moment, Hamer asserts, “They did something in Mississippi that gave us the hope that we had prayed for for so many years. We had wondered if there was anybody 89 90 91 92

Hamer, “‘Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either,’” 128. Hamer, Ibid., 130. Hamer, “‘Is It Too Late?,’” 132. Hamer, “Foreword,” vii.

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human enough to see us as human beings instead of animals.”93 The noticeably qualitative change that occurred in Mississippi during the summer of 1964 instilled within Hamer an encounter with the white other that was not oppressive, but humanizing and life-giving. In the process, she knew the experience was more than merely political because it was transcendent too in the way values and styles (manners) of relating were not conforming to the customs of the Jim Crow South. Both people and the space in which they occupied were being made anew. Hamer was not the only one to sense the new thing that was happening in the summer of 1964. Unita Blackwell, a contemporary of Hamer, and first black woman to serve as a mayor in the state of Mississippi in 1977, said, For black people in Mississippi, Freedom Summer was the beginning of a whole new era. People began to feel that they wasn’t just helpless anymore, that they had come together. Black and white had come from the North and from the West and even from some cities in the South. Students came and we wasn’t a closed society anymore. They talk about that we had a right to register to vote, we had a right to stand up for our rights. That’s a whole new era for us. I mean, hadn’t anybody said that to us, in that open way, like what happened in 1964.94 Although Hamer uses explicit Christian language to explain the phenomenon, both she and Blackwell agreed that change had come in a major way. Moreover, in Blackwell’s description of the experience, one can see an ecclesiology that characterizes self-empowerment, community, diversity, mutual compassion, and trust. The black rural Southern underemployed poor welcomed the white middle- to upper-class students from the North and West into their homes and communities. In the process, the black and white people who were once strangers became neighbors who labored side-by-side and hand-in-hand to fashion a country that was attentive to the needs of the least as well as redefine the needs and interests of those white elite and segregationists. The belief that the oppression and suppression of black people constituted a legitimate way of life in the United States was passing away in the Summer of 1964. A new day emerged to make the United States great for all people, regardless of race, gender, or class. What Hamer and Blackwell experienced and observed as a new era in the South is similar to how Jesus and his disciples discussed and bore witness to 93 94

Hamer, “Foreword,” viii. Hampton et al., 193.

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the kingdom of God. Likewise, both the communities of Jesus and Hamer were evaluating and engaging their respective Empires—the Roman Empire for Jesus and Jim Crow/Segregation Empire for Hamer. Warren Carter, a New Testament scholar, argues that for the New Testament authors and texts, Rome’s empire is constantly being negotiated though many contemporary readers overlook this basic way of understanding the New Testament world. Religion and politics were not separated for Jesus or Hamer. According to Carter, the way Jesus was treated demonstrated that “the empire is not committed to God’s purposes. It cannot recognize God’s agent and does not receive his revelation of God’s purposes. The empire is dangerous.”95 The same could be said of Hamer and the empire she had to negotiate—it was not committed to God’s purposes and it flogged, abused, sterilized, and sexually assaulted God’s prophetic agent in the person of Hamer instead of recognizing and receiving the kingdom that she was bearing witness to. The Jim Crow/Segregationist Empire was dangerous. Undoubtedly, it has been demonstrated that Hamer was critical of black preachers though she understood the significant role the segregated black church could play in black liberation. However, she did acknowledge those who inspired her. On one occasion, she was touched by the address of Reverend Warren Booker with whom she shared a speaking platform with at a rally. In her address, she confessed, “You know, this man said so much tonight, that’s the first time I felt like just picking a man up in my arms and kissing him, because you see, in the first place, our folks done got tied up on compromising too much with this white man that’s done done all this damage to us.”96 The compromising that Hamer intimates is related to how many black Baptist preachers of the rural South were financially dependent on white people.97 Furthermore, “on the plantations, some planters subsidized Baptist churches directly; in other cases, Baptist preachers expected a sizeable year-end bonus from nearby landlords for keeping their flocks happy.”98 In short, many Baptist preachers were being faithful to the white man instead of to God and Christ. For example, 95 96

97

98

Warren Carter, The Roman Empire and the New Testament: An Essential Guide (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2006), 40. Hamer, “‘To Tell It like It Is,’ Speech Delivered at the Holmes County, Mississippi, Freedom Democratic Party Municipal Elections Rally in Lexington, Mississippi, May 8, 1969,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 87. Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Los Angeles and Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 191. Payne, Ibid.

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During reconstruction, the minister was mostly the black man’s only leader. Often he was handpicked by the plantation owner and in most instances he was the only literate person in the black community. Few of the country preachers attended any of the political and cultural meetings because they felt it might conflict with what ‘Mr. Charlie’ would like them to teach their congregations. Some of these ministers have been conditioned to take their sermons to the plantation owner before they deliver them. If there is anything in them he doesn’t like, they cut it out. The poor backwoods preacher, like a puppet on a string, preaches what he is told to preach.99 Unfortunately, too many black ministers were seen as part of the problem instead of the solution. It is said of Gloria Richardson, a leader of a SNCC project in Cambridge, Maryland, that “women participated in spite of the church.”100 Hamer participated in spite of the institutional church, black or white, and she nonetheless recognized, received, and entered into the kingdom of God, and participated in an organic experience of the church through SNCC. Moreover, her intolerance of, and impatience with, many black Baptist preachers did not cause her to have disdain towards the church. In her description of Freedom Summer in 1964, she interpreted and appropriated Jesus’s telling of the parable of the Good Samaritan as the white students were likened to the Good Samaritan, the church was the people who passed by the wounded man, and the Negroes were the wounded man.101 Her analogy removes Negroes, or black people from the church, the agency or institution that is responsible for responding to the physical and spiritual wounds, and growth, of humanity. The church was comprised of white people of the South who refused to stop to address the needs of the wounded black people. On another level, she invites black and white people of Christian faith to consider how young white students could represent the life of Christ that outweighed those who confessed to be followers of Christ. For example, she asserted, “to me, if I had to choose today between the church and these young people—and I was brought up in the church and I’m not against the church—I’d choose these young people.”102 The church, in its black or white manifestation, was falling short of 99 100 101 102

Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long?: African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 141. Robnett, 142. Hamer, “Foreword,” vii-viii. Hamer, “Foreword,” viii.

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what it should be, and yet the young people provided a satisfactory example for Hamer. Hamer’s correlation of the young people as being Christlike speaks to her revolutionary understanding of Christ more so than the righteousness of the young people. The work they were participating in was costly to their life and limb, and they were engaged in the life of the black people of Mississippi in which they, too, suffered and risked physical and emotional violence. They were out there with the people where it was happening. Furthermore, Hamer’s perspective on the young people is underscored here when she stated, “if Christ were here today, He would be just like these young people who the southerners called radicals and beatniks. Christ was called a Beelzebub, called so many names.”103 Hamer’s declaration of choosing the young people over the church and naming them as Christ-like does not render Christ as white nor does it deny her own work as being Christ-like. Moreover, the church and the kingdom, in Hamer’s experience, included people from every race, gender, class, tongue, and age, like what John in Revelation saw in his vision of God’s reign. In Hamer’s thought on the ecclesia and basilea there was room for both black and white, female and male, young and seasoned, and materially poor and well-off people. Hamer’s commitment to a more expansive, inclusive church and kingdom beyond white segregationists and terrorists did not preclude her from being attuned to supporting black organizations and initiatives such as the Black Panther Party (BPP). On one occasion during a demonstration for Bobby Seale, co-founder of the BPP, the media approached Hamer to share her thoughts on the BPP. Aware of the trap, she responded by saying, Hold it, just a minute. What do you think of the White Citizens’ Council? What do you think of the Ku Klux Klan? What do you think of the Mafia? What do you think of the Minutemen? What do you think of all of these things that not only killing people in this modern time? We talked about what happened under Hitler’s administration that killed six million Jews, but have you thought about how they wiped out forty million black folks?104 Hamer did not participate in the media trap. The reporters attempted to dismiss and overlook white violence and terrorism that was being perpetrated 103 104

Hamer, Ibid. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 117.

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on black lives, and exploit another black person, such as Hamer who was known for nonviolent protest and resistance, to speak publicly against the perceived irreverent militancy of the BPP. Instead, her response was a mirror for white people in the United States to examine their diverse socio-economic groups’ ideology and practices of violence that were unjust though unchecked by governmental legislative, legal, and law enforcement institutions. Although Hamer did not have access to James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power (1969) and A Black Theology of Liberation (1970) to articulate the significance of Christianity for an oppressed people and to stand with brothers and sisters in the BPP who were also enacting and envisioning black liberation, her black folk theology appeared to have been sufficient. Christ did not have to be symbolically black in her black folk theology to care about what was happening to black people. This was yet another example of her being Christlike by being out there with the people where it was happening. Hence, the church as a body and institution should have been doing likewise according to Hamer. 4.4 Justice and Peace At the heart of Hamer’s view on justice and peace was her confidence and ability to name what was wrong from her perspective. Moreover, in general, peace was a by-product of justice being implemented, or the wrong being made right. For example, in education, she asserted, “We got to start, we got to start in every institution in this country because the history that we been getting, baby, had never happened and it never will. And we got to change some curriculum and in making the change, we can have more peace, and real democracy …”105 Educational justice and peace that focused on accurate portrayals and contributions of black people in curriculum content and instruction were necessary. She rhetorically inquired, “… why didn’t you tell us that we have the longest civilization? And why didn’t you tell us it was a black man that made the alphabet? And why didn’t you tell us it was also a black man that discovered science?”106 The intentional silence and/or sheer ignorance by white people and curriculum developers regarding black contributions to civilization had to be contested and changed according to Hamer. Hamer would be in alignment with contemporary protest signs that say “No Justice, No Peace” because as a poor black woman of Mississippi she was keenly aware of the numerous battles that were waged against, or simply discounted, her. In addition, she would stand with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King,

105 106

Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’” 102. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 119.

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Jr. who proclaimed, “true peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.”107 What white people in Mississippi and the nation believed to be peace was, in part, their denial, apathy, and/or ignorance regarding the economic, political, social, and educational oppression of black people. Hamer proclaimed that black people were not at ease with the current conditions. Hamer criticized the nation’s institutions and systems of justice after her 1963 beating in the Winona jail, and subsequent trial that found the white officers involved innocent of any violations of the law. She indignantly proclaimed, I just wonder how many more times is America gonna turn its head and pretend nothin’ is happenin’. I used to think the Justice Department was just what it said—justice. I asked one of those men, ‘Have y’all got a Justice Department or a Injustice Department?’ That’s the way I feel now. They didn’t investigate what happened to us—they investigated us. So I tell people I don’t want no equal rights any more. I’m fightin’ for human rights. I don’t want to become equal to men like them that beat us. I don’t want to become the kind of person that would kill you because of your color.108 After being arrested on the bogus charges of “disorderly conduct and resisting arrest,” and enduring torture at the hands of the white policemen, Hamer found herself no longer being disillusioned by the United States Department of Justice, or the once seemingly-just cause for civil rights. Now with her eyes wide open and first-hand experience of encountering the severe limitations of law enforcement, legal investigations, and court proceedings, Hamer saw that black people had no rights in which white people were bound to respect in the judicial system. Moreover, she saw that the mere struggle for equal rights did not challenge or change the fact that black people were still seen as less than human on one hand, and on another hand, it assumed that the rights, privileges, and protections, as exercised by white America, were equally desired by black people. Hamer made it perfectly clear that her sense of justice could not entail her right and privilege to kill, to destroy based on the color of one’s skin.

107 108

King, Martin Luther, Jr. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2010), 27. Hamer cited in Egerton, A Mind to Stay Here, 101. The italics are either Egerton’s or Hamer’s.

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Her vision of justice was not based on hate because she claimed, “… I see what hate had done to you [white people]. And I am going to do good, where you have done evil to me. I’m going to do good.”109 Hamer’s social, political, economic, and educational vision of justice and peace was not constitutive of retributive justice. However, she did believe the nature of the racial discord and injustice engendered by white hate and violence was being disrupted by “the new militancy of blacks and many young whites.”110 Further, she believed that the resistance that was being manifested by the interracial coalition of the younger generation “… have caused, not only in the Deep South but the North as well, to realize that racism is an unnecessary evil which must be dealt with by ‘men and governments’ or by ‘men and guns.’”111 For Hamer, a second civil war could have been an inevitable outcome if the various forms of government at the local, state, and national levels did not respond to the language and outcry of the people. She argued, “if survival is to be the name of the game, then men and governments must not move to postpone violent confrontations but seek ways and means of channeling legitimate discontentment into creative and progressive action for change.”112 Responsible action must be taken by governments and the people to preclude massive blood shed on both sides. While the people—black maids, sharecroppers, manual workers, civil rights organizations, and white supporters—had been resisting and enduring violence in a racially-based violent system, now, the government had to rethink how to respond when the interracial younger generation was applying a different kind of pressure. Regarding the Vietnam War, Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) of McComb called it a racist war as early as 1965. While SNCC and King followed in 1966 and 1967, respectively, Hamer alleged the United States was wrong in its attempt to bring democracy to another nation when it was failing miserably in democracy domestically. She stated, “… I am sick of the racist war in Vietnam when we don’t have justice in the United States.”113 She never explicitly stated why she believed it to be a racist war, but the MFDP’s pamphlet on the Vietnam War makes it clear. Below are the five reasons why they were in opposition: 1. No Mississippi Negroes should be fighting in Vietnam for the White Man’s freedom, until all the Negro people are free in Mississippi. 109 110 111 112 113

Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 118. Hamer, “‘If the Name of the Game Is Survive, Survive,’” 142. Hamer, Ibid. Hamer, Ibid. Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’” 99.

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2.

Negro boys should not honor the draft here in Mississippi. Mothers should encourage their sons not to go. 3. We will gain respect and dignity as a race only by forcing the U.S. Government and the Mississippi Government to come with guns, dogs and trucks to take our sons away to fight and be killed protecting Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana. 4. No one has a right to ask us to risk our lives and kill other Colored People in Santo Domingo and Vietnam, so that the White American can get richer. We will be looked upon as traitors by all the Colored People of the world if the Negro people continue to fight and die without a cause. 5. Last week a white soldier from New Jersey was discharged from the Army because he refused to fight in Vietnam; he went on a hunger strike. Negro boys can do the same thing. We can write and ask our sons if they know what they are fighting for. If he answers ”Freedom,” tell him that’s what we are fighting for here in Mississippi. And if he says Democracy, tell him the truth—we don’t know anything about Communism, Socialism, and all that, but we do know that Negroes have caught hell right here under this American Democracy.114 The racist war, as delineated by the MFDP, had nonwhite people in North America pitted against nonwhite people in Asia for the benefit of white people in the United States. Hamer wanted all energy and resources to be directed within the United States’ borders to ensure democracy. Hamer stated, “… We want to have peace, and the only way that we can have peace is to bring the boys home from Vietnam, start dealing with the problems in the United States, stop all of this urban renewal and model cities that’s pushing people out of a place to stay …”115 Hamer identified three critical steps for the United States government: first, cease and desist involvement in Vietnam by bringing military personnel home; second, start placing resources in addressing grave domestic problems; and third, cease and desist the displacement of predominantly low-income, nonwhite people under the guise of urban revitalization. In her mind, justice was concrete, and not abstract. In principle and practice, Hamer carried out SNCC’s and MFDP’s aim of transcending lunch counter integration or other forms of integration that were primarily being championed by the black middle class, that included an exercise of one’s humanity, and changing of social structures

114 115

MFDP stance on Vietnam War. http://www.crmvet.org/docs/mccombv.htm. Accessed on June 20, 2017. Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’” 101.

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and relations so that black humanity of all classes could be nurtured and supported. Brooks argues Hamer wavered between hope and despair just like the prophet Jeremiah who wondered and questioned God on how long before divine justice would come.116 She yearned for the lived, realized eschatology of the Advent when she declared in a personal exchange with a female friend, “I hope one day we can truthfully say, ‘peace on earth goodwill toward men.’ Until then my mission is to keep telling the world it is wrong to hate anybody.”117 In her commitment to bearing witness to love, and not hate, compassion and not destruction, Hamer began to see the struggle for justice and freedom with new lenses. As black people determined to exercise their humanity and restructure society, and white backlash became exacerbated, Hamer claimed in a speech in 1970, We are not even wrestling with men today because I believe in God, but the sixth chapter of Ephesians and the eleventh and twelfth verse said, ‘Put on the whole armor of God, that he may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.’ The twelfth verse said, ‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, spiritual wickedness in high places’—that means no-good chicken-eating ministers will go up to the man and make a deal about you know who.118 Oppressing, lynching, hating, bombing, murdering, and colluding were of the evil one and were forces that were antagonistic to God’s peaceable realm in Hamer’s vision of justice and peace. These forces had to be resisted and Hamer utilized the armor of God to stand against them as well as work for a just and peaceable society. 4.5 Land and Labor The Southern context into which Hamer was birthed was one in which labor was inextricably connected to land. Elite white southern males not only monopolized both land and labor, but controlled the passing, or not, of legislative policies that continued to overlook the land and labor needs, interests, and values of black workers. Hamer, in her speech in Berkeley, California at a Vietnam War Moratorium Rally said this of a senator from Mississippi, 116 117 118

Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir An Army, 163. Hamer cited in Brooks, Ibid. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 118.

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There’s something very funny when a man like Senator James O. Eastland, the biggest welfare recipient in the whole country, there’s something wrong when he can help to set policies for Vietnam and own fiftyeight hundred acres in the state of Mississippi and people on the plantation suffering from malnutrition. There’s something wrong with that.119 To Hamer, the injustice is clear, and change must occur at the individual and institutional levels so that the gaping economic disparity between the landowner and the land worker, and malnutrition of the black workers and their families would cease. Moreover, the land on which Hamer existed was “the site of Parchman penitentiary, birthplace of the Citizens’ Council, and home of Senator James Eastland, who operated a 2,000-acre plantation.”120 Hence, Hamer was positioned in the lions’ den of white male economic and political elite domination that ended Reconstruction efforts in 1875 through an intentional, vicious campaign of violence and intimidation known as the “Mississippi Plan.”121 As previously noted, Hamer’s commencement as plantation worker began when she was six years old and ended when she was forty-four years old when she was fired and evicted from Marlow’s plantation. Upon expulsion from the white man’s privately owned land, Hamer embarked on working for Christ, and championed a new relationship to the land that was reflective of cooperation, sharing, and belonging. Beyond voting rights and electoral politics, Hamer underscored the significance of access to land in the freedom struggle. However, her approach was through cooperative ownership, and not merely individualized, private ownership. She stated, “Cooperative ownership of land opens the door to many opportunities for group development of economic enterprises, which develop the total community, rather than create monopolies that monopolize the resources of a community.”122 Although blacks in the Mississippi Delta outnumbered their white counterparts in many towns and counties, the white minority owned the land, labor industries, and legislative seats because of slavery, failed reconstruction, Jim Crow, and political disenfranchisement. As a member of the black and poor masses of Mississippi, Hamer was not interested in duplicating the private monopoly of land and labor although she did leave 119 120 121 122

Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’” 100. John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 136. Dittmer, Local People, 12. Hamer, “‘If the Name of the Game Is Survive, Survive,’” 142.

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room for private land ownership as long as it did not exceed the amount necessary to live. Here, her sentiments are consistent with what Jesus instructed his disciples to do by praying for their daily bread, and how the God of Israel provided for the people during the Exodus with manna that was sufficient for the family’s daily needs, no more and no less. In short, for Hamer, land was necessary for basic survival—food and shelter. With the National Council of Negro Women under the leadership of Dorothy Height, Hamer started a pig bank because she believed, “If you give a hungry man food, he will eat it. If you give him land, he will grow his own food.”123 Hamer implies that government handouts or bailouts were insufficient if it kept people dependent on a system that suppressed their creativity, dignity, and appropriate self-sufficiency. She was not looking for the United States government to be paternalistic in its relationship to, and responsibility for, poor black people of rural Mississippi. Black people demonstrated their commitment and skills to working the land that did not benefit them, but with the development of Freedom Farms, Inc., Hamer provided an opportunity for black self-determination and for the people to consume what they planted and produced.124 Hamer’s assessment of Freedom Farms, Inc. was summed up as follows: “The land has given us hope, dignity and self-respect.”125 She was finally proud of her labor as she continued to work for Christ, the people, and herself. She commented in an interview, It’s one of the most helpful things, you know. People are working together. I don’t be ashamed when someone comes here, and I can go in the kitchen and fry some ham, and open some soup, and have some vegetables, because we put it up. It’s not only essential that you have food, but it’s healthy food.126 Healthy food choices, cooperative relations, and hospitality nurtured a new people that had been denied the right to land, liberty, and life. As a member, and leader of Freedom Farms, Inc., Hamer and many others finally had the

123 124 125 126

Hamer cited in Susan Kling, Fannie Lou Hamer: A Biography (New York, NY: Women for Racial and Economic Equality, 1979), 46. More discussion on Freedom Farms occurs in chapter 3. Hamer cited in Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir An Army, 200. Hamer, “Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer by Dr. Neil McMillen, April 14, 1972, and January 25, 1973, Ruleville, Mississippi; Oral History Program, University of Southern Mississippi,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 174.

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opportunity “to feed themselves, own their homes, farm cooperatively, and create small businesses together in order to support a sustainable food system, land ownership, and economic independence.”127 Emphasizing collective stewardship and rights, and not individual rights, Freedom Farms status report indicated its vision “to develop a black controlled institution that would have its strengths in the land and would be able to support the indigent blacks and whites of the Sunflower County area that are being displaced by increased mechanization of agricultural production.”128 Hamer stood in a line of historical and contemporary witnesses, both within and beyond Mississippi, in her Freedom Farms Cooperative endeavor.129 Many others of African descent had launched various economic and land cooperatives against great odds. As a native of the South, Hamer found a way to stay committed to the land of her birth instead of migrating to northern cities. She confidently claimed, I never thought of leavin’ the South. I love it. I was born here. I watched my folks take a double-blade ax and chop down trees like that pecan tree. A lot of this land the white folks is usin’ now, I watched my parents clean it up. We’re not trying to take this land away from them, but we got a right to stay here. That’s what I told the principal when I put my girl in school. He accused her of stealin’, and I said she didn’t do it. He said, ‘I hate a liar and a thief,’ and I told him, ‘Then you don’t hate my people, you hate yours. If your people hadn’t stole from my people, we’d own this country.130 Hamer was connected to the land in an intimate way that included yet transcended the disappointment, death, and destruction she had to manage. She clearly understood the multi-generational toil of her blood line, and that of black people in the South, and claimed her right to belong to a people, to a nation, and to a land that desired to maintain de jure and de facto practices of dehumanization of black people. Moreover, not only was Hamer opposed to going North, but she also had a response for those who told her to go back to

127

128 129 130

Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2014), 181. Nembhard, Collective Courage, Ibid. Nembhard, Collective Courage. Hamer cited in Egerton, A Mind to Stay Here, 106.

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Africa. In a poignant and piercing manner, which was typical of Hamer’s style, she stated, And I don’t want you telling me to go back to Africa, unless you going back where you came from. I got a note one day telling me to go back to Africa and ever since that time—it’s been three times a week, I say it, when I am in a white audience—I say we’ll make a deal: after you send all the Koreans back to Korea, the Chinese back to China, the Jewish people back to Jerusalem, …, and you give the Indians their land back and you get on the Mayflower from which you came, … but as we all here on borrowed land, then we have to figure out how we’re going to make things right for all the people of this country.131 In Hamer’s mind, the land belonged to the people, and vice-versa. The sharing, cooperation, and belonging was the work for, and of, Christ that she performed until her death in 1977 in Mississippi.

5

Summary

Mississippi public education could not, and would not, have provided Hamer with the stellar education she received from her family, church, and civic affiliations. Black self-love and respect were pillars that enabled her to respond to hate and hostility with love and compassion. Moreover, Hamer’s participation in organizations that were designed and fueled by women leaders such as Ella Baker and Septima Clark provided her a platform to speak and live her truth in public spaces. In the next chapter, Hamer’s practical theology is further discussed and is placed in conversation with academic practical, black, and womanist theologies. 131

Hamer, “‘Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either,’” 126.

Chapter 2

Hamer and the Academic Disciplines of Practical, Black, and Womanist Theologies Hamer’s redemptive, alternative education contexts, content, and processes were pivotal in forming her Christian faith. It can be argued that she received an empowering education from her black family, church, and civic affiliations that enabled Hamer to be a light in and for the church and society. Hamer spoke, taught, sang, prayed, and lived in increasingly public spaces as a bodacious Christian who was also black, female, rural, and poor. Like practical, black, and womanist theologians, Hamer focused on lived experience as a starting point for interpreting, interrogating, and articulating Christian faith and life. In this chapter, first, a comparison between Hamer and the aforementioned academic theologians is made to demonstrate aspects of non-academic and academic theologies in practice.1 Second, the roots and vison of Hamer’s Christian ministry are presented that includes ongoing dialogue primarily with black and womanist theologians. Third, and finally, attention is given to how Hamer’s indigenous, organic, and highly public revolutionary practical theology invites, especially, white academic practical theologians to move beyond overcoming real and/or perceived binaries to examining and articulating ways of overcoming death, destruction, and dehumanization that occur in both the church and society.2

1

Non-Academic and Academic Theologies in Practice

It can be argued that Hamer’s non-academic practical theology is comprised of elements that are ascribed to academic practical theologians such as “prac1 Hamer’s non-academic practical theology should not be construed as non-intellectual or anti-intellectual. It is merely referencing her starting point or context beyond the academy as well as her ability to instruct academic practical theologians, and not merely learn from them. 2 White Catholic practical theologian Claire E. Wolfteich admits to how white practical theologians are preoccupied with attempting to overcome binaries in their respective research and scholarship. See Wolfteich’s Mothering, Public Leadership, and Women’s Life Writing (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2017), 3.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004438071_004

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tice and performance oriented, oriented to multidimensional dynamics of social context and embodiment, holistic, theologically normed, interventionist and critically constructive, and teleological and eschatological.”3 Cahalan and Mikoski’s description of the scholarly and research commitments and foci of the field of practical theology nearly forty years after the death of Hamer, interestingly, provide an academic heuristic for comprehending and engaging Hamer for the discipline of practical theology. While acknowledging that practical theologians are not the only academicians who foreground these concerns, they also humbly note, “The field simultaneously builds bridges of understanding and collaboration with scholars in theological education and the wider academy, as well as with practicing religious leaders and others in the churches.”4 In this instance, through the construction of Hamer’s religious public leadership as a member of the black church, hopefully, bi-lateral bridges are employed towards more sophisticated skills in bridge building and developing sound structures that facilitate redemptive, transformative collaboration. As is shown in more depth in chapters three through five, Hamer was a bridge builder too. Hamer’s numerous and varied practices and performances range from the mundane, everyday practices of mothering and farming to the more public ones of speaking, singing, teaching, voting, and organizing within and beyond the local church. Although mothering was not done biologically, possibly, in large part due to the forced sterilization, and farming was initially a coerced pattern of practice, Hamer cultivated practices of mothering and farming that shaped her ability to tend to human and geographical bodies with a deep sense of care and compassion. To date, there is limited data on Hamer’s mothering. She is known for adopting two black girls, nine-year-old Dorothy Jean whose single mother could no longer care for her and five-month-old Virgie who was a burn victim and whose biological parents were too poor to provide medical care.5 The Hamers’ embrace of these two little girls could be likened to what

3 See Cahalan and Mikoski, “Introduction,” 1. They list eleven elements in total although only six are mentioned here. They give a brief description on all elements in a linear fashion. The six elements extrapolated from their list will be more of an integrated, ongoing presentation of how these characteristics manifest in the non-academic practical theology of Hamer. Sometimes the discussion is explicit and at other times, less so; I do not call the reader back to Cahalan and Mikoski’s core elements of an academic practical theologian every time I describe and discuss Hamer’s commitments. In those times that are less explicit, I focus the attention on Hamer’s religious thought and practice in dialogue with other scholars beyond Cahalan and Mikoski. 4 Ibid., 2. 5 Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 21.

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Swinton and Brock contend occurred in early Christianity as “the human action of loving an orphan of any form is only secure if it grows from and defers to the loving care which pursues that child even should the human parents no longer be able or willing to love.”6 Moreover, Swinton and Brock argue that this particular practice can be traced to Apostle Paul’s biblical theological articulation of the “Spirit of adoption” in which God the creator and parent enacted through the Son an all-encompassing claim on every person, Jew and Gentile, as a child of the divine and pursues them accordingly through divine love.7 Although it is unclear if Hamer was informed by this biblical and theological tenet, it is clear that the Hamers received the little girls as their own when their respective parents could no longer care for them. Even when Hamer’s daughter Dorothy Jean died, Hamer adopted her two grandchildren as her own. Hamer shared, “Although my daughter was taken, she left me two darling little girls to love and do for. I don’t have everything, but one thing I know they are rich with love. I love them so very very much that make a part of my life beautiful.”8 In short, Hamer’s practice of adoption reflected the “Spirit of adoption.” Whether or not Hamer had to file for legal adoption in her choosing of the four black little girls is unclear and beyond the scope of this book. Nonetheless, the issue of adoptive legal procedures is raised because it is central to Swinton and Brock’s edited volume that seeks to provide sound practical theological and ethical guidance for contemporary Christians on adoption practices and challenges. More research on Hamer’s adoptive practices and mothering need to be conducted to be able to engage, contribute, and advance the work of Swinton and Brock on one level. However, on another level, the limited information on Hamer’s adoptive experience and context is instructive and insightful in the following ways. First, while Swinton and Brock include narratives on barrenness and infertility, Hamer’s voice and experience from the perspective of a black, poor, rural, and disenfranchised woman illuminates the struggle of women who can no longer have children due to forced or involuntary sterilization.9 That part of a woman that provides the holding, developing, and nurturing space for embryonic and fetal life was illegally removed from Hamer. Yet, in post-involuntary sterilization, Hamer was able to receive, secure, and

6 See John Swinton and Brian Brock, A Graceful Embrace: Theological Reflections on Adopting Children (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2018), 7–8. 7 Ibid., 5–8. 8 Hamer cited in Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir an Army, 163. 9 Hamer biographer Lee notes that there is limited information on why Hamer was childless prior to her forced sterilization in 1961. There is evidence that Hamer had two stillbirths. Hence, she is believed to have been pregnant twice. See Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 21.

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nurture, as best she could, the babies, the children of other biological mothers and fathers. She provided them with love and an opportunity to be mothered and fathered although it was an arduous task trying to keep them clean, nourished, and warm.10 Poverty and activism, including her limited efforts against involuntary sterilization, even caused Hamer to lose her house insurance as she made explicit a black woman’s plight.11 Yet, Hamer and her partner found a way to claim as their own those who no longer had parental provision. While the connection made between Hamer’s adoptive practice and the theology behind it is not one that Hamer explicitly made, I think it is safe to argue that she cared about the well-being of people, regardless. Her attention to practicing care for the people, a ground to her adoption practice, can be traced to the way Hamer understood the practice of a revolutionary Jesus pursuing, engaging, caring for, and welcoming the people. Thus, as is demonstrated throughout the book, Hamer gave attention to practice in her non-academic practical theology like academic practical theologians. Yet, as postmodern practical theologian Thomas Beaudoin argues, while attention to practice is of utmost importance to the academic practical theologian, it should nonetheless be interrogated to ascertain “… what this consensus means, and what the practice of its perpetual reinforcement causes or keeps from happening.”12 I contend that Hamer gave attention to Christian practice for different reasons than what Beaudoin describes in his risky and thoughtful criticism of academic practical theologians. From the ranks of the racialized, dehumanized, and disenfranchised, Hamer was not motivated by the need to identify Christian insiders and outsiders, or theologically laden practices that could be traced back to an essential Christian beginning of beliefs and practices in what Beaudoin describes as “christianicity.”13 Her motivation more properly stemmed from her existential experience of a radical disjuncture between black Christian faith and United States culture, and therefore, to live in the world constituted an enactment and performance of her faith that either sought to reconcile aspects of faith and culture, transform culture by faith,

10

11 12

13

See Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir an Army, 162–3. Brooks shares intimate correspondence between Hamer and Rose Fishman, a supporter of Hamer and civil rights of Waban, MA, that recounts Hamer’s bouts with depression, despair, fatigue, and inadequate resources to properly care for her daughters. Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 171–2. Thomas Beaudoin, “Why Does Practice Matter Theologically?,” in Conundrums in Practical Theology, eds. Joyce Ann Mercer and Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2016), 11. Beaudoin, 17–24.

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and/or make meaning of faith, and culture, regardless of the intransigent nature of culture. While Hamer’s dynamic interaction and engagement of faith and life, and faith and culture are predicated on a revolutionary Jesus, possibly, her foundational belief enabled her to engage and care for those who were neither Christian nor black, as well as white Mississippians who claimed to be Christian. With her Christian belief and practice, Hamer experienced and encountered an opening up of a Mississippian society to the values, fictive kin relations, and ideals of the divine reign. Furthermore, she shared the stage with Malcolm X when he was the national spokesperson for the Nation of Islam in the United States, and after his assassination, during a radio interview, Hamer said, “Malcolm X was one of the best friends I ever had, a remarkable man. Oh, he was a great man!”14 In the end, Hamer was enacting, and practicing for, a new future with whoever was interested, too, in practicing freedom, love, justice, and reparations. Hamer would possibly agree with Beaudoin that Christianity does not have a corner on practices and beliefs that many academic practical theologians claim as “Christian” because in the world she inhabited, Christian practices and beliefs were part of the problem, and not necessarily a solution, to Jim Crow segregation, discrimination, and oppression, and the legacy of slavery. Yet, apparently for Hamer, Christian practices and beliefs were not static. Instead, they were open to be experienced and constructed to breathe life into both faith and culture.15 In this vein, the lynching and quarantining of black bodies were not considered to be Christian practices by Hamer even though white confessional Mississippians argued the contrary. Espousing a revolutionary Christ before the emergence of Black power and black academic liberation theology, Hamer critiqued Christian thought and practice that legitimated white supremacy and terror. Unequivocally, Hamer’s practical theology drew from Christian language, symbols, and sacred writings as she understood and interpreted the faith tradition. As she worked with different leaders and the file-and-rank members of various and diverse organizations, Hamer’s focus was on faithful living for 14 15

Hamer cited in Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir an Army, 137. In chapter 6, Hamer’s theological reflection sources are presented at length by using the Wesleyan Quadrilateral: experience, reason, tradition, and scripture. It will be clear that she was deeply informed by the black church tradition and yet she was free to critique it without disowning her faith or the value of what the black church tradition had to offer in her lifetime. Then, throughout the book Hamer’s reference to the cross and freedom are theological categories that are appropriated anew too as will be demonstrated in more detail as well in chapter 6. I consider Beaudoin to be inviting and challenging academic practical theologians, especially those who are “Christian-centric” to do like Hamer.

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freedom in response to the exigencies of her time. For example, Hamer’s practical theology engaged numerous issues of faith and life including, but not limited to, peace and war, health care, black infant mortality, labor rights, and state sanctioned violence. Regarding health care and black infant mortality, Hamer is noted for sounding the alarm in 1964 on the lack of black doctors, the ill-treatment of black patients by white doctors, the higher death rate of black people compared to white people, and the higher rates of black infant mortality (61.2 percent) compared to white infant mortality (26.1 percent).16 Hamer’s response to various personal, social, and political issues was not encumbered by ascertaining how to apply the faith or how to do theological reflection. Somehow, someway, Hamer enacted her faith in the world as she was decoding both her faith and culture to address the disjuncture between the two entities. Unlike Hamer, academic practical theologians grapple with the perceived disjuncture between theory and practice17 while simultaneously assuming that all practice is theologically laden and all theology is practical.18 Beaudoin pushes the field to question the consensus on “why does practice matter theologically,” and thereby names and exposes the issues of white power and privilege, as well as “chistianicity,” that he contends dismisses the reality of religious pluralism and reinforces a presumed white Christian constructed identity without considering “… the theological significance of practice to preChristian, Christian, post-Christian, and non-Christian meanings …”19 Pastoral and practical theologian Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore discusses extensively the politics of practical knowledge within the field and seemingly laments, “We claim knowledge in practice but struggle to put that knowledge and its value 16

17

18

19

See Hamer quoted in “Memphis World: Jim Crow Medical Care Hit,” Digital Public Library of America, http://dp.la/item/a8d46991302e774db82d9a15db4992fd. Accessed on June 10, 2019 at https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/fannie-lou-hamer-and-the-civil-rights -movement-in-rural-mississippi/sources/850. See Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore’s “The Theory-Practice Binary and the Politics of Practical Knowledge,” 190–218, in Conundrums in Practical Theology, eds. Joyce Ann Mercer and Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2016). See Elaine Graham’s “On Becoming a Practical Theologian: Past, Present, and Future Tenses,” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 73, no. 4 (2017). https://doi.org/10 .4102/hts.v73i4.4634. Accessed on June 10, 2019. Graham articulates the development of the field of practical theology and highlights the notion of all theology being practical, and all practice as being informed by theology. Beaudoin, 29. Also see Beaudoin, 10–13, 26–27, where he first names the disorientations that he has experienced as an academic practical theologian and later he critiques Don Browning’s correlational approach that provides the heuristic for seeing practices that can be framed theoretically and engaged theologically.

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into words and institutional practice. What exactly is going on here?”20 Hamer, as detailed throughout the book, did not have a problem with ascertaining and articulating “how theology matters for people in practical contexts.”21 Furthermore, Hamer can be understood as the spiritual and freedom songstress, poet, prophet, and lay pastor who contributed to and conveyed theology from her particularity.22 In short, in Hamer’s focus on the disjuncture between faith and culture, she models for academic practical theologians, especially those of European descent, a way other than the theory-practice binary, and a way beyond it. The more radical elements of Hamer’s practical knowledge were articulated and lived prior to, as well as concurrently with, the development of academic black theology and religion. More specifically, “Prior to the contemporary black theological movement [circa 1969] in seminaries, divinity schools, and departments of religion, even in predominately black schools, African Americans, [or anyone else], could not study and concentrate on African American religion as a legitimate academic subject area.”23 As Hamer was experiencing black invisibility in everyday life, unfortunately, it was commensurate with what was occurring in Christian and non-Christian seminaries, divinity schools, and departments of religion specifically regarding black religious and theological beliefs, conceptions, and constructions of faith and life. Neither Hamer nor black religion and theology were deemed as significant to be heard or considered as an academic body of study. Today, both are considered as scholarly areas of study. However, Hamer did not appear to be aware of the black theological movement, and neither does it appear that the academic scholars were aware of Hamer during her lifetime. Nonetheless, in the next section and chapters 5 and 6, Hamer and black academic theologians are at times placed in dialogue in which Hamer’s revolutionary practical theology offers an expansion and corrective of certain black academic thought and methods. Then, at other times, the connections and continuities between Hamer’s Christian life and thought, and the fields of black, practical, and womanist theologies are demonstrated. 20 21 22

23

Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, “The Theory-Practice Binary and the Politics of Practical Knowledge,” 191. Ibid., 197. See Miller-McLemore, 202, as she draws upon Robert J. Schreiter to discuss how pastors as professional theologians are not the privileged, or only, ones who contribute to the development of theology. Hamer is inserted into the paradigm to showcase how she fulfills Schreiter’s description and advances the significance of practical knowledge. Frederick L. Ware, Methodologies of Black Theology (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2002), ix.

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As a hidden precursor to, and an unknown, short-lived contemporary of, black academic theologies, Hamer’s highly public and non-academic revolutionary practical theology can be considered as a living, dynamic manifestation of James Cone’s intellectual, cognitive synthesis of black folk theology and black power ideology.24 As is articulated in more detail in chapter 5, Hamer’s lived expression of black folk theology and black power ideology was grounded in the Christian notion of universal love. What Cone is criticized of by black male clergy as lacking attention to Christian love was not true of Hamer.25 As is shown throughout this text, Hamer’s practice of love was not only an antidote for hatred and fear, but her practice of love also enabled her to contest the citadels of white normativity, femininity, and supremacy. With passion and compassion, and anger and anticipation, Hamer’s conception and expression of love became medicinal for the souls of black folks. In responding to the crisis of lovelessness in the United States and among African Americans, black feminist and cultural critic bell hooks says, “… I define love as a combination of care, knowledge, responsibility, respect, trust, and commitment.”26 Undoubtedly, in my mind, Hamer exemplified hooks’ vision of love in practice and maintained her commitment to Christian love in the midst of the often misunderstood and fear of black power by both black Christians and the white oppressors. In chapter 5, Hamer’s leadership for jubilee and black reparations is provided and engages the emergence of the Black Power Movement as the Civil Rights Movement in and of the South was losing steam. In many ways, Hamer’s Christian practice of love in particular, and her revolutionary practical theology in general, were constructive and corrective in her day as are womanist theologians and ethicists in their academic contexts which began in the late 1980s.27 Commencing over a decade after Hamer’s

24 25

26 27

See James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York, NY: Seabury Press, 1969). See Dale P. Andrews, Practical Theology for Black Churches: Bridging Black Theology and African American Folk Religion (Louisville, KY and London, UK: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 4. bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love (New York, NY: William Morrow [imprint of HarperCollins Publishers], 2001), xviii-xix. See Katie G. Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics. AAR Academy Series No. 60 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1988); Jacquelyn Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response. AAR Academy Series No. 64 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989); Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope. AAR Academy Series No. 79 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1993); Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993); Katie Geneva Cannon, Katie’s Canon: Womanist and the Soul of the Black Community (New York, NY: Continuum, 1995).

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death, womanists, in their attention to both themes of liberation and survival challenged white and black men as well as white women’s God-talk by centering black women’s lived and literary experiences. In response to white male theologies, womanists assert that if a scholar of religion and theology would begin with the context and lived experience of black women, instead of theological doctrines or propositions, this approach would yield a different understanding of the Christian faith and black condition of oppression. In response to black male theologies and in particular the liberation strand, womanists assert that while the God of the Bible is known to be a liberator of and for the oppressed, there are times, such as in the case of Hagar, that the divine provides means for survival over death, and not liberation from one’s oppressor. In response to white feminist theologies, womanists assert that race, racism, and white supremacy, along with patriarchy, sexism, classism, and heteronormativity must be interrogated in one’s theological methods and scholarship. In addition, while black liberation, womanist, and white feminist theologies focus on liberation, each differs from white male systematic theologians because they are contextual theology by starting with experience.28 In Hamer’s context, it was not the white male theological academicians but the white male confessional Christian politicians, landowners, and law enforcement agents that she engaged, challenged, and corrected by drawing from her lived experience as a black, poor, rural Christian woman. Moreover, Hamer critiqued and challenged the black church. Those who occupied the pulpit and the pew were invited to pick up their cross as did Jesus. In the 1970s, as founding member of, and speaker at, the National Women’s Political Caucus, Hamer made it clear that black women’s experiences were different from white women’s experiences and the assumed sisterhood could not overlook the issues of racism and poverty.29 In short, for both Hamer and womanists, black women’s lives, and their respective communities, matter. Hamer’s modeling of public theology and ministry provides a foundation for black or African American academic practical theology as well as for aca-

28

29

The distinction between “contextual” theology and “systematic” theology should not be considered as a clearly defined one. On one hand, nonwhite and non-male theologians contend that white males are doing contextual theology, too, although it goes unacknowledged because white males assume they are the norm for every other human. Then, on another hand, some contextual theologians present their scholarship in a systematic form even though they are beginning with lived experience. Fannie Lou Hamer, “‘Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free,’ Speech Delivered at the Founding of the National Women’s Political Caucus, Washington, DC, July 10, 1971,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 135–6.

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demic black theology that claims to be practical for the church and society.30 Although Cone and Wilmore argue, “before the rise of Black [academic] theology, Black churches uncritically accepted the written theologies of White churches,”31 Hamer’s non-academic practical theology was publicly critical of both white and black churches as demonstrated in chapter 1 and to be shown, again, in subsequent chapters. Her declarative assertion that Christ was a revolutionary person was not a popular nor pervasive understanding of the Jew of Galilee during her time. Hamer’s theological claims were not typical of either black nor white churches. Furthermore, Hamer’s public analyses and influence on the black church, black life, and white society appear to be more far reaching than can be said of black academic theologians. Cone and Wilmore succinctly note, “Black theology today is being defined by seminary and university professors in the context of the Society for the Study of Black Religion (SSB) and AAR (American Academy of Religion). These are not places where pastors are likely to spend their time. As a result, Black theology and the Black Church have not had a happy time together. Both have suffered a kind of isolation from each other.”32 While black Protestant theologians were isolated, according to Cone and Wilmore, they nonetheless acknowledge that Black Catholic theologians were less isolated from Black parish life because of their attention to pastoral issues.33 Attempting to bridge the divide between black Protestant church folks and academic black Protestant theologians, Dale P. Andrews, early in the twenty-first century, articulates a way beyond the chasm although without reference to or knowledge of Hamer.34

2

Roots and Vision of Hamer’s Christian Ministry

In chapter 1, we learn how two institutions, the black family and church, were integral to Hamer’s faith formation, public religious ethic, and ministry to the nation. J. Deotis Roberts, a lesser known black theologian than James Cone, provides the first theological analysis and construction of the black family and 30

31 32 33 34

James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, “General Introduction,” in James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Theology: A Documentary History Volume Two: 1980–1992 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 3. Ibid. Ibid., 6. Ibid. See Dale P. Andrews, Practical Theology for Black Churches: Bridging Black Theology and African American Folk Religion (Louisville, KY and London, UK: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002). A more extensive description of Andrews is given in chapter 6.

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church.35 Roberts claims that while several black sociologists and historians have studied both, or one, of these institutions, no theologian at the time of his publication have considered both the black family and church together in a study.36 Roberts focuses on “… the family as a symbol of a deeper understanding of the church. [And] the role of family and church as “visible” institutions and to their humanizing functions in the lives of black people.”37 Their separate yet interrelated functions are explored primarily, though not solely, within the discipline of theology. Undoubtedly, Hamer experienced humanization by her black family and church. However, it must also be noted that the black church, especially in Hamer’s adult years, was not as visible as desired in the freedom struggle. In subsequent chapters, Hamer’s awareness of her African family and cultural roots are revealed. As Roberts traces the black family in the United States back to Africa by positioning darker-hued people as humans prior to European encounters, colonization, and Christianization,38 Hamer, too, underscored her African ancestral beginning, contributions, and ways of being in the world. Both Hamer and Roberts debunk the Euro-American lies, myths, origins, and erroneous depictions of black life, family, and culture as lazy, stupid, and inferior. In many ways, Hamer was a living witness of Roberts’s citation of black theologian and churchman Gayraud Wilmore when he [Wilmore] asserts, “Blacks have used Christianity, not as it was delivered to them by segregated white churches, but as its truth was authenticated to them in the experience of suffering, to reinforce an ingrained religious temperament and to produce an indigenous religion oriented to freedom and human welfare.”39 I would argue that a more apropos statement would be black people have practiced Christianity, instead of black people have used Christianity, … because Hamer, as a representative of black Protestant Christianity, embodied a faith that was diametrically opposed to Euro-American Christian thought and practice. Many of the slaveholding ancestors of Jim Crow Mississippi believed that God had ordained the segregation of the races, and the subjugation of black people, but Hamer did not adhere to such a belief or the corresponding divinity. Again, as stated in this and the previous chapter, Hamer espoused a belief in a

35 36 37 38 39

J. Deotis Roberts, Roots of a Black Future: Family and Church (Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press, 1980). Ibid., 9. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 23–38. Gayraud Wilmore in Roberts, 42.

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revolutionary Christ who was immersed in the lives of the people, the masses. As Jesus proclaimed the spirit of the Lord was upon him, Hamer announced that the spirit of the Lord was upon her to proclaim a message of liberation and justice to black and white people alike. While Hamer’s black family and church were both humanizing in her early years, it can be argued that it was her Christian faith, spirituality, and black religion of the oppressed in Mississippi that grounded and informed her in her adulthood. Due to multiple factors, including but not limited to the great black migration north to urban and inner cities, Hamer’s sense of family, of kinship was constantly threatened and recreated. Nonetheless, Hamer knew intimately the family in its broadest, extended sense by overcoming a forced sterilization and the early death of one of her adopted daughters, and then assuming responsibility of her motherless grandchildren, and “mothering” the young black and white college students during Freedom Summer of 1964 and the lifespan of SNCC until 1970. Roberts could argue that Hamer’s experience of the family is “… a symbol of a deeper understanding of the church”40 because he contends that within the African/Afro-American familial ethos is a sense of communalism, unity, extended and not nuclear relations, and belonging that transcends mere blood lines.41 However, as stated in chapter 1 and discussed again in subsequent chapters, Hamer equated the multigenerational, interracial, cross-cultural, and interconnected kinship experience as a manifestation of the kingdom of God, and not the church. In Hamer’s day, the church as a local, visible institution was comprised of segregated black families and segregating white families, and she experienced the black church, especially the preachers and teachers, as by-and-large colluding with the white power structure. Hamer did not look to the church as the body, the organ of the spirit, or the space and place to lead the way in ushering in, and bearing witness to, racial healing, freedom, and justice in the black family and broader society as does Roberts.42 Yet, Hamer never lost sight of what the church should be and could become in response to a revolutionary Christ and death-dealing conditions and relations that were contrary to God’s gift of freedom through Christ. This particular view of what the church can be is further outlined in chapters 5 and 6. Instead of viewing the black church as central to the revolutionary aims of Christ in the church and society, it can be argued that Hamer gave more

40 41 42

Roberts, 7. Ibid., 11. See, particularly, Ibid., 7, 45–56, 110–33.

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emphasis to activism as a form of ministry. In addition, Hamer enacted black Christian religion of the oppressed in communal spaces both within and beyond the local church. Hence, Hamer’s vibrant, organic Christian faith and life would be overlooked if the academic practical theologian is looking solely in the local church and at readily understood forms of ministry. Womanist sociologist of religion Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, in her research on black women activists and leaders in the church and community, shares humbly about the inadequacy of her secular sociological research mode.43 As Hamer moved fluidly in the sacred and did not limit religious experience to the parameters of church life, Gilkes discovered that the black women in her oral history interviews did likewise. More specifically, as noted in chapter 1 and detailed more extensively in chapters 5 and 6, Hamer’s faith and religion took root among and with communities that became efficacious, from her perspective, in entering and experiencing the kingdom of God. It must be noted that Hamer did not explicitly refer to herself as a “minister” in either the formal, ordained sense or in the informal lay sense. However, as stated in chapter 1, when Hamer spoke to the black masses in her inaugural speech, she invoked Jesus’s words in Luke 4:18–22 of being anointed by the divine and credentialed herself in the process by saying that the spirit of the Lord was upon her too. After confronting the white male vigilantes and terrorists who tried to deter her and seventeen others from trying to register to vote, Hamer proclaimed that the spirit of the Lord was upon her. After being evicted from the white master’s land for trying to register to vote, Hamer proclaimed she was free to work for Christ. After enduring a jailhouse beating, torture, and sexual assault, Hamer proclaimed that the spirit of the Lord was upon her. The spirit of the Lord in Hamer’s existential experience can be understood as an empowering and consoling presence that provides ways and means to transgress, transcend, and transform unjust conditions and structures for the healing, freedom, and justice for self and others. In this vein, Hamer’s Christian ministry encompassed being a vessel of reconciliation and revolution for a racialized people, nation, and faith communities. Womanist practical theologian and Christian educator Evelyn L. Parker identifies and describes Hamer when addressing what constitutes good ministry.44 In the person of Hamer, one sees a prophetic public presence of min43 44

Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “If It Wasn’t for the Women”: Black Women’s Experience and Womanist Culture in Church and Community (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 5. Evelyn L. Parker, “Embodiment,” in What Is Good Ministry?: Resources to Launch a Discussion: A Collection of Portraits and Essays, eds. Jackson W. Carroll and Carol E. Lytch (Durham, NC: Duke Divinity School, 2003), 20.

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istry, according to Parker, who cares for the poor, critiques the proud and privileged, and extends her bodily-self to both her friend and foe.45 Moreover, Parker asserts through Hamer’s Christian convictions, singing, organizing, lay preaching, mothering, and wifely identities, both the private and public spheres of life were touched in the ways she incarnated the unity of the human and divine reality of Jesus for the deliverance of a racially oppressed people and nation.46 Hamer’s local, state, and national ministry created space for new life, relations, and body politic to emerge as she invited, challenged, and cajoled the people to envision and enact a compassionate Christianity, and one that refused to conform to the segregationist, dehumanizing policy, protocol, and practice of Jim Crow. The potency of Parker identifying Hamer, the person, as the embodiment of good ministry is that practical theologians could explore, construct, and appropriate in more detail such a provocative claim. For example, courses on preaching and worshipping in diverse settings, such as rallies, congregations, protests, citizenship schools, and jailhouses, could be developed if Parker’s claim is taken seriously. This new curricular approach could open up hearts, eyes, and minds to the ways black girls and women are not readily recognized, received, and believed in the church and society. If Hamer, a poor black woman, is the center of the curriculum with assignments that include exegeting the content and context of her speeches/sermons, the delivery, the desired ends, and affective impact on the contemporary hearer/reader, this would be revolutionary. Also, there could be a comparative analysis between her speeches/sermons and oral history interviews to explore what and how she presents in those different contexts. It is my contention that when attention of good ministry is given to a person who performed and practiced recognizable Christian principles and priorities, there is more possibility for integration and creativity as contemporary Christian laity, clergy, and congregations discover and develop their own sense of good ministry. Legal scholar Stephen L. Carter, too, acknowledges Hamer as an exemplar in the public square because of her prophetic, principled voice in calling politicians, even at the highest level, to change their hearts and govern justly, according to the reign of the divine.47 Desiring more than a mere end to racial segregation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Carter notes, “By

45 46 47

Ibid. Ibid. Stephen L. Carter, God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000).

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calling for the establishment of the Kingdom, she [Hamer] was proposing a radical restructuring of American society, and a radical reordering of its priorities.”48 In short, according to Carter, Hamer was seeking a revolution that did not necessarily assume that everyone had to be Christian, but that every leader who did not conform to her this-worldly Christian vision were going to be challenged to do likewise, regardless of their religious or non-religious tradition.49 For Carter, Hamer sought to universalize her faith values of Christian love and justice because Christianity, as one of many faith traditions, is concerned about what adherents of the faith do and why they do them.50 Here, Carter extols Hamer as an example of how faith can be embodied in the public square in a right, and faithful, way because she is perceived as one who honors both her faith tradition and democracy simultaneously.51 Hence, Carter, a legal scholar, raises practical concerns about Christianity and religion in public life, and speaks of Hamer’s embodied religious practice in public, political spaces as does Parker as a practical theologian. Other scholars who acknowledge Hamer’s religious public witness and Christian ministry are pastoral theologian Kathleen D. Billman and systematic theologian Daniel L. Migliore. These theological educators present Hamer’s Christian ministry of justice and reconciliation as an example of Christian lament, public prayers of pain and protest.52 Attempting to recover the significance of prayers of lament for the church, pastors, and laity, Billman and Migliore draw upon the Christian witness of Hamer. Like Parker and Carter, they note, “She [Hamer] refused to bend to pressures from Democratic Party leaders, including the President, whose guiding principle in dealing with the claims of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was political expediency rather than justice.”53 As is explained in more detail in chapter 4, Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party claimed that the white male delegates who were representing Mississippi were not a reflection of the black 48 49 50 51

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Ibid., 33. Ibid., 32–5. Ibid. Carter’s main argument is that religionists must be allowed to participate in the public square so that democracy, and politics, would not be devoid of moral and transcendent norms. See pages 1–23 for a basic outline of his claim and concerns, and how Hamer (pp. 25–39) is used as an example. While further discussion of his claim is beyond the scope of this study, it is worth exploring for practical theologians who are interested in nurturing, negotiating, and navigating the relationship between religion and politics in their pedagogy, syllabi, research, and/or scholarship. Kathleen D. Billman and Daniel L. Migliore, Rachel’s Cry: Prayers of Lament and Rebirth of Hope (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2006), 140. Ibid., 142.

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Mississippian vote because of the policies and practices of terror, torture, and unjust taxation on black people. The pain and sorrow of being terrorized and tortured as well as disenfranchised and dehumanized were channeled into hymns and prayers of protest by Hamer according to Billman and Migliore. Furthermore, they contend, Hamer’s prayers “… did not hide the unjust realities of her life or discount the significance of life here and now in favor of the next life.54 Prayers of lament, according to Billman and Migliore, address the divine with the existential anger, pain, and despair while seeking healing and hope to transcend the seemingly insurmountable personal and/or sociopolitical sorrow.55 Like Rachel’s cry in Jeremiah 31:15 who laments over the loss of her children and refuses to be consoled by inadequate theological platitudes because they do not address the magnitude of the senseless, pervasive, and unjust demise of her babies,56 Hamer, too, cried out that she was sick and tired of being sick and tired personally, socially, economically, and politically. In Hamer’s ministerial cry, comfort and consolation could only come through working, praying, and hoping for the manifestation of the kingdom of God on earth and following the way of Christ, the revolutionary. “Hamer’s faith,” according to Billman and Migliore, “does not fit the usual definitions of liberal or conservative. For Hamer, Christ was both the miraculous, resurrected Christ and the gritty, revolutionary Christ. These two images of Christ were not contradictory for Hamer, but in their unity were the very source of her confidence and strength.”57 I concur with this insightful characterization of Hamer’s religious thought and practice. As is demonstrated in this chapter, Hamer was speaking about a revolutionary Christ as a non-academic practical theologian before black and womanist theologies had entered the academy or public discourse. This “liberal” element of her faith was also inclusive of what can be understood as “conservative” elements such as following Jesus in bearing one’s cross and seeking to know the freedom that he initiated in his death. Thus, both then, and arguably today, Hamer’s Christian ministry and witness was distinctive, innovative, creative, and provocative. In Pragmatic Spirituality, historian of black religion and the African American church Gayraud S. Wilmore quotes Hamer as a reliable, encouraging source for black and womanist identity and consciousness.58 An academic

54 55 56 57 58

Ibid. Ibid., 8–11, 33–4. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 143. Gayraud S. Wilmore, Pragmatic Spirituality: The Christian Faith through an Africentric Lens (New York, NY and London, UK: New York University Press, 2004), 151.

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black male theologian calls upon a non-academic black female practical theologian to inspire those within the academy to find a way to stay committed to the task of nurturing, defining, and clarifying a black theology for the sake of the black church and African American life. Possibly, Wilmore acknowledges one from the pew in the person of Hamer who operated at the nexus of theology and ministry in a non-dualistic Africentric way. The acknowledgement and discussion of Hamer’s Christian ministry primarily beyond the walls of the institutional church can prove to be problematic for many practical theologians who consider the institutional and local religious sites to be central to their respective research and scholarship. Interestingly, as noted by Hamer in chapter 1 and will be noted again in subsequent chapters, the church and the kingdom of God were experienced in conjunction with the young black and white college students during Freedom Summer of 1964, and not within traditionally assumed sacred places and spaces. Hence, in many ways, Hamer invites practical theologians and Christians to reconsider how the church is defined, located, experienced, and thereby studied. For example, the term “Christian ministry” as applied to Hamer’s Christian thought and practice challenges various contemporary researchers, scholars, activists, advocates, and community organizers to rethink the ways in which Christianity can be lived and infused in spaces and places other than the local and institutional church. Hamer’s God and theological framework were capable of engaging religious, racial, ethnic, national, gender, socioeconomic, regional, age, and ideological differences while exhibiting clear Christian practices of faith, hope, love, justice, and freedom. Instead of being referenced as civil and human rights activist, now, hopefully, Hamer can be rightfully acknowledged and subsequently analyzed as a “Christian” civil and human rights activist who ministered to the people by doing the work of Christ. Her Christian faith mattered, and it was challenged, deepened, and called on in the crucible of white domination, terror, and hostility. While Hamer’s Christianity was real and alive in the struggle for racial and environmental healing, freedom, and justice, the term “Christian ministry” is somewhat of a misnomer when applied to Hamer’s Christian thought and practice. As previously stated, Hamer never explicitly stated she was doing Christian ministry although she did say she was able to work for Christ when she was evicted from Marlowe’s plantation. Furthermore, Hamer’s reference to “work,” and not “ministry,” is consistent with what womanist sociologist of religion Gilkes discovered in her study of twenty-five black women leaders and activist in the church and community.59 For black women who served in the 59

Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, If It Wasn’t for the Women: Black Women’s Experience and Womanist Culture in Church and Community (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 16.

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church and community, the term “work” was employed to capture the nature of their service. Regarding community work, Gilkes provides an extensive description as follows: Community work consists of all tasks contained in strategies to combat racial oppression and to strengthen African-American social, economic, and political institutions in order to foster group survival, growth, and advancement. Community work is focused on internal development and external challenge, and creates ideas enabling people to think about change. It is the work that opens doors to elected and appointed positions in the political power struggle, and demands and creates jobs in local labor markets and the larger economic system. Community work also focuses on changing ideas, stereotypes, and images that keep a group perpetually stigmatized. Sometimes this is done by demanding different textbooks in the schools or publicly criticizing newspapers and other media. At the same time, community workers may insist, rightly or wrongly, that community members change their behavior to avoid being treated in terms of prevailing stereotypes. Community work is a constant struggle, and it consists of everything that people do to address oppression in their own lives, suffering in the lives of others, and their sense of solidarity or group kinship.60 In subsequent chapters, it is shown that Hamer definitely and consistently embodied this broad, elaborate definition of community work as a Christian. Unequivocally and unabashedly, she battled against racial injustice and dehumanization while struggling for black survival and development by accessing social, political, economic, educational, agricultural, and religious institutional resources and processes. If the resources were not readily accessible, Hamer and the communities with whom she worked created their own way such as the development of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party when poor black Mississippians were systematically and intentionally excluded from the Democratic party and process in Mississippi. In her community work of advancing Christian ideals and critical socio-political analyses, Hamer concretized abstract notions of love, freedom, justice, reparations, Christ, and so much more. Then, it must be noted that before Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Carol Moseley Braun, and Barack Obama, there was Fannie Lou Hamer who was opening doors to occupy appointed and elected seats as well as providing life-giving labor for the well-being of black

60

Ibid., 17.

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families and communities through the development of the pig bank, Head Start, and Freedom Farm Cooperative programs. The political was intricately connected to the personal in Hamer’s community work that she performed until her death. She believed in freedom and could not rest until it came for her and the people. In this vein, it can be argued that Hamer’s community work models for contemporary Christians a more accurate understanding of salvation for a people that includes yet transcends individual, personal notions of being delivered or pardoned from “sin.” An exploration of the differences and similarities between Christian “work” and “ministry” by black women is beyond the scope of this book. Here, I am not advocating for an abandonment of the term “ministry.” Rather, there is an interest to uncover a broader conceptual understanding of black women’s labor who still, by-and-large, experience exclusion from pulpit and civic organizational positions even though they comprise the majority of the people who serve and work from the pews or rank-and-file membership in both institutional settings. For example, according to Gilkes, black women in both the church and civic organizations could assert that “if it wasn’t for the women” because: When viewing the creative role of women in the simultaneous processes of social change and community survival, one must conclude that if it wasn’t for the women, racially oppressed communities would not have the institutions, organizations, strategies, and ethics that enable the group not only to survive or to maintain itself as an integral whole, but also to develop in an alien, hostile, oppressive situation and to challenge it.61 The “work” juxtaposed against the “ministry” of black women in the church and community, both then and today, invites a broader examination of black women’s leadership beyond traditionally sanctioned leadership roles. It would allow for the black church to be seen as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, a scholar of history, African, and African American studies, positions it “… not as the exclusive product of male ministry but as the product and process of male and female interaction.”62 Women like Hamer who engage, contest, and resist nu-

61 62

Ibid., 26. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “The Black Church: A Gender Perspective” in AfricanAmerican Religion: Interpretative Essays in History and Culture, eds. Timothy E. Fulop and Albert J. Raboteau (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), 204.

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merous and various isms in their church and community work animate the religious and civic institutions to which they belong in an attempt to make those spaces and places alive, and accountable, to the people. Finally, Hamer’s “work” for Christ, in the context of Gilkes’s church and community work paradigm, could also be compared to Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement and Paulo Freire’s notion of cultural worker. These prospective studies in the field of practical theology could yield greater insights on women’s work in the church and society that include yet transcend traditionally acknowledged forms of ministry. Catholic practical theologian Claire E. Wolfteich’s examination of mothering, in the domestic and public spheres, through maternal life’s writing can be used as a framework for exploring Hamer’s and other black women’s differences and similarities in conceptualizing “ministry” and “work.”63 Wolfteich’s attention to the recovery of mothering as a spiritual practice through the texts and various forms of the performance of the self to help shape readers can be interpreted as Christian ministry too.64 Wolfteich opens another aspect in which further study of Hamer can be considered although to date, there does not appear to be much explicit autobiographical and biographical writings on Hamer as a mother in public leadership. As discussed earlier in the chapter, what is evident is the atrocity she and so many other black women experienced in forced sterilizations which she coined as the “Mississippi appendectomy” as well as the loss of her adopted child because of the lack of access to hospitals and healthcare. Lastly, Hamer’s pro-life, pro-family, pro-community, and pro-children and youth education as documented in her speeches, writings, and interviews are texts to be considered to ascertain her mothering that can yield even further insight on her revolutionary practical theology.

3

Hamer’s Invitation to White Academic Practical Theologians

Hamer’s leadership in rural, local, contextual, and national public religious thought was replete with practical knowledge and sound theological sociopolitical messaging without the privilege of a formal theological education. The substance of Hamer’s faith and the way she lived and practiced faith, religion, and beliefs suggest that her non-academic practical theology could assist and enhance theological education and the discipline of practical theology

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Wolfteich, 1–2. Ibid., 16.

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instead of the other way around. Ella Baker’s motto, “Strong people don’t need strong leaders,” rang true for Hamer. Therefore, imagine if white academic practical theologians were there hearing and singing the freedom songs such as “Certainly Lord” alongside rural, impoverished, undereducated and redemptively educated, exploited, and disenfranchised black people plus young black and white college students. How would faculty of white-dominated seminaries, divinity schools, and departments of religion have been shaped differently if white academic Christians were there when black people in Mississippi were being crucified and lynched like the Lord? How would have white Evangelical male clergy, and their respective congregations, been trained differently if they were there in Mississippi when the sun refused to shine as black and white bodies were found in lakes and rivers, usually after being jailed and tortured? How would Christianity in the United States be different if white academic practical theologians were there when black people of Mississippi were being pierced in the side by starvation, malnutrition, inadequate health care, and little to no legal protection? How would white academic practical theologians have responded to Hamer’s provocative call and question of “Have you got good religion”? If white academic practical theologians were there in Mississippi, would they have been able to respond with “Certainly Lord,” or would they have trembled due to the existential realization of the invitation to embody and enact a different religion? How would the field of practical theology in the twenty-first century be different if white academic practical theologians were there in Mississippi alongside Hamer encountering and entering into a different experience, assuming new faith practices, listening to and believing a black woman’s narrative, and accessing material to construct new normative perspectives of Christian faith and life for the white church and society?65 Although white academic practical theologians would have had far less to offer and much to learn on the faith and life matters that were at play in Mississippi 65

Although white academic theologians were not documented as being present in Mississippi to date, there were some white mainline “liberal” churches, clergy, and denominations who were actively engaged in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s particularly in Mississippi. See Mark Newman’s Divine Agitators: The Delta Ministry and Civil Rights in Mississippi (Athens, GA and London, UK: The University of Georgia Press, 2004) where he provides a historical account on the emergence of the National Council of Churches (NCC) and its role in the civil rights movement especially after the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956) and student sit-ins in the early 1960s. As an organization comprised primarily of white U.S. Protestant and Orthodox congregations, Newman documents how it moved from merely issuing statements and resolutions in favor of desegregation to becoming immersed in the lives of the people through various self-help, economic empowerment and development programs, and efforts of relief, literacy, education, and voter registration.

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and the nation, could they have been a bridge between black religion in the Civil Rights Movement and the white church and society?66 Hamer’s practical knowledge and theology were cultivated through the practices of going to jail for freedom, picketing for justice, hating segregation yet loving the segregator and the segregated.67 While these practices were neither exclusively, nor uniquely, Christian as Beaudoin reminds academic practical theologians, and practical theologians like Dykstra and Bass would question the “christianicity” of such practices because they lack a clear, consistent historical grounding in and throughout time and place,68 Hamer’s life and legacy, is nonetheless, instructive for contemporary academic practical theologians. To learn of and from Hamer, today, could also entail white academic practical theologians examining the substance and scope of Christianity through the lens of a religiously inspired socio-political movement that was led by blacklay organizers (primarily women and youth) and clergy mobilizers (primarily Baptist male pastors and preachers). In this vein, the “new” faith practices and beliefs that disrupted the Jim Crow status quo and informed Hamer’s socio-political action and engagement could also be seen as constitutive of 66

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The possibility of any strong presence of white academic practical theologians during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, especially in Mississippi, was highly unlikely. As was noted earlier in the chapter, black religion and theology did not exist in higher education and seminary institutions according to Ware, and legislation that led to the desegregation of public schools and land-grant institutions was not being implemented, nor enforced, “with all deliberate speed” to integrate ready and capable black students, educators, and administrators. Nonetheless, this question is raised to challenge a major presupposition of academic practical theology that can be applied to black and womanist theologies too, and not just white practical theologians. Practical theology exists as a discipline to assist the church, congregations, clergy, faith communities, and individual practitioners by providing formal, theological substance and support for faith and life. This is an assumed one-way relationship and further presupposes that academic practical theology has something to offer and nothing to learn from the respective entities and parties. Hamer’s lived experience and practical theology challenge this presupposition and invite academic practical theologians to assume postures of learning from, with, and/or of people like Hamer and their respective communal, group identities and contexts. For a more extensive discussion on white practical theology’s hegemony in the U.S. see Tom Beaudoin and Katherine Turpin’s “White Practical Theology,” in Opening the Field of Practical Theology: An Introduction, 251–69, eds. Kathleen A. Cahalan and Gordon S. Mikoski (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). The practices listed here are drawn from the verses of the freedom song, “Certainly Lord.” Craig Dykstra and Dorothy C. Bass, “A Theological Understanding of Christian Practices,” 13–32, in Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life, eds. Miroslav Volf and Dorothy C. Bass (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002).

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the church. Sociologist Aldon D. Morris notes that ninety-eight per cent of members in the Civil Rights Movement of Montgomery (Montgomery Improvement Association) and Birmingham (Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights) in the late 1950s were church members with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. leading MIA and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth leading ACMHR.69 Furthermore, Morris argues that the indigenous base of black churches, communities, institutions, organizations, leaders, and resources organized and sustained the work from 1953–1963.70 Black Southern Christians in urban areas were at work in and beyond the walls of the institutional church. Clarence Jordan, a white Southern Baptist minister and co-founder of Koinonia Farm, an interracial community in Sumter County, Georgia, in 1942, states, “I am increasingly convinced that Jesus thought of his messages as not dead-ending in a static institution but as a mighty flow of spirit which would penetrate every nook and cranny of man’s personal and social life … I really don’t think we can ever renew the church until we stop thinking of it as an institution and start thinking of it as a movement.”71 According to Jordan’s conceptualization of the church, Hamer and many other black Southern Christians were modeling and embodying the church as a movement, and would be dismissed as being the church because many theological scholars view the church, first and foremost, as an institution.72 Hence, to learn from Hamer, white academic theologians would have to start seeing the church as a movement in a particular time and place, that may differ from other movements, as the church, or not, in and throughout time, and from place to place.73 This new proposed way of conducting research in the field of practical theology would challenge whiteness and white practical theologians, alike, according to white practical theologians Tom Beaudoin and Katherine Turpin 69 70 71 72

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Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1984), 74. Ibid., xii. Morris’s study examines a ten-year period in the communities of Baton Rouge, LA, Montgomery, AL, and Birmingham, AL. Clarence Jordan cited in Charles Marsh, The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, From the Civil Rights Movement to Today (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2005), 81. Beaudoin states “… Christian-ecclesial traditions remain not only the main focus for action but supply the intellectual resources for theological work.” See Beaudoin, “Why Does Practice Matter Theologically?,” 18. Morris’s examination of the social movements in the state of Louisiana and two cities in the state of Alabama are each distinct with some similarities. King and Shuttlesworth were able to learn from and lean on each other as well as draw upon the first boycott that occurred in Baton Rouge, Louisiana that was led by Rev. T. J. Jemison in June of 1953. The King-led Montgomery bus boycott commenced the day Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955.

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because white practical theology is characteristic of having a “… love for orderliness… and the embrace of procedural rationality and orderly method as a distinctive marker of influential approaches in the field.”74 The fluidity, complexity, novelty, and particularity in viewing Hamer’s lived faith and the church as a movement are neither “orderly” or “controlled” by white practical theologians, and therefore would require new training and ways of being and seeing meaning and value in nonwhite confessional Christian and non-Christian beliefs, practices, and responses to white supremacy, terror, violence, and injustice. To acknowledge and analyze Hamer as one who participated in the church as a movement invites academic practical theologians to not start with “… finding contemporary inadequate, unfaithful, confused, contradictory, or otherwise in need of the theological intervention that the theologian can provide.”75 A paradigmatic shift in research and scholarship would move beyond the tendency of white academic practical theologians’ traffic in the world of engaging the binaries that Beaudoin and Turpin argue “the overcoming of binaries recapitulates colonial history, making white theology a purifying, reforming, ordering theology that will civilize its adherents, making them more virtuous Christians.”76 Furthermore, they assert that attempting to overcome dichotomies such as the public and private, theory and practice, secular and sacred, material and spiritual, and/or theology and ministry is more of a fabrication and a research orientation that is not a typical starting point for nonwhite theologians.77 When the turn is made to the religious belief and practices of people of African descent, there is already more of a fluid, embodied way of being, and knowing, as exhibited by Hamer, and discovered by womanist sociologist of religion Townsend Gilkes. Furthermore, pastoral and practical theologian Emmanuel Lartey argues “… that one of the hallmarks of African religious life and thought is an integrating, synthesizing ethos whereas European Christianity has progressed by separation and analysis, distinguishing itself from beliefs and practices that differ from its own, labelling them as ‘evil’, ‘demonic’, 74

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Tom Beaudoin and Katherine Turpin, “White Practical Theology,” in Opening the Field of Practical Theology: An Introduction, eds. Kathleen A. Cahalan and Gordon S. Mikoski (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 259. Ibid., 263. While Beaudoin and Turpin describe what white practical theologians do or orient themselves as a starting point in research, I use the thought to say what must change to appropriately learn of and from Hamer. Ibid. Ibid. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore also acknowledges that nonwhite practical theologians do not give attention to overcoming the binaries as do white practical theologians in her essay on “The Theory-Practice Binary and the Politics of Practical Knowledge,” 191.

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‘dangerous’, or else unsavoury, barbaric, or unenlightened.”78 Both Lartey’s and Townsend Gilkes’s observations have implications for how doctoral and scholarly training need to be sensitive to the diverse religious experiences and traditions and develop appropriate research methods and procedures to properly study, present, and respond to religious diversity. Unfortunately, as Beaudoin claims, “Practical theology is still quite far, in general, from being able to relate with the depth of creativity and criticality to its Christian heritage that a postcolonial, two-thirds-world-attentive global situation requires.”79 Unlike academic white practical theologians, Hamer, I contend, was farther along in her vision of a “postcolonial” United States especially for the black masses in Mississippi and therefore offers not only intellectual resources for the theological work to be done, but also programmatic, pragmatic, and principled practices to be examined for one’s research agenda or appropriation into one’s current context. Moreover, as is shown, Hamer’s non-academic practical theology is solid and broad enough to engage black practical, contextual, systematic, and womanist theologies who are the leading, and often invisible, scholars on how to relate the Christian heritage to a one-third-world situation. Then, unknowingly, Beaudoin and Turpin open the door for Hamer to be a dialogical partner with white academic practical theologians when they state, … white practical theology must continue to struggle to listen to these partners [nonwhite scholars] as interesting inflections of the field but rather as central to the shaping and reshaping of its forms of dialogue, conceptual and methodological framing, and research directions. In addition to colleagues within the field of practical theology, critical white practical theologians can find partners in antiracism and anti-oppression work in critical pedagogy and numerous activist movements that seek greater equality by paying attention to whiteness and its impact on theoretical categories, understandings of practice, and modes of reflection and analysis.80 As is continuously presented in subsequent chapters, Hamer is a dialogical partner whom I hope white and nonwhite academic practical theologians will come to know as intimately as possible as one who is believed to be among the African ancestors and/or the Hebraic-Christian cloud of witnesses. 78 79 80

Emmanuel Lartey, Postcolonializing God: New Perspectives on Pastoral and Practical Theology (London, UK: SCM Press, 2013), xi-xii. Beaudoin, “Why Does Practice Matter Theologically?,” 18. Beaudoin and Turpin, “White Practical Theology,” 265.

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Hamer did not necessarily see the church as a movement even though she named an aspect of the Civil Rights Movement as being a reflection of God’s reign. In her struggle in, with, and beyond the institutional black church, Hamer enjoined the black Christians of Mississippi to become cross bearers, as was Jesus and Simon of Cyrene, who illuminate the way to freedom, justice, and a just democracy. Hence, it can be argued that Hamer articulated and adhered to a living faith, or theology, as a movement. Bearing one’s cross was a sign of a commitment to freedom in Christ and creation, and refusing to accept as normative the conditions, policies, and practices of suffering black Mississippians experienced in light of the legacy of slavery, white supremacy, and Jim Crow segregation. Right then and right there, Hamer practiced an embodied human freedom and dignity as she understood that Christ had designed. Latina Catholic Christian feminist theologian Teresa Delgado presents an embodied research focus that can be seen as being akin to the church as a movement or Hamer’s lived faith as a movement when she asserts, “Our Christian doctrines need to be critiqued through the lens of an embodied epistemology, a way of knowing that ‘sees reality through the configuration of our bodiliness and seriously considers the effects of ideas as they bear on bodies and vice versa, especially the disfigured bodies of the marginalized ….’”81 If Delgado’s research agenda is taken seriously, structural, cultural, doctrinal, institutional, and ideological inflicted suffering would be exposed while possibly creating space for accessing life-giving, embodied, and emerging revolutionary Christian thought and practices. This could be yet another way for white academic practical theologians to move beyond the theory-practice binary.

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Teresa Delgado, “This Is My Body … Given For You: Theological Anthropology Latina/ Mente,” in Frontiers in Catholic Feminist Theology: Shoulder to Shoulder, eds. Susan Abraham and Elena Procario-Foley (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 36. Delgado speaks of the harm inflicted on Latin American women and Latinas in the U.S. who are forced to give of their bodies as victims of modern-day human trafficking from families, and HIV/AIDS from intimate male partners as if it is for a legitimate greater good. Delgado critiques both traditional Catholic doctrines and Latin American oppressive cultural norms that legitimize the bodily distortions of Latin American and Latina women. Also, white practical theologian, Richard R. Osmer’s reflective practice approach and other descriptive-interpretative methods are employed in ways that allow for critique of Christian doctrines and culture instead of merely applying doctrine. See Osmer’s 2011 ‘Practical theology: A current international perspective’, HTS Teologiese Studies/ Theological Studies 67(2), #Art. 1058, 7 pages. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/hts.v67i2.1058. Accessed on July 15, 2019.

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Summary

Hamer stands before and alongside the best of academic black and womanist theologies in her sociopolitical analyses, faith commitments, and religious embodiment that includes yet transcends the labor of a civil and human rights activist. Like practical theologians and theologies, she attended to lived experience and practices at both micro and macro levels towards helping the church and society to live into both of their proclaimed ideals of freedom and justice. It can be argued that she stood both inside and outside of the institutional black church while encountering the church, irrespective of racial and ethnic fault lines, in ways that many of us Christians today have yet to experience. The black family and culture were central to her practical theology that took on more significance than the black church in her adult years. More than ever, Hamer invites, or perhaps exhorts, academic practical theologians to include the “ministry” or work of women prophets, and not just pastors, as legitimate leadership roles in the life of the church in society. Then, there is the church as a movement to be considered because of the way Hamer’s faith and other black Southern Christians inspired a movement. In the next chapter, the turn is made to discussing and analyzing Hamer’s experience in the United States “wilderness.”

Chapter 3

Black Prey, White Predator: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Practical Theology of Racial Freedom in the United States “Wilderness” In many of her speeches, Fannie Lou Hamer often closed with a quote from a song her mother taught her. After conveying the depth of her struggle to be free, and critical analysis of social, political, economic, and spiritual powers and principalities, she said, “Should earth against my soul engage and fiery darts be hurled, when I can smile at Satan’s rage, and face this frowning world.”1 Clearly, in this hymnal verse, Hamer accounted for the cruelty and antagonism that can be experienced and encountered in the Earth that is neither friendly, welcoming, or encouraging of her human flourishing in her darkerhued skin. Yet, she was not without hope or agency to respond to the demands of the moment as articulated in the hymn. Confronting, engaging, resisting, and transforming, she refused to accept environmental conditions that relegated nonwhite human beings to the structural, attitudinal confines of white domination and supremacy. Aware of her human vulnerability in the natural world and under socially-constructed unjust, unnatural conditions, Hamer defined and redefined her relationship in and to the world. It is argued that Hamer privileged human-to-human relations, especially across race, gender, and class, in her endeavor to address and redress ecological damage and injustice. Hamer’s Christian vision of healing our common home manifested in her participation in: 1. Affordable, accessible, and quality housing, 2. Anti-poverty programs and services, 3. Anti-Vietnam war protests, 4. Community development and decision-making, 5. Cooperative land acquisition and use, 6. Early childhood, public, and adult education, 7. Economic cooperatives, 8. Fair wages and labor rights, 9. Farming, 10. Health care and access, and 11. Voting rights and electoral politics. 1 Fannie Lou Hamer in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 6, 56, 73, 93, 120.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004438071_005

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These practices and projects as forms of resistance constituted Hamer’s ecological sensibilities in her practical theology of racial freedom. At the core, caring for people in a particular space and place as well as the broader nation motivated Hamer to not be merely reactive, but also proactive, creative, and innovative while navigating the United States “wilderness.” In this chapter, first, I provide a rich description of her practical theology of racial freedom. Second, attention is given to how Hamer’s practical theology of racial freedom challenges myths and misperceptions on black people’s relationship to the environment. In this section, Hamer’s Christian thought and practice on the environment is contextualized in a broader ecological discourse. Scholarship by ecowomanists, black liberation theologians, environmental historians, political environmentalists, and agriculturalenvironmentalists demonstrate that African Americans have a more complex, multi-layered relationship to the natural world due to slavery and Jim Crow segregation than their white counterparts. Third, attention is given to specific creation care practices and advocacy of Hamer that is reflective of black people’s integrated, collaborative, and communal approaches to caring for both human and non-human beings. Fourth and finally, Hamer’s practical theology of racial freedom is presented as a necessary corrective to certain limitations and nearsightedness as found in scholarship on environmentalism and creation care. Her approach is a model of reclamation or recovery of black women’s leadership, thought, and practice in response to current environmental challenges such as global warming, food insecurity, landlessness, and displacement.

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Hamer’s Practical Theology of Racial Freedom: A Rich Description

The United States “wilderness” was not an environment in which Hamer and other black people could readily exercise their natural, human dignity and creativity. Instead, it was designed to control, constrain, oppress, and suppress the natural movement and identity of black lives within United States borders. From Hamer’s first unsuccessful attempt in registering to vote (August 31, 1962) to the day she became a registered voter (January 10, 1963), Hamer experienced being fired from her job, evicted from her home, separated from her family in exile, and almost gunned down by white nightriders.2 After she had become one of the first black women to be registered to vote in her county,

2 Fannie Lou Hamer, “Fannie Lou Hamer,” in My Soul is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered, Howell Raines (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 252.

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Hamer exclaimed, “it was like I become a hunted person, criminal.”3 She further recalled, We would have to have our lights out before dark. It was cars passing that house all times of the night, driving real slow with guns, and pickups with white mens in it, and they’d pass that house just as slow as they could pass it… three guns lined up in the back… Pap (Hamer’s husband) couldn’t get nothin’ to do…4 Both hunted and criminalized for exercising a supposed constitutional right, Hamer navigated and negotiated a United States terrain which she, and others, intimately called “the land of the tree and the home of the grave.” Although trees were used for shade and freedom school sites for poor black Mississippians such as Hamer, they were also sites where black bodies were hung, mutilated, and burned for exhibition by white terrorists. Lynching was a tragic reality in the black experience and became popularized and politicized by two African American women in different time periods and professions. First, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Ida B. Wells conducted an anti-lynching campaign through investigative reporting. She announced and exposed the true motivations behind the lynching of black bodies by debunking a common white myth of the time that purported black men were predators who desired to rape white women, rather than the true predators, elite white males. White women had to be protected from black men according to white men, but not according to Wells. In her investigations, black people needed to be protected from white men and women because white women were interested in black men though they were not free to admit it, and black women were subject to rape and sexual assault by white men without any recourse.5 Wells’ investigations uncovered white women’s desire for black men in which the relationship was more consensual coupled with white men’s fear of black reprisal and denial of white women’s desires for black men. While Ida B. Wells wrote about lynching in her newspaper and denounced in her public speaking, jazz singer Billie Holiday sang about lynching of black

3 Fannie Lou Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’ Speech Delivered at Loop College, Chicago, Illinois, May 27, 1970,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is, eds. Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 110. 4 Hamer, “Fannie Lou Hamer,” in My Soul is Rested, Howell Raines, 252. The reference to Hamer’s husband indicates that he was not able to find work because of her activism. 5 V. P. Franklin, Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths: Autobiography and the Making of the African American Intellectual Tradition (New York, NY: Scribner, 1995), 66–8.

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bodies in 1939. Holiday took the 1937 poem of Abel Meeropol, a Jewish teacher and closet communist, and recorded and performed it to show her disdain for the predatorial practices occurring predominantly on southern land and trees.6 Strange Fruit is the title of Holiday’s song that is relatively short yet ecologically sad and profound. The lyrics are: Southern trees bear a strange fruit. Blood on the leaves and blood at the root. Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze. Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. Pastoral scene of the gallant south, the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth. Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh, then the sudden smell of burning flesh. Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck, for the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, for the sun to rot, for the tree to drop. Here is a strange and bitter crop. Born and bred in the deep south, Hamer was all too familiar with the “strange and bitter crop” that Holiday performed in song, and Wells denounced in her media production. Furthermore, in calling the United States “the land of the tree and home of the grave,”7 and not the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” Hamer made explicit that the environment she inhabited was deathdealing, and not life-giving. Always under the constant pressure of being extinguished or disposed, Hamer knew she was perceived as an environmental and sociological problem. Nonetheless, her ability to voice in song, formal speeches, and piercing sermons her lived experience to fellow black sufferers and potential white sympathizers and resisters enabled her to transcend the constant threat of death. Black liberation theologian James Cone notes in an interview with Bill Moyers on his text, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, “when you can express and articulate what’s happening to you, you have a measure of transcendence over it [white control and domination] … It [expression and articulation] gives you self-definition and when you have self-definition not defined by the world then you transcend what is happening to you.”8 Hamer enacted freedom as she faced the tragedy and atrocity of lynching and white terror in the United States “wilderness.” Another specific way Hamer enacted and proclaimed freedom included her ability to advocate for people at the intersection of race and class. Poor white 6 https://www.npr.org/2012/09/05/158933012/the-strange-story-of-the-man-behind-strange -fruit. Accessed on September 25, 2017. 7 Hamer, “‘Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either,’ Speech Delivered at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, January 1971,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 126. 8 James Cone, A Bill Moyers Interview on the text The Cross and the Lynching Tree. https:// www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/watch2.html. Accessed on August 23, 2017.

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people, who were taught to hate all black people regardless of their social class, were extended love and compassion by Hamer. She publicly proclaimed, But not only am I concerned about getting the black people registered in the state of Mississippi, but it’s poor white people that’s been taught that they are better than I am because of the color, the pigment of their skin. But when I see the suffering in the state of Mississippi, I know I can’t just pin the fight down just for black people, because due to all of the suffering that I have gone through in the state of Mississippi, I refuse to bring myself down to the depths of hell to hate a man because he hated me.9 Poor black and white people of Mississippi were part of the human family and both people groups were being overlooked and dismissed, according to Hamer. Moreover, on another occasion, she mentioned the lives of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney as Christ figures, who died in the struggle for civil and human rights, to set all of us free. Two white Jewish men, and one native Mississippi African American man were redemptive figures in Hamer’s practical theology of racial freedom to possibly underscore the interconnection between all humans, and the severity of the ecological and social problem that should not be understood as merely a black problem. Speaking to a predominantly white middle-class Wisconsin audience, Hamer stated, “your freedom is shackled in chains to mine.”10 As noted in chapter 1, Hamer informed one of her jailers and torturers of the parenthood of God, and kinship of humanity regardless of race or nationality.11 Paraphrasing Acts 17:26, she told the officer, “the Scripture says ‘Has made of one blood all nations.’”12 Hamer was humanizing the jailer, and herself, by reciting a biblical text that ascribed to God as creator of one humanity. Refusing to acknowledge and embrace his and her humanity, he responded by saying, “It’s a damn lie. Abraham Lincoln said that.”13 Here, the hearts of both Hamer and her torturer were exposed. Hamer, even under duress, externalized

9 10 11 12 13

Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’ Speech Delivered at Loop College, Chicago, Illinois, May 27, 1970,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 114–5. Hamer, “Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 125. Hamer, “‘I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,’ Speech Delivered at a Freedom Vote Rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, Fall 1963,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 5. Ibid. Ibid.

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her belief in the interconnection of humanity. On the other hand, the jailer externalized the poison of white supremacy, deep-seated hatred, and biblical ignorance. Hamer’s reference to Acts 17:26 was not only recited in jail, but also in some of her speeches. Regardless of her audience, she would emphasize the unity of humanity and explain the cause of the difference in skin pigmentation. She proclaimed to her predominantly white audience, And I’m fed up and sick and tired of you saying that you can’t stand for integration when you started it, when they started unloading the ships of the black people when we began to come in from Africa. You started it because I have cousins as white as any of you in here with blue eyes and gray hair—and a black man didn’t do it.14 For Hamer, integration can be traced back to the European slave trade, and when black women were sexually assaulted to fulfill the white man’s lust, and increase his profit margin. The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to desegregate public schools was a legal precedent, but integration had been occurring de facto for centuries according to Hamer. White men had produced, and abandoned, many children with black women against the women’s will that was a tragic reality of integration. As Hamer teased out the difference between humanity’s inherent unity from the racial biological fallacy and the social, environmental atrocity of rape, she invited the white predator to become her neighbor, sibling, and co-worker in transforming the United States “wilderness.” Forced segregation, dehumanization, subjugation, and denial of black selfdetermination were white practices contrary to the divine, transnational human kinship in Hamer’s mind. Inhumane activity and a grave distortion of the religion of Jesus helped to create an imbalance in nature and human-tohuman relations. From slavery to sharecropping, black hands tilled the land of a monocultural crop that only filled the pockets and bellies of the white landowners.15 King cotton alone was not beneficial for the black masses, or the soil in which it was grown. Cheap, exploited black labor within both economic industries of slavery and sharecropping created generations of poverty and malnutrition for many black Mississippians. Rendered unemployable, black 14 15

Hamer, “‘What Have We to Hail?,’ Speech Delivered in Kentucky, Summer 1968,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 82. See Gerald Jaynes, Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862–1882 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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field hands became even more vulnerable when mechanization began to replace human labor. In response to the economic and environmental conditions, Hamer cried out “… white America, you can’t destroy me because I’m black to save your life without destroying yourself.”16 Hamer sounded the alarm, on numerous occasions, for the nation to avert the final environmental destruction by acknowledging and embracing a shared humanity. In 1971, Hamer was invited to Tougaloo College near Jackson, Mississippi to speak on the topic and question “Is it too late?” They wanted Hamer to provide a prognosis for the nation regarding its environmental and sociological problem of racism, racial injustice, and racial dehumanization. A year before this speech, Hamer spoke in Chicago at Loop College in 1970 on “America is a sick place, and man is on the critical list.” She had given her diagnosis as a Christian freedom fighter and cultural worker, and in 1971, she was being called on to provide leadership on how to heal, how to live regarding the urgency of the moment. Like many contemporary environmentalists, Hamer was invited to assess the external situation and instruct on what can be done, if anything, to heal the land, a geo-political space and place. Although the planetary issues of global warming, climate change, rising sea levels, deforestation, and fossil fuel emissions were not part of Hamer’s frame of analysis, in her own way, she provided a cogent moral and political response that focused on people, place, and space on Earth. More specifically, in the beginning part of her short speech, Hamer stated, “In the streets of America, my home and land where my fathers died, land of my family’s pride, I have taken a stand for human rights and civil rights not just for my sake, but for all mankind.”17 Instead of calling the nation “the land of the tree and the home of the grave,” Hamer acknowledged a more intimate sense of belonging to the nation that included yet transcended the domestic terror of lynching, murder, and assassination. A land, a place and space in which she was constantly under duress, became a land, a place and space to which she claimed to belong, and it belonged to her. Furthermore, although she does not specifically name who her ‘fathers’ are, it can be assumed that she was referring to black men and women, and white ones too, who had sacrificed their lives for the healing of the nation and restructuring of the social, political, economic, and environmental conditions of racial 16

17

Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’ Speech Delivered at the Vietnam War Moratorium Rally, Berkeley, California, October 15, 1969,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 101. Hamer, “‘Is It Too Late?,’ Speech Delivered at Tougaloo College, Tougaloo, Mississippi, Summer 1971,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 132.

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exclusion and oppression. Revising and recontextualizing her relationship to the land that was not merely reflective of her victim and oppressive identity, Hamer unequivocally asserted that she had a stake in the land, and its wellbeing was of utmost concern. This well-being of the land privileged the people over the place though Hamer did not exclude the space and place of the United States “wilderness.” They were interconnected. Environmental historian, Dianne D. Glave argues, “Contrary to the dominant purist sort of preservation that emphasized places and not people—the practice and ideology of whites—African Americans acknowledged and emphasized the communities populating those wild places.”18 Furthermore, Christian ethicist, Peter Paris states, “The anthropocentric nature of African cosmological thought and the holism it entails imply a sacramental view of life in general and of human life in particular.”19 Hence, Hamer stood solidly within an African American centered orientation towards the environment and the people who inhabited it. Hamer’s stance for human and civil rights for herself, and all of humanity invites us to explore fresh insights regarding connections to the land. For example, for Hamer, the land was not the exclusive right of white male elite landowners and politicians, and I would add, neither is the planet. Moreover, the land was not to be monopolized, or merely commodified, by any group, but should be accessible to the people who inhabit and commune in and with the land for the well-being of everyone, and everything. Likewise, neither is the planet and the Earth’s rich, sufficient resources. In this vein, preservation of the wild would be inclusive of people, land, place, and space without any racebased, gender-based, class-based, or human-based domination among the inherent biodiversity. However, as Glave argues, “segregation stripped African Americans of their human, social, and political rights but ironically reinforced traditions by keeping African Americans knitted together on segregated wild or cultivated Southern landscapes.”20 In her resistance of segregation and the unacknowledged damage on the people, land, place, and space of slavery and colonization, Hamer exhibited a relationship to the land that flowed out of her African American lived experience, African cultural retentions, and Christian teachings that valued communal belonging and responsibility, and not private, individual ownership. 18 19 20

Dianne D. Glave, Rooted in the Earth: Reclaiming the African American Environmental Heritage (Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books, 2010), 8. Peter J. Paris, Virtues and Values: The African and African American Experience (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2004), 6. Glave, Rooted in the Earth, 9.

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Hamer’s sense of belonging to the land, and not owning it, enabled her to create space for the diverse realities that existed on the land. Hamer reminded her audiences of the stolen land from the Native Americans that included the more voluntary immigration, and colonization, of many white ethnic groups, and the forced immigration, and economic exploitation, of many nonwhite and poor people groups. Each time she would respond to the people who wanted her to go back to Africa, Hamer would cite various and often different racial, ethnic, and cultural groups to underscore the fact that the United States geopolitical land belonged to everyone and not just white people.21 Hamer was clear that the past could not be undone, but the need to face the past in the present was imperative to find a just way to coexist as inhabitants of, and on, the land. Furthermore, she came to understand her right to stay in the land for various reasons that included the sweat of her foreparents’ labor on the land.22 Despite the suffering she endured in the South, Hamer nonetheless claimed, “… I ain’t givin’ up. I’m stayin’ right here in the South, in Mississippi. We got to treat each other right, ‘cause we’re in this thing together, and if the white people survive, we’re gonna survive too.”23 Hamer’s intimate connection to the land is instructive. To remain in a place and space that was legally designed to dispose of you just because of the color of your skin, or deny your right to be, shows a relationship to the environment that has been either overlooked or undervalued by many white environmentalists and creation care advocates. Hamer refused to participate in the black migration though it was a chosen option for many southern black people due to the promise of a better quality of life up north and out west. Instead, she chose to remain in a place and space to instill and model a different set of principles and values that reflected her understanding of the kinship of humanity through the divine parent. In the spirit of Booker T. Washington, she “dropped her bucket down where she was.” Like Martin Luther King, Jr., she sought to experience the beloved community, both locally and nationally, by confronting and embracing her white sisters and brothers with political vigor, economic justice, cultural pride, and critical consciousness to ensure food security, affordable, quality housing, public education, and access to healthcare especially for the poor in Mississippi.

21

22 23

Hamer, “‘To Tell It Like It Is,’ Speech Delivered at the Holmes County, Mississippi, Freedom Democratic Party Municipal Elections Rally in Lexington, Mississippi, May 8, 1969,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 91. Hamer in John Egerton, A Mind to Stay Here: Profiles from the South (London, UK: Macmillan Press, 1970), 106. Hamer in Egerton, Ibid.

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For Hamer, the divine was actively involved with what was happening in the United States “wilderness,” and was neither silent nor indifferent. From Hamer’s perspective, she argued, God is in the plan; He has sounded the trumpet and have called the march to order. God is on the throne today; He is keeping watch on this nation and marking time. It’s not too late—there is still time for America to change. God have delayed destruction on this nation to test the hearts and consciousness of us all. Believe me there is still time.24 Although she believed in a pending divine judgment if the people did not correct their unjust behavior and change their ways, she also adhered to an understanding of grace and longsuffering on the part of the divine. If God was in the plan, there was hope for change. If God was in the plan for justice, righteousness, peace, love, restoration, reparations, and right relations, a disciplined approach and engagement were necessary. God’s plan included raising up a generation of young people who were standing against the racial and social injustices while fighting for justice and human rights in ways that inspired Hamer. She proclaimed, … I believe in God and He said He would raise up a nation that would obey Him. So the young people that’s out here today, that’s fighting for justice for all human beings, I believe are the chosen people that’s going to lead this country out if it’s not too late.25 In Hamer’s practical theology of racial freedom, the chosen people were based in an age group that was more inclusive of race, gender, or socio-economic class who were believed to be in obedience to God’s plan for justice, peace, and righteousness. Hamer believed in the young people more so than she did the church and her peers. Hamer accentuated her point when she pointedly stated, “… you elderly folks my age is almost hopeless, you got to know now that the children know what’s going on and you not going to be able to fool them any longer.”26 According to Hamer, the young people were conscious of the times and acted accordingly while far too many of their parents and grandparents wanted to attempt to remain ignorant and accept the status quo.

24 25 26

Hamer, “‘Is It Too Late?,’” 132. Hamer, “‘Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either,’” 130. Hamer, Ibid.

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Hamer worked to save black people from extinction and the nation from further degradation. Although she had faith in the young people, Hamer was not giving up on her generation or the ministers. She knew others were needed beyond the young people in cooperating with the divine’s plan for change. At the end of her speech “Is It Too Late?”, after mentioning the deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, JoEtha Collier, veterans in the Vietnam war, and people dying in the streets of the nation, she asserted, “For these sins this country should pray, because we have been spared a little longer. Miles of paper and film cannot record the many injustices this nation has been guilty of, but there is still time.”27 Though not explicitly stated, Hamer seemed to be invoking the Genesis narrative when the divine was speaking to Cain because his brother Abel’s blood was crying out from the land. Brotherly, and sisterly, responsibility must be acknowledged in the death and destruction of the people and the land. Then, moving beyond the interconnection and responsibility of all God’s children, Hamer called on the Christian religious leaders, regardless of race, to join her and the young people in the freedom struggle while there was time.28 Hamer’s understanding of Jesus as a revolutionary person out there where it was happening also inspired and strengthened her. Her positioning of Jesus with the masses of the poor and oppressed, and not the few elites who were the politically and economically powerful, is consistent with academic liberation theologians and ethicists of the late twentieth century to the present. Moreover, in research to date, Hamer did not mention Jesus’ manipulation of the environment when he turns water to wine at a wedding reception, curses a fig tree for its barrenness, feeds over five thousand people with two fish and five barley loaves of bread, and calms the winds and waves while on a boat with his disciples at sea. However, she did reference Jesus’s healing of a man who was possessed by numerous demonic spirits and lived at the cemetery. Hamer decried how the business owners were upset when their profits and property literally went over the cliff into the sea but had no concern for the man whom Jesus healed.29 She compared the business owners of the first century to many white people in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s who cared more about what they possessed, and what they could make, with little to no concern on how individuals and communities were being harmed. In Hamer’s practical theology of racial freedom, the symbol of the cross was an invitation to express one’s allegiance to, and identification with, Jesus who 27 28 29

Hamer, “‘Is It Too Late?,’” 133. Hamer, Ibid. Hamer, “‘To Tell It Like It Is,’” 90.

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was a revolutionary in his time. For those who claimed to be Christ-followers or Christians, they, too, must assume the role of revolutionary by no longer conforming and capitulating to the dehumanization and degradation under Jim Crow segregation, and the legacy of slavery. Hamer was emphatic concerning the significance of the cross when she claimed in her first speech after reading Luke 4:18, “Now the time have come that was Christ’s purpose on earth. And we only been getting by, by paying our way to Hell. But the time is out.”30 Hamer was admonishing her audience to assume a different posture and role in the United States “wilderness” that was modeled by Christ in his vulnerable first century context. Although Hamer never acknowledged Jesus’ disinherited status as a Jew under Roman Empire, she knew Christ nonetheless preached to the poor, delivered the captives, healed the sick, hung out with social, political, and religious outcasts, challenged and received the social, political, and religious privileged and oppressors, and provided a model for society and humanity, especially the poor and oppressed, to be and become more fully human. She went and did likewise in the United States “wilderness.”

2

Contextualizing Hamer’s Practical Theology of Racial Freedom

Hamer’s relationship to, and perspective of, her environment in the United States “wilderness” is one that explicitly sought to protect and preserve vulnerable people who intentionally and systematically were denied access to sustainable resources and relationships. In current research on race, gender, class, religion, and the environment, Hamer’s life and legacy represent a source for doing ecojustice in ecowomanism, on one hand. Then, on another hand, Hamer articulated and advanced a framework for racial freedom and justice in the United States “wilderness” that was deeply embedded in her faith tradition that can be seen as exemplary in her own right. Melanie L. Harris provides a methodological framework for exploring black women’s relationship to the environment. Harris states, Ecowomanism is critical reflection, contemplation, and praxis-oriented study of environmental justice from the perspective of women of color and particularly women of African descent. It links a social justice agenda with ecojustice, recognizing the parallel oppressions that women

30

Hamer, “‘I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,’” 4.

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of color have often survived when confronting racism, classism, sexism, …, that the earth is facing through environmental degradation.31 This method of examining and unearthing the lived experience of women of color and African descent in relation to their environments seeks to integrate social justice and ecojustice efforts. In linking ecojustice and social justice, the method proposes to yield insight on conditions, practices, and policies that harm both people and the environment, and their responses to environmental harms and injustices. Moreover, the method entails a participatory element that enables the academic to reflect on the practice and possibly, the community in which they are participating. In short, Harris provides a research orientation to further examine Hamer’s ecojustice and social justice connections that could affirm, extend, and/or critique the construction of Hamer’s practical theology of racial freedom in the United States “wilderness.” James H. Cone also links social justice with ecojustice in his article entitled Whose Earth Is It Anyway?: Why the Environmental Movement and Racial Justice Movement Need Each Other. Cone attempts to bridge two seemingly irreconcilable groups by unapologetically stating, People who fight against white racism but fail to connect it to the degradation of the earth are anti-ecological—whether they know it or not. People who struggle against environmental degradation but do not incorporate it in a disciplined and sustained fight against white supremacy are racists—whether they acknowledge it or not. The fight for justice cannot be segregated but must be integrated in the fight for life in all of its forms.32 Here, Cone acknowledges the two movements must be linked or integrated, as does Harris. Moreover, he describes what he considers to be the common ground by asserting, “their separation from each other is unfortunate because they are fighting the same enemy—human beings’ domination of each other and nature.”33

31 32

33

Melanie Harris, Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2017), Loc 2598 of 2847. James Cone, “Whose Earth Is It Anyway?: Why the Environmental Movement and Racial Justice Movement Need Each Other,” in Earth Habitat: Eco-justice and the Church’s Response, eds. Dieter Hessel and Larry R. Rasmussen (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 23. Cone, “Whose Earth Is It Anyway?,” Ibid.

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Cone’s identification of the mutual enemy between ecojustice and racial justice advocates appears to be reflected in Hamer’s thought. As the environmental movement advocates for places in the wild to be protected and preserved, Hamer likewise asserted black people, and the places and spaces in which they dwell, needed to be protected and preserved. As the environmental movement advocates for clean, quality water, Hamer had to advocate for access to running water because this public resource was not readily attainable for poor black Mississippians. Although she did not have running water in the house, she was nonetheless charged for the use of nine thousand gallons of water because the white predators were after black prey in the United States “wilderness.”34 As environmentalists advocate for the drastic decrease of fossil fuel emissions by multinational corporations and individuals, Hamer had to walk, carpool, or drive for miles for basic needs such as healthcare. Hence, for Hamer, it seems safe to say that her fight for racial justice included an engagement of the broader environmental challenges and conditions. Put simply, for many African American environmental justice activists, “the issues of the environment do not stand alone by themselves. They are not narrowly defined. Our vision of the environment is woven into an overall framework of social, racial, and economic justice.”35 Hamer’s experience of being hunted and criminalized was an inherent part of being black in the United States and relating to one’s natural, and unnatural, environment. The environment, and the planet, as Hamer recounted in her reciting of the hymn that was provided at the beginning of this chapter, were not necessarily sites of beauty, pleasure, and/or leisure. The environment could be ruthless. Hence, for many African Americans, the relationship to the environment reflects the interconnection or intersection of social, economic, political, racial, and environmental realities that were sometimes good, and other times horrifying. For example, recounting the complex landscape of the United States “wilderness” for African Americans, Glave notes, The wilderness was a place to roam and hide for a moment’s peace from slaveholders, or it could be a means of premature escape. It was also

34 35

Hamer, “‘America is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 111. Mark Stoll, an environmental historian, cites deceased African American female environmental activist, Dana Alston in “Religion and African American Environmental Activism,” in “To Love the Wind and the Rain”: African Americans and Environmental History, eds. Dianne D. Glave and Mark Stoll (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 151.

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a source of both sustenance and healing as slaves hunted animals and gathered medicinal plants. The woods and swamps were also dangerous, not only because of predatory animals but also because of predatory whites who used dogs to track runaways from the plantations and farms. Wilderness could be a haven or a nightmare for blacks. These positive and negative forces made the wild theirs, for better or worse, even though, in contrast to many whites, most African Americans did not legally own the soil or a single tree or twig.36 The complex way in which black people have, and still do, relate to the environment is a testament to Hamer’s, and other black people’s, unsung creativity and ingenuity while navigating the United States “wilderness.” Thus far, methodological, moral, theological, and environmental historical claims have provided a broader ecojustice context to interpret and/or further investigate Hamer’s practical theology of racial freedom. What is painfully clear is that race and racism have altered the environment, and whatever advocacy is developed in saving people and the planet, these socially constructed forces must be considered. Political scientist environmentalist Kimberly K. Smith in African American Environmental Thought: Foundations goes a step further by asserting, … black environmental thought offers a critical normative perspective not only on our environmental practices but on the mainstream tradition of environmental thought itself. Its central message is this: we have inherited a world scarred by history. Slavery and racism have shaped the meaning of the American landscape, its physical features, its patterns of possession and dispossession. To make sense of the landscape, we need to draw on the conceptual resources embedded in the black political tradition: ideas about stewardship, the social foundations of environmental virtue, and the role of memory and tradition in relating humans to the natural world. Black Americans have seen the strange rendings of nature wrought by racial oppression. Listening to their voices leads to a deeper understanding of our common task: to redeem and to possess a land cursed by injustice—to make of our shared world ‘a more fitting home’ for human lives.37

36 37

Glave, Rooted in the Earth, 8. Kimberly K. Smith, African American Environmental Thought: Foundations (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2007), 200–1.

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Smith does not merely posit African American environmental thought as different from white mainstream environmental thought, but as a way of seeing and being in the world that if rightly adhered to could lead to redemption of both human-to-human relationships and the Earth. Unlike Harris in drawing from the experiences of black women and women of color, Smith draws extensively from the lived experience of African Americans and the black political tradition of canonical male figures such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke. Although black women are excluded, and Christian religious thought and experience are minimally addressed, Smith reconstructs an academic view of the U.S. “wilderness” in environmental terms in which white men such as Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and John Muir are not the center of the conversation. Moreover, in arguing that black people have not been environmentally indifferent, she shows how traditional white standards of environmental thought such as “preserving the wilderness and maintaining a viable ecosystem” is narrow and inadequate because “it excludes too many voices and perspectives on humans’ relationship to nature, and it tends to obscure the environmental dimension of black political activism.”38 In redefining ‘environmental thought,’ she views it “as a set of ideas concerning the relationship between humans and the natural environment, including the norms that ought to govern that relationship.”39 In this vein, the notion of environmental thought becomes deconstructed, and reconstructed, from the social and political margins while including those who are at the “center,” too, because they are also part of the natural environment. If white environmentalists were to embrace the idea of African American environmental thought as a critical normative perspective, then a bridge could be developed between racial justice advocates and environmentalists. Furthermore, the acknowledgement of the new norm could debunk the perceived myths that African American people do not care about the environment or have been too traumatized by the legacy of slavery to have any intimate knowledge of the landscape. Environmental sociologist Dorceta E. Taylor’s 2017 Wege lecture on Untold Stories of the Conservation Movement: Race, Power, and Privilege revealed insightful narratives regarding how nonwhite and white people’s relationship to the land, and view of it, have been diametrically opposed since the initial encounter. Black people and indigenous people espoused a sense of community and belonging to the land while the early white explorers and sub-

38 39

Smith, African American Environmental Thought, 3. Smith, Ibid.

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sequent conquerors, thieves, colonizers, and settlers saw the land for private, individual use and ownership. What would happen if a sense of community and belonging were recovered as a normative way of relating to humans and the planet instead of humans and the planet being brought into service for a few white men and the ideology of white supremacy? Hamer, in her own way, saw and acted on this interconnection of life especially as she reminded her torturer while in jail of their common kinship and origin.

3

Hamer’s Creation Care Advocacy

The various aspects of Hamer’s United States “wilderness” experience must be taken into consideration to begin to understand her creation care advocacy.40 She was a person who was displaced from her native land, forced to work on stolen settler-colonized land, intentionally deprived of access to adequate housing, water, food, and clothing, and the victim of forced sterilization. These Euro-American inflicted practices constitute the factors that contributed to Hamer’s expression of compassion and care. Instead of becoming bitter, vengeful, and/or fearful of the white predator in the United States “wilderness,” Hamer became emboldened and wise from three key practices that are constructed as her creation care advocacy. They are: land use and access, reproduction and procreation, preservation and conservation. Hamer’s practices of creation care flowed from her commitment to Christ, the one whom she believed came to bring life and freedom. As a sharecropper with intimate connections to the land for life and survival, Hamer and many other enslaved Africans, sharecroppers, tenant and “private” farmers possessed skills and land ethics that sought to overcome the ravages of monocultural planting which harmed the land and the black masses that inhabited it. Now, the turn is to specific practices that unveil Hamer’s orientation of navigating the United States “wilderness” while also nurturing new life and possibilities in people, relations, spaces and places.

40

It must be noted that Hamer’s use of the term “creation care” has yet to be discovered. It is probably safe to assume that she did not use the term especially as it is known and employed by many white Protestant Christian evangelicals. The move in the chapter from the broader religion and ecology discourse to creation care, more specifically, is my attempt to show the depth and breadth of Hamer’s Christian thought and practice to speak to multiple academic and religious communities regarding racial and environmental justice concerns.

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3.1 Land Use and Access Contrary to commercial agriculture and monopolization of the land as practiced by affluent white males, Hamer came from a tradition and practice regarding humans’ relationship to the land that was communal and collaborative at the local, grassroots level. The mono-cultural agri-business system of cotton production was not life-giving for the black worker. For example, economist Gerald D. Jaynes notes, The typical attitude of the Sea Island freed people was expressed by the following declaration: ‘Cotton is no good for nigger. Corn good for nigger; ground nuts good for nigger; cotton good for massa; if massa want cotton he may make it himself, cotton do nigger no good; cotton make nigger perish.’41 Both before and after the Civil War, and President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, black people of the south rejected the land, labor, and food exploitation that left them bereft of viable resources. They were keenly aware of the food production that would sustain them and the food products that would not. Hamer expressed a similar sentiment and the launching of Freedom Farms Cooperative, Inc. was developed to produce and construct what was good for black people such as housing, health care, jobs, education, vocational training, and access to healthy, nutritious food. She organized and led a habitat for black, poor humans of rural Mississippi because she knew “the state wants us out and the federal government considers us a surplus. We must buy land immediately or our people will die forgotten.”42 Under the constant threat of being ejected from the land by state officials and perceived as a populace stressor to federal officials, Hamer had to generate a plan that would provide resources to access land for black life and freedom. According to Monica White, an environmental sociologist, Hamer implemented the Freedom Farms Cooperative project because Hamer sought to keep black people in the south, instead of migrating to northern cities such as Chicago, by creating viable, life-giving resources and alternatives to malnutrition, Type II diabetes, hypertension, underemployment, unemployment, and high infant mortality rates.43 In short, White asserts, “White elites used 41 42 43

Gerald D. Jaynes, Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862–1882 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1986), 13. Monica M. White, “‘A Pig and a Garden’: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Freedom Farms Cooperative,” Food & Foodways 25, no. 1 (2017): 28. White, 21.

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hunger as a weapon, starving anyone who sought the right to participate in the political process into compliance.”44 Having worked the land through forced, exploited labor, black Mississippians were not able to access the fruit of their labor for their own well-being due to white backlash to the expressions of black freedom. Nevertheless, Hamer used agriculture, land access and use, as means of resistance, notes White.45 Hamer’s philosophy of land procurement “represented a piece of her [Hamer’s] long-term strategy of self-determination and self-reliance that had food at its center.”46 Economist and professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, notes in Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, that “Freedom Farm Corporation was officially constituted in June 1970 as a nonprofit agricultural and charitable corporation under state charter in Mississippi.”47 Four years into the operation, a Freedom Farm’s status report restated its purpose as follows “to develop a black controlled institution that would have its strengths in the land and would be able to support the indigent blacks and whites of the Sunflower County area that are being displaced by increased mechanization of agricultural production.”48 People of both races, and eventually, an increasing number of women as heads of households were able to feed themselves, own their homes, farm cooperatively, and create small businesses together in order to support a sustainable food system, land ownership, and economic independence. As was discussed in chapter 1 on Hamer’s theology of labor and land, Hamer practiced cooperative land access and use in which everyone who participated would have access to the harvest to meet the needs of their respective households. Furthermore, membership was extended to black, local people and to anyone, regardless of race, who could benefit from what Freedom Farms Cooperative offered.49 Even families who were not able to work the land had access to the harvest, and crop surplus was shipped as far north as Chicago.50 The significance of land to economic stability, political and social freedom, and overall well-being for poor, black rural Mississippians was clear to Hamer.

44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Ibid. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 23. Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Collective Courage, 181. Ibid. White, 25. Ibid., 27.

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Through the Freedom Farms, a landless, politically disenfranchised people were reconnecting to the land, to agriculture, and to the fruit of their labor in ways that translated into black life and freedom. Farming and agricultural skills that were retained from Africa and created anew in the drudgery of slavery and sharecropping were now being used to resist starvation and compliance to the Jim Crow South while simultaneously aiding in political empowerment. With the cooperative land access and use, black people could produce their own food which meant greater freedom to participate in the political process and less dependence on the white power structure for food and the means to access it. In leading this effort of caring for the people and creating an inhabitable space and place, Hamer never underestimated the power of white anger, hatred, and retaliation. When a student organizer visited Hamer’s home and saw the freezer filled with produce and the kitchen shelves lined with jars of various preserves, he inquired why she needed the canned foods since she had the freezer. Hamer replied by saying, “What will I do if they turn off the electricity.”51 Hence, Hamer’s practice of black land cooperation and empowerment, through food, addressed local needs as well as broader national concerns and issues in an organic way with wisdom and courage.52 Although Freedom Farms had a short life span of six years, it should be acknowledged and further studied as one expression of Hamer’s care for creation in a wholistic, integrated manner in which people existing in a particular place and space were politically empowered, socially transformed, economically compensated, and materially sustained for a season. Through Freedom Farms, many black people were able to redefine their relationship to the hostile, oppressive environment with creativity and dignity that provided them with a place to heal and a space to breathe. Another aspect of Hamer’s creation care advocacy in relation to land access and use is the motivation behind her dogged strength and determination to remain in the United States in general, and Mississippi in particular. Subsequent chapters speak to her developing sense of identity and belonging to a land, a geo-political space and place that was far from “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

51 52

Hamer cited in White, 26. White coins Hamer an organic intellectual because Hamer was able to address and provide an alternative to the new terror schemes and tactics of white supremacy that entailed obstruction of federal anti-poverty funds to the state of Mississippi, inferior and inadequate education, housing, and healthcare, and lack of access to quality food during the late 1960s and into the 1970s. See White, 33.

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At the heart of Hamer’s commitment to remaining in the United States and Mississippi was black sweat equity. Proudly, she asserted, The black people have contributed more to America than any other race; our mothers and fathers were bought and sold here for a price; we built this country on our bent back and made it rich by the sweat of our brow; our kids have fought and died for what was called, ‘Democracy.’53 Based on Hamer’s experience, observation, and alternative education, the work of black people in shaping the United States was incomparable. The negative epithets of being called lazy, ignorant, and immoral by white people were not accurate portrayals of a people who labored from sun up to sun down without adequate financial compensation, food, or shelter. Fighting wars both in the United States and abroad, black people struggled for multiple victories against various forms of imperialism and oppression. Hamer was one who was on the front lines on United States soil in which she responded to the constant onslaught of racial violence and injustice perpetrated against black people with faith in God, in change, and in ultimate justice. Black people cultivated the soil and harvested the crops regardless of gender or age. Black women nursed white women’s babies, cooked food that they did not have access to, and cleaned homes that they did not inhabit. The extensive care black people provided to white, oppressive families and the land constitutes unexplored aspects of creation care. Although on many levels it was forced care while on other levels, as will be further demonstrated in subsequent chapters, Hamer’s revolutionary practical theology was humanizing and transcendent in spite of the harshness of the United States “wilderness.” She persevered hoping and believing that her labor, and care, were not in vain. Hamer’s belief in the right to remain on the land in the south was not an issue of entitlement. The evidence of work that she and countless other black people had performed was unquestionable although it was never, and has yet to be, recognized as such by the white dominant structure. Neither was her claim to remain on southern land motivated by a desire for black control at the exclusion of everyone else. Rather, it was grounded in her belief in and commitment to fulfilling her human vocation and Christ’s freedom on Earth in the place where she was born. Aware of the struggle for freedom regardless

53

Fannie Lou Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges,” in Mississippi Writers: Reflections on Childhood and Youth, Volume II: Nonfiction, ed. Dorothy Abbott (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 330.

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of her regional location, Hamer claimed, “Some people say there’s more possibility for human rights in the South than in the North. That may not be so, but I’ll take a chance on it first.”54 Further affirming her commitment to create life in the south, Hamer stated, I never thought of leavin’ the South. I love it. I was born here. I watched my folks take a double-blade ax and chop down trees like that pecan there. A lot of this land the white folks is usin’ now, I watched my parents clean it up. We’re not tryin’ to take this land away from them, but we got a right to stay here.55 Refusing to be criminalized and further disenfranchised, Hamer stood her ground in freedom and social change on southern soil. In 1862, one hundred years before Hamer became publicly involved in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, abolitionist, orator, women’s suffragist, and intellectual Frederick Douglass argued in a lecture for the release of the enslaved black people and for them to remain in the United States without interference from white people. Poignantly, Douglass asserted, It is one of the strangest and most humiliating triumphs of human selfishness and prejudice over human reason, that it leads men to look upon emancipation as an experiment, instead of being, as it is, the natural order of human relations. Slavery, and not Freedom, is the experiment; and to witness its horrible failure we have to open our eyes, not merely upon the blasted soil of Virginia and other Slave States, but upon a whole land brought to the verge of ruin.56 As Hamer rightly called out the backward, inaccurate thinking of white people, so did Douglass. Freedom, as many black people knew before, during, and after slavery, was natural and divine. Moreover, the outcome of what should be properly called the experiment had annihilated both slave and “free” states. No person, place or space were left unscathed in the United States “wilderness.” Hamer called the nation to open its eyes to the fact that a nation divided

54 55 56

Hamer cited in John Egerton, “Fannie Lou Hamer,” in A Mind to Stay Here: Profiles from the South (London, UK: Macmillan Press, 1970), 106. Hamer cited in John Egerton, Ibid. The italics are Hamer’s. Frederick Douglass, “Free the Slaves, Then Leave Them Alone: Address to the Emancipation League in Boston, 1862,” in Afro-American History: Primary Sources, 2nd ed., ed. Thomas R. Frazier (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1988), 126.

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against itself cannot stand as did Douglass. Later in his speech, Douglass, like Hamer, identified black sweat equity and black people’s right to stay in the United States when he rhetorically asks, But would you have them stay here? Why should they not? What better is here than there? What class of people can show a better title to the land on which they live than the colored people of the South? They have watered the soil with their tears and enriched it with their blood, and tilled it with their hard hands during two centuries; they have leveled its forests, raked out the obstructions to the plow and hoe, reclaimed the swamps, and produced whatever has made it a goodly land to dwell in, and it would be a shame and a crime little inferior in enormity to Slavery itself if these natural owners of the Southern and Gulf States should be driven away from their country to make room for others—even if others could be obtained to fill their places.57 As did Hamer in her day and time, Douglass, too, affirmed the sweat equity of enslaved black people in the United States. The forced, skilled, and extensive land labor was the premise on which both Douglass and Hamer argued as the right of black people to remain in a land, a place and a space that they had created and cultivated. Unfortunately, many black people of southern states became internal refugees after the Civil War and during Reconstruction; the United States federal government did not provide sufficient nor sustained protection and preservation of black lives. Even one hundred years later, Hamer experienced much of the same. The government’s non-intervention in the violence black people experienced by state and local municipalities allowed for the extinction and expulsion of black people from the land. Then, when the government did become involved, as Hamer identified and experienced, it was to curtail black women’s procreative ability and rights. Hamer and Douglass both saw the criminality of anti-black thinking and practices especially in relation to the land. In addition, both were keenly aware of the land stewardship of black people that must not be denied or diminished. Before Hamer and after Douglass, Du Bois asserted the same sentiment of black people caring for the land in his scholarship. Near the end of his concluding chapter in his now classical work The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois writes eloquently and prophetically when he asserts,

57

Frederick Douglass, Ibid.

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Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song—soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit. Around us the history of the land has centered for thrice a hundred years; out of the nation’s heart we have called all that was best to throttle and subdue all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice have billowed over this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of the God of Right. Nor has our gift of the Spirit been merely passive. Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation,—we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse. Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth giving? Is not this work and striving? Would America have been America without her Negro people?58 Speaking to more than just sweat equity, Du Bois identified two additional gifts that black people contributed in shaping the national landscape. The gifts of story and song, and the Spirit along with sweat equity speak aptly of Hamer’s revolutionary practical theology although Du Bois wrote Souls fourteen years prior to Hamer’s birth. As is shown throughout this text, Hamer manifested the gifts of a people, of black lives in such a way that debunks the myths of black ignorance, criminality, incompetence, and soullessness. Furthermore, Hamer learned to love those who wanted her, and other black folks, to disappear while accessing a powerful, calming, and liberating song in a land that was “ill-harmonized and unmelodious” as Du Bois asserts. She became a living witness of Du Bois’ assessment of southern land when he claimed in a 1946 speech to the Southern Youth Legislature of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, “There is a vast field for consumers’ cooperation, building business on public service and not on private profit as the main-spring of industry.”59 Her

58 59

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1989), 187. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Behold the Land, No. I, 1964,” in Freedomways Reader: Prophets in Their Own Country, ed. Esther Cooper Jackson (New York, NY: Westview Press, 2000), 10.

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leadership in the Freedom Farms Cooperative, SNCC community organizing, voting rights activism, MFDP, and Mississippi Freedom Labor Union, just to name a few, helped to create new pathways on southern land for black preservation and the healing of a nation. Cooperation, and not competition or individualized, privatized monopoly of the land, constituted Hamer’s approach and relationship to the land. Hamer refused to surrender the land of her birth to those who would continue to ruin the land and black lives. She took her chances on southern soil by staying instead of migrating to northern cities. Du Bois admonished his audience to do likewise when he states, Here in this South is the gateway to the colored millions of the West Indies, Central and South America. Here is the straight path to Africa, the Indies, China and the South Seas. Here is the path to the greater, freer, truer world. It would be shame and cowardice to surrender this glorious land and its opportunities for civilization and humanity to thugs and lynchers, the mobs and profiteers, the monopolists and gamblers who today choke its soul and steal its resources. The oil and sulfur; the coal and iron; the cotton and corn; the lumber and cattle belong to you the workers, Black and white, and not to the thieves who hold them and use them to enslave you. They can be rescued and restored to the people if you have the guts to strive for the real right to vote, the right to real education, the right of happiness and health and the total abolition of the father of these scourges of mankind, poverty.60 The building of a nation, and the healing and hope of southern land, rested in the hands of black people according to Hamer, Du Bois, and Douglass. As black thinkers, activists, and practitioners, each envisioned land access and use as a public, cooperative endeavor and championed black people’s unique relationship in and to the land. Religious educator and practical theologian Patrick B. Reyes speaks at length of his vocation to life in the United States “wilderness” of the Central Valley and northern regions of California.61 He, like Hamer, challenges contemporary readers to remain faithful and connected to one’s native land

60 61

Ibid. The italics are Du Bois’s. Patrick Reyes, Nobody Cries When We Die: God, Community, and Surviving to Adulthood (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2016). Although Reyes does not specifically use the phrase “U.S. Wilderness” as it is being used to interpret Hamer’s context, he does have chapter titles of “Valley of death,” “In the Wilderness,” and “Grounded in New Life” and concepts which capture the same thought and intent, I would argue.

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and racialized, exploited community although the price to remain is a matter of life-and-death. From childhood to adulthood, he poignantly narrates his encounters with domestic, street, institutional, structural, and spiritual violence while simultaneously hearing, responding to, and cultivating the divine’s call to life. Reyes, like Hamer, advances the significance of caring for people within a particular place and space as integral to fulfilling one’s vocation and Christian commitment. More specifically, he names and presents a theology of the soil that is informed by German theologian Paul Tillich’s existentialist ground of being category of the divine. Reyes’ interpretation of Tillich is used to illuminate the ground of being of his Salinas, California Latinx family and community as exploited brown, migrant field hands who nonetheless create and discover ways to live, ways to survive within and beyond the hunger pains and open wounds as the disinherited.62 By naming God that is true to his experience, his ground of being, Reyes points to ways of how bad soil is transformed into life-giving soil and greater access to encounter the divine as the ultimate ground of being. Reyes openly and honestly admits that “good soil is hard to find.”63 As a former worker in the fields and in quality control, he speaks intimately about the necessary ingredients and conditions of creating and cultivating good soil that takes time. Significantly, according to Reyes, when good soil is experienced and created, “It’s not mine alone. It doesn’t belong to me. I don’t try and take it home and put in a pot to grow only the seeds I like. It benefits everyone growing in it.”64 Every human and non-human experiences flourishing in good soil. People in community and the space and place in which they inhabit are developed and tended to within a harmonious balance of give and take. In this vein, creation care is never separated from the human nor from the natural environment. Both are acknowledged and necessary for life-bearing opportunities for both human and non-human beings. Put differently, neither any human nor the land are subjugated for the benefit of only a few white men in the land. These brown and black examples demonstrate that to care for the totality of creation, one must first properly acknowledge and affirm the human in and of creation. In returning to an appropriate, righteous understanding of the human, we, as Christians, are assisted in returning to an assumed ontological, biblical truth of being created from the dirt, the soil, the earth. Black, brown, and red people have been the true, long-term keepers and tillers of United

62 63 64

Ibid., 103–5. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 120.

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States soil. This rich relationship to the land must be excavated and articulated to ensure access to fulfilling the call to life. 3.2 Reproduction and Procreation According to sociologist and legal scholar Dorothy Roberts, racists and white supremacists have a history of regulating black women’s bodies toward the ends of sustaining white domination and black exploitation.65 White practices contrary to the care of black women such as rape, the legal separation of black children from their black mothers, the criminalization of black mothers, and forced sterilization of black women are “… dehumanizing attempts to control Black women’s reproductive lives.”66 Hamer was a victim of forced sterilization in a Mississippi hospital and of sexual violence during her torture in the Winona jail. Forced sterilization of black women and other forms of sexual violence were widespread. In her historical account of SNCC, Wesley C. Hogan notes, “A movement physician in Selma reported treating an average of twenty civil rights women a day whose vaginas had been burned by cattle prod-wielding police. The doctor sent affidavit after affidavit to Washington, but the papers found their permanent resting places in Justice Department files.”67 Biographer Mills states that Hamer sought to make forced sterilization a part of SNCC’s socio-political agenda but to no avail.68 Even though she was denied the right to have babies, Hamer adopted other people’s babies who could not keep them. Unfortunately, the refusal of SNCC and the women’s movement of the 1970s, in which Hamer was also involved with, to acknowledge this aspect of the black experience relegated black women’s freedom struggle to issues that excluded the violence done to their wombs and vaginas.69 65 66 67 68

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Dorothy Roberts, “Preface to the Vintage Books Edition (2017),” in Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2017), xi. Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 4. Wesley C. Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 240. Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Louisville, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 276. Although Hamer was not successful in persuading SNCC to include reproductive rights and care of black women, recent scholarship on Rosa Parks demonstrates her role in standing with and for black women who were victims of rape long before Parks helped to launch the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott in 1955. See Danielle L. McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2010). Roberts’s experience possibly sheds light on why Hamer was not successful in incorporating forced sterilization into SNCC’s agenda. When Roberts served on a panel entitled

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This brief, though no less important, subsection on an aspect of Hamer’s creation care practice attends to black women’s bodies, wombs, fruit of their wombs, and resisting unwanted, violent access in the penetration of black wombs by a physician’s hand or a white man’s sexual organ. Hamer’s foremothers in the United States struggled for the right to retain and nurture their children as well as the right to just resources to properly care for their children. Hamer assumed responsibility for other people’s children even though she was deprived of the right to give birth to her own. In short, black women’s reproductive experience expands the notion of creation care beyond the right to abort, and as Roberts does, broadens civil, human, and women’s rights by illuminating black women’s reproductive needs and concerns that differ from both black men and white women.70 3.3 Preservation and Conservation Delores Williams, a womanist systematic theologian argues “For many black Christian women today, ‘wilderness’ or ‘wilderness-experience’ is a symbolic term used to represent a near-destruction situation in which God gives personal direction to the believer and thereby helps her to make a way out of what she thought was no way.”71 Williams identifies how I have symbolically constructed Hamer’s experience on United States soil as a “wilderness” in which she was hunted, pursued, and attacked. Furthermore, Williams also points to parallels between African American women and Hagar, the Egyptian enslaved female found in the biblical narratives of Genesis 16 and 21 who encountered

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“Civil Rights Under Attack: Recent Supreme Court Decisions,” she notes, “when it came time for questions, I was assailed by a man in the audience for risking solidarity around racial issues by interjecting the controversial issue of reproduction.” She was advised to stick to traditional, less controversial issues such as affirmative action, voting rights, and criminal justice. See Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 4–5. Hamer’s views on abortion are discussed in chapter 5, “Rethinking the Diversity and Inclusion Paradigm” in the context of her work with the women’s movement of the 1970s. Hamer’s strong disagreement with any woman, regardless of race or class, to terminate a pregnancy is not fully engaged in this chapter because it is not the same as forced sterilization. Furthermore, forced sterilization was not included in Hamer’s activism while a member of SNCC, and abortion was Hamer’s focus, and not forced sterilization, when she was working in the women’s movement. Hence, I did not want to confuse the issues and I could not articulate Hamer’s view beyond what is done here. As will be shown, Hamer does advance black women’s needs with abortion, and Roberts does so by expanding black women’s reproductive health and rights beyond abortion. Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 108.

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the divine when pregnant Hagar escaped to the wilderness from her oppressors, and then when she and her child were evicted from the land and household of Abraham and Sarah. Both Hagar and her offspring were preserved in the wilderness through faith in the divine, and the divine’s protective promise being fulfilled. That place and space that could have led to Hagar’s demise became one that was life-giving and sustaining. As has been documented in this chapter, black people’s relationship to the wild, or natural environment, has not been merely a passive, reactive one. Although Hamer’s practice of preservation focused primarily on black people and the towns, counties, regions, and states in which they inhabited, “African Americans,” asserts environmental historian Mart A. Stewart, “when they were slaves, … participated in what may be regarded as an active conservation or environmental ethic.”72 Under the slavocracy, black people revitalized the declining fertility of southern soils, provided energy into agricultural ecosystems that led to improved land productivity by moving mud, marl, or manure, and negotiated, as much was allowed, access to resources for their healing and well-being.73 However, after the Civil War, “poor, underdeveloped counties in the South with large black populations have been more likely to be locations or proposed locations of hazardous waste sites or factories that spew noxious pollutants.”74 Even within new contexts of toxicity and subjugation, black people continue to inform a care for the environment with a particular political agenda that focuses on “… the pursuit of collective rights, the tendency to see community in broad terms that include both humans and nonhumans, the connection of environmental concerns to the world of work and production rather than to lifestyle choices and consumptions,” claims Stewart.75 Undoubtedly, Hamer practiced environmental politics as noted by Stewart in her practical theology of racial freedom. Hamer not only practiced the conservation and protection of black lives, she also implored governmental entities to do the same due to the violence and death experienced in the United States “wilderness.” She spoke openly against the Vietnam War and desired for the United States to deal with problems at home instead of directing resources to assist others abroad. For example, Hamer exclaimed, “And we are sick and tired of seeing people lynched,

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Mart A. Stewart, “Slavery and African American Environmentalism,” in “To Love the Wind and the Rain”: African Americans and Environmental History, eds. Dianne D. Glave and Mark Stoll (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 17. Stewart, “Slavery and African American Environmentalism,” 17–19. Stewart, 19. Stewart, 20.

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and raped, and shot down all across the county in the name of law and order and not even feeding the hungry across the country.”76 Poor, black, and nonblack humans were starving, malnourished, and undernourished in the United States and funds were being diverted, under the guise, to stop the expansion of communism outside of the United States. Within the state of Mississippi in the early 1960s, SNCC launched the “Food for Freedom” campaign because “Hunger in the Delta rendered the importance of political action practical and concrete rather than idealistic and abstract.”77 Sit-ins at lunch counters or boycotts of segregated, dehumanizing transportation systems were not practical or empowering for poor, black rural Mississippians because they did not have the resources to purchase the food at the diner nor the need of public transportation while existing on the white landowner’s plantation. The white (economic and political) backlash to SNCC organizing of the black, disenfranchised, landless, and hungry Mississippians included cutting them off from federal food aid as well as eviction from the land and job as in Hamer’s case. With little to no protection from the federal government, unfortunately, “county authorities wedded to a southern tradition based on the oppression and subjugation of black Americans therefore continued to hold the lives of poor blacks in their hands.”78 Furthermore, many “white landowners stipulated,” and were not hindered or challenged by federal and state legislators and local officials, “that all arable soil be dedicated to cotton cultivation, allowing none for food plots or subsistence gardens.”79 Clearly, black lives did not matter and this intentional, systemic neglect was characterized by key SNCC organizers as “… gradual genocide, the goal of which was to effect the dispersal or extinction of the Negro population.”80 As was noted in Hamer’s land access and use practices, she was aware that both the state and federal legislators were not concerned about protecting or preserving black lives. The food insecurity and injustice experienced by black, poor people was also a problem in first century Palestine for many subjugated, peasant Jews, according to biblical scholar, Carol B. Wilson. She analyzes the Matthean Gospel to underscore the community’s significant focus on food shortages while ad-

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78 79 80

Hamer, “To Make Democracy a Reality,” 100. Mary Potorti, “‘What We Eat Is Politics’: SNCC, Hunger, and Voting Rights in Mississippi,” in The Seedtime, The Work, and the Harvest: New Perspectives on the Black Freedom Struggle in America, ed. Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, Reginald K. Ellis, and Peter B. Levy (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2018), 142. Ibid., 123. Ibid. Ibid., 125.

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vocating that all people have access to enough food.81 Wilson’s study draws attention to the specific food access practices of the Gospel community and how Jesus is presented as a model to be emulated in the way he cared for those who hungered and taught practices that disrupted the ideology and behavior that contributed to the food shortages.82 Time and space do not permit a comparative analysis between the food shortage conditions in both first century Palestine and mid-to-late twentieth century Mississippi and the poor communities’ various responses to its respective empires. However, for now, two things are worthy of note. Jesus cared about the poor and hungry in concrete ways and so did Fannie Lou Hamer while the white people who confessed Christianity operated contrary to the life and teachings of Jesus. Second, creation care in the Gospel of Matthew and Hamer’s practical theology of racial freedom includes an integrated, collective view of people, space, and place. Beyond the food shortages experienced in Mississippi and the broader nation, the hungry black people were also being displaced according to Hamer. As early as 1969, Hamer also called on local, state, and federal governments to “stop all of this urban renewal and model cities that’s pushing people out of a place to stay and start dealing with facts of life.”83 Hamer’s travels to “up south,”84 as she called it because it did not really differ in kind from down south, allowed her access to the unfortunate, slum conditions of many newly arrived black urbanites. She critiqued and exposed the coded language of “urban renewal” and “model cities” that had nothing to do with helping to increase the quality of life for black people. Instead, from her observation, the practices and promises exacerbated the already landless, economically impoverished, and malnourished black souls. Again, the care, protection, and preservation of people, that should not be misconstrued as anthropocentric, in their particular place and space, constituted Hamer’s creation care advocacy.

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Hamer’s Corrective and Model

The chapter title “Black Prey, White Predators” is inspired by Afro-Caribbean revolutionary psychotherapist and social psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon’s Black 81 82 83 84

Carol B. Wilson, For I Was Hungry and You Gave Me Food: Pragmatics of Food Access in the Gospel of Matthew (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014), 11–14. Wilson, Ibid., 19–20. Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’” 101. Hamer’s references to northern cities.

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Skin, White Masks (1967) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Though not born in the United States, Fanon’s contribution to the black political tradition on environmental thought, as broadened and defined by Smith, is significant though Fanon is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, he will be engaged in more detail in chapter 5, Revolutionizing the Diversity and Inclusion Paradigm: Hamer’s Leadership for Jubilee and Black Reparations. Now, brief attention is given to clearly delineating how Hamer’s practical theology of racial freedom is a corrective for many environmentalists and creation care activists, and how late twentieth century and more contemporary womanist thought help to advance Hamer’s practical theology of racial freedom in the United States “wilderness.” Clearly, the hunting, criminalizing, terrorizing, and intimidating of Hamer in the United States “wilderness” did not cause her to accept the constructed, unjust conditions dictated by elite white males or to lose faith in the divine. Freedom from the racist, oppressive conditions and freedom in a new society motivated Hamer to labor relentlessly on southern soil and different geo-political spaces for the well-being of humans, and the land, our common home. Moreover, based on Hamer’s existential analyses, experience, and practical responses in the United States “wilderness,” one can deduce that racism is an environmental problem, too, that must be aggressively addressed alongside other environmental issues such as fossil fuel emissions, deforestation, and wildlife extinction. People, and their relationship with one another and the natural order, were drastically altered especially when the biological fallacy of white superiority and black inferiority was created and propagated through ideologies, oppressive policies, systems of slavocracy and segregation, and abusive, inhumane practices. Racism and racists have polluted the air by extinguishing black lives on trees and in rivers, or in public streets and enclosed walls of concrete. They crucified, killed, incarcerated, and deformed black bodies without hesitation or fear of incrimination. The burning and bombing of black sacred sites as well as their domestic dwellings are yet other emissions of racist toxins. The denial of the existence of racism and its pervasive effect puts us all in danger of an imminent death. Present and future generations must find a way to heal this environmental harm that has for several centuries gone unresolved. To address racism as an environmental problem, white environmental and creation care activists must first and foremost render black people as visible in, and integral, to the environment and its overall well-being. White people have intentionally sought to erase the human footprint of black people, and other nonwhite people groups, and thereby have wreaked havoc on all life forms. White people’s ability and capacity to make visible what should

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have never been manipulated in the environmental landscape will come from group, communal, institutional, and individual acknowledgement of the environmental harm that has been, and continues to be, done.85 Hopefully, the acknowledgement would become public displays of confession and commitment to redress and reverse environmental degradation while serving as a counternarrative to historical and contemporary public displays of lynching, killing, displacing, and depleting of black people and their habitats. When black people assume their rightful place in the created, natural world in the white psyche, it changes the climate of human-to-human relations and humans’ relationship to the natural world. Second, white environmental and creation care activists must develop a new anthropology because the existing paradigms of the human either excludes black people, and other nonwhite people groups from the human family, or wrongfully applies an anthropocentric critique to any environmental work that privileges human need over and above an isolated environmental concern. Third and finally, a new cosmology is necessary, too, for white environmental and creation care activists because the individualized, privatized, monopolized, and dichotomized ways of relating to the land have proven not to be sustainable for people or the planet. Indigenous, African, and African American cosmologies reflect collective rights, communal, cooperative access and responsibility, and an integrated awareness of all life forms in daily existence, including the divine. Theologically, the scholarship of womanist theologians is helpful in bridging, claiming, and recovering Hamer’s Christian life and thought for further amplification of black people’s relationship to the land and the broader cosmos. In Sisters of Dust, Sisters of Spirit: Womanist Wordings on God and Creation, womanist theologian Karen Baker-Fletcher asserts, I regret that this land has been claimed primarily by wealthy white men. All that lives and breathes and has being belongs to God. This land, this water, these trees are all part of the Great Spirit in which the Native Americans, the Africans, and I believe.86 Baker-Fletcher’s sentiment of regret is not only launched at elite white males. She seems to be inviting her readers, from a womanist perspective, to lay their 85

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In chapter 5, I speak in more detail on the role of narratives in addressing racial harm and injustice and specific practices that would contribute to revolutionizing the diversity and inclusion paradigm. Here, the context is seeing racism as an environmental problem and how this specific issue can be addressed. Karen Baker-Fletcher, Sisters of Dust, Sisters of Spirit: Womanist Wordings on God and Creation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998), 130.

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claim on the land that is reflective of their values, spirituality, and faith commitments. Clearly, she espouses a view that we human and non-human beings belong to the Creator and Author of life while suggesting that ownership and subjugation, the way many white elite males have laid their claim on the land, does not have to become a normative ethic or ideal. One such paradigm of proactive orientation to the environment is ecowomanist Elonda Clay’s transcultural environmental knowledge (TCEK) which can be embraced as a new normative ideal and ethic as well as guide for scholarship and research. Clay’s concept accounts for diverse ways in which people of the African diaspora relate to the environment within and beyond the imposed inheritances of the slave trade, slavery, and forced segregation.87 She describes multidirectional ways of adapting to space and place, land and the broader socio-political landscape that were practiced by displaced, enslaved Africans, and their modern-day ancestors. Clay’s framework invites scholars on religion/theology and ecology to get serious about accessing the depth of an African’s relationship to the land beyond the assimilationist or acculturation models. Then, there is Shamara Shantu Riley who boldly asserts Ecology is a Sistah’s Issue Too by articulating the particular environmental assaults on black people and the planet, and the various leadership of black women and organizations in responding to the global and local crises.88 These earlier womanist’s theological scholarship on the environment and creation along with Harris’s more recent work illuminate black women, men, and the broader African diaspora’s divinely inspired and conscious relationship to the land. Harris’s Ecowomanism is groundbreaking scholarship. She outlines a methodological path for ecowomanist researchers and scholars and simultaneously documents the vast creative and spiritual richness of black people’s connection with the land. It is scholarship that is ecumenical, interfaith, and inter-spiritual in scope yet grounded in a clear message of the human relationship to the environment and a clarion call to participate in the healing of people, place, and space. Harris and other ecowomanist scholars remind us that God is present in the midst of an environmental crisis such as climate change that is caused primarily by a few elite white males although

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Elonda Clay, “How Does It Feel to Be an Environmental Problem?: Studying Religion and Ecology in the African Diaspora,” in Inherited Land: The Changing Grounds of Religion and Ecology, eds. Whitney Bauman, Richard Bohannon, and Kevin O’Brien (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011), 157–9. Shamar Shantu Riley, “Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too: Politics of Emergent Afrocentric Womanism,” in Ecofeminism and the Sacred, ed. Carol J. Adams (New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1993).

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with many colluders. Furthermore, Hamer’s exemplary model is both inspiring and informative. Although she did not become financially wealthy or win any political seat, her witness of faith invites us to consider radical, liberating ways of trusting the divine in and for racial freedom. Theology helped her in the practical context of the United States “wilderness,” and hopefully, her Christian thought and practice will continue to be explored and excavated to unearth more rich, life-giving minerals. In (re)membering Hamer in the United States “wilderness,” this chapter concludes with a prose in her honor.

… “I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired”: A Tribute to Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977) For Fannie Lou Hamer the landscape of the U.S.A. was riddled with the diseases of racial hatred and white supremacy Race-based, gender-based, and class-based injustice and violence were hostile constants in her Mississippi and national environments The control and surveillance of Black bodies fueled by an economic system engineered to maintain and legitimize an ideology that rendered Black lives as UN-NATURAL and UN-COMELY From slavery to sharecropping various conditions and systems had to be UN-DONE: Black production without access to JUST consumption to JUST nutrition to JUST education to JUST political representation Black production without access to JUST distribution to JUST compensation to JUST self-determination

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Black production as property and manual workers before being replaced by the supposed progress of mechanization Black production without access to JUST shelter and protection Black production without access to JUST integration beyond rape and sexual exploitation Black production without access to JUST medical attention Degradation, debilitation, and dehumanization were resisted especially when Mrs. Hamer proclaimed “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired” Declaring her humanity in the face of police brutality and state-sanctioned violence she denounced the “it-ness” and announced the “I-ness” of her Black dignity and creativity Illness and disease plagued the land and its inhabitants, and fortunately, Mrs. Hamer was determined to find an individual and national panacea by creating a path of revolutionary healing Jesus of Nazareth, the dark-skinned Jew, was her inspiration who was out there, too, with the people where it was happening Both were members of the disinherited yet possessed a well of spiritual and familial resources to disrupt, and transform, imperial socio-political powers Both were despised and rejected, a man and woman of sorrow acquainted with grief Both were wounded by the immoral, socio-political elites yet overcame those powers and principalities Thank you, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, for being rooted and grounded in LOVE of the Creator and all of creation

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Thank you, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, for singing and preaching, praying and believing, enacting and envisioning FREEDOM for and by vulnerable populations Thank you, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, for speaking TRUTH to power, and to the people Thank you, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, for local, state, and national LEADERSHIP that refused to quit Thank you, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, for redefining the aesthetics of the U.S. social, political, educational, economic, environmental, and spiritual landscape by externalizing unapologetically BLACK LIVES and all LIFE-FORMS MATTER!!!!

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Healing the People, Healing the Land: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Theo-Politics of Love Hamer is widely remembered for her statement: “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”1 Hamer’s lament became a rallying cry that manifested in her activist narrative as well as her illness narrative, says cultural anthropologist, Dvera Saxton.2 Hamer held in tension the depth of the personal and social trauma with the hope of healing ills caused by race, gender, and classbased violence. From 1962–1977, Hamer publicly interrogated, transcended, and transformed United States racist ideologies, systems, structures, and practices through what is coined as her theo-politics of love. Hamer’s theo-politics of love through her Christian faith and liberating use of sacred literature is presented in this chapter.3 It is argued that Hamer’s vision and practice of healing the people and the land entails the political, social, economic, ideological, and ecological decentering of whiteness. Hamer’s perception of the sickness of white landowning males who legally, or with impunity, terrorized, intimidated, segregated, lynched, mutilated, raped, exploited, and politically misrepresented black poor and oppressed land workers and their families was inclusive of people, place, and space. In developing and constructing Hamer’s theo-politics of love, first, I provide a brief overview of love and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Second, socio-political anecdotes of Hamer’s private resistance and leadership-activism are discussed through the four stages of her theo-politics of love. Third, an analysis of some

1 Hamer, “‘I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired,’ Speech Delivered with Malcolm X at the Williams Institutional CME Church, Harlem, New York, December 20, 1964,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 62. 2 Dvera Saxton, “Fannie Lou Hamer’s Reparative Justice Leadership Panel Respondent,” Literature A/Cross Cultures Conference, Fresno Pacific University, Fresno, October 7, 2016. 3 Hamer’s theo-politics of love is constructed as a four-stage maturational process that occurred before, during, and after her involvement in SNCC. Clayborne Carson, a historian, King scholar, and participant in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, discusses the threestage intellectual development and legacy of SNCC. This parallel is drawn between Hamer and SNCC to demonstrate the organic, creative, and dynamic contexts in which Hamer lived as well as her participation in an intellectually sophisticated grassroots organization. See Carson’s In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004438071_006

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outcomes of Hamer’s theo-politics of love is presented to contextualize love as more than a political strategy though necessary for socio-political engagement and change. Fourth, I recount accolades Hamer received in life, and death, to highlight her impact on healing the people and the land through her theopolitics of love.

1

Love and the Civil Rights Movement: A Snapshot

Hamer’s theo-politics of love, an aspect of her revolutionary practical theology, is constitutive of what Vincent Harding argues in There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. He states, “… the black struggle for freedom is at the heart a profoundly human quest for transformation, a constantly evolving movement toward personal integrity and toward new social structures filled with justice, equity, and compassion.”4 Hamer’s theo-politics joined the protracted black struggle for freedom that was simultaneously personal and political, private and public, individual and collective, and imminent and transcendent. Her God-inspired, and grounded, sense of love entails a telos of “a new, transformed humanity, a new humanized society (not ‘equal opportunity’ in a dehumanized one).”5 As is detailed below, Hamer invited all to acknowledge and address the malaise because she claimed, “America is a sick place, and man is on the critical list.”6 Prior to Hamer’s participation in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, Ella Baker was the black woman architect and advocate of a grassroots movement comprised of ordinary people acting on their environment in an extraordinary manner.7 Love for self and neighbor by recognizing the dignity of every human was at the core of Baker’s religious moral ethic that was a major part of the Civil Rights Movement. In recalling a childhood memory with her maternal grandfather, who was a Baptist pastor, Baker’s sense of compassion is highlighted when she notes, We had a big garden, much too big for the size of the family. I’d pick a bushel or more [of green peas], and we didn’t need them, so you’d give

4 Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (San Diego, CA and New York, NY: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1981), xxiv. 5 Harding, There Is a River, xxv. 6 Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 104. 7 Rosetta E. Ross, Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 89–90.

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them to neighbors who didn’t have them. That’s the way you did. It was no hassle about it. I don’t think it ever occurred to our immediate family to indoctrinate children against sharing. Because they had the privilege of growing up where they’d raised a lot of food. They were never hungry. They could share their food with people. And so you share your lives with people.8 As has been discussed in the previous chapter, Baker was the primary convener of college students who were protesting through sit-ins in the early 1960s and the designer of SNCC as an autonomous entity from the professionally-led NAACP and clergy-led SCLC. Under Baker’s indigenous student-led model, conditions and relations were created for Hamer’s theo-politics of love to emerge. John Lewis, a former SNCC leader, civil rights veteran, and member of congress, said, “The Civil Rights Movement, above all, was a work of love. Yet even 50 years later, it is rare to find anyone who would use the word ‘love’ to describe what we did.”9 Lewis points to the public, political engagement and manifestation of an act that constituted the heart of participants’ means and ends. Love of self. Love of God. Love of neighbor, and even love of the white oppressor and terrorist. Love of people and place. Love of land and space. Love of those from diverse religious, educational, racial, ethnic, economic, and geographical backgrounds. Love to overcome the fear, hatred, and bitterness that were constant hounds to experiencing freedom and justice. Love that refused to accept unjust, violent conditions and that envisioned a renewed social and political order. Love to heal the wounds, trauma, and casualties. The Civil Rights Movement must be remembered, too, as a work of love. Diane Nash, another civil rights veteran and member of SNCC who led college students to continue the Freedom Rides in 1961 on interstate bus lines after the original group which included Lewis was bombed, gassed, and physically assaulted. In a 2017 speech at Notre Dame Law School, Nash coined the term “agapic energy” to capture the heart of the Civil Rights Movement.10 Drawing from the biblical Greek term agape, which is understood as God’s unconditional, unfailing love, and the ultimate expression of caring for another person, Nash speaks of the divine force that empowered the grinding, day-to-day acts of love. The love that challenged and transformed people for, 8 9 10

Baker cited in Ross, Witnessing and Testifying, 35. Italics are Baker’s. Krista Tippet, host. “Love In Action.” On Being (podcast). January 26, 2017. https://onbeing .org/programs/john-lewis-love-in-action-jan2017/. Accessed on October 23, 2017. Nash cited in Kevin Allen, “Civil Rights Pioneer Says Love Fueled the Movement.” http:// law.nd.edu/news/civil-rights-pioneer-says-love-fueled-the-movement/.

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and against, racial justice and peace, was grounded in an ideal and life-giving force that transcended the horror and injustice of the present moment. Womanist religious ethicist, Rosetta E. Ross, understood Hamer exemplifying agape neighbor love, that was typical of the broader movement, by showing how Hamer’s practice of love moved beyond rationalized, expedient norms to encompass a divine good that addressed the needs and concerns of vulnerable populations such as herself.11 In attending to the least, Ross shows that the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was a diverse political party comprised mainly of poor black sharecroppers, maids, and manual workers who were seeking political justice, self-determination, and economic restructuring and redistribution. They posed a challenge at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) of 1964 to unseat five white male delegates of Mississippi. As the more authentic reflection of the people of Mississippi than the five white elite males, the MFDP projected a neighborly love (agape), according to Ross, for each other, and the members of the political system who were decision-makers for the political, economic, and social well-being of the black masses. Risking their lives and livelihoods, members of the MFDP challenged the DNC beyond mere legitimate participation in the political process which would have been the rational, expedient thing to do. Instead, Hamer and the MFDP focused on repairing the historical harm, too, by demanding the illegitimate candidates be removed because they had excluded black people from participating in the process through various means such as terrorism, unfair administration of poll taxes and voter registration practices, and locking people out, and moving precinct meetings without prior knowledge.12 In short, love was exemplified in a public way as the MFDP expressed their concern for the disinherited who were excluded from participating in such public, political spaces and institutions. Although the divine good did not manifest itself at the DNC of 1964 as Hamer and the MFDP desired, nonetheless, Hamer is remembered as one who did the impossible and possibly, the unthinkable. She infused Christian morality into political life that exposed the hypocrisy of politicians who claimed to practice democracy, and invited the politically powerful and ambitious to recognize, receive, and enter the love that was manifested among them. The politicians and lawmakers who were bearing witness to a love supreme were faced with a choice in which they had the power to act for a divine good, 11

12

Rosetta E. Ross, “Religion and Civic Life: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as a Metaphor for What Love Requires,” Quarterly Review (Summer 2000): 125–39. Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir An Army, 77.

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and not the perpetual policies and practices of exclusion and death. Moreover, beyond her testimony that was televised nationally, Hamer also relied on the divine impetus of agape to speak truth to power in more closed settings because Hamer and the MFDP, according to Ross, believed the following, God’s movement was understood not only as requiring and motivating individuals and communities of religious believers who supported the civil-rights cause; the divine activity was also understood to operate in the lives of people—believers and nonbelievers—who opposed the general vision and particular activities of civil-rights participants.13 In this spirit of divine empowerment, Hamer informed Senator Hubert Humphrey, who was also a vice presidential hopeful, that she was praying for him to do the right thing. She affirmed his humanity by saying “you’re a good man, and you know what’s right.”14 Then, she went on to say, “the trouble is, you’re afraid to do what you know is right.”15 The courage to recognize and receive the love by doing the right thing for black people and the nation was before Humphrey and the DNC. Though his reception of love probably would have cost him his professional goal of becoming vice president of the United States, he would have participated in a divine good by responding to the needs of his black, vulnerable neighbors. Ross’s emphasis on Hamer’s expression of agape and the divine good was one among many interpretations of Hamer’s influence. Drawing from the agricultural environment in which the black Mississippians existed, Charlie Cobb, a civil rights veteran, proudly notes, “The people in the South are like seeds, each with the potential to grow and spread more seeds, for more growth: creating gardens and forests of themselves—lawns of living. They are planted in their lives.”16 Cobb characterizes Hamer, specifically, as a crabgrass politician because she acted on her realization that the white social, political, and economic power structure at the county, state, and national levels did not define who she was or who she was to become. She became a ‘weed’ that disrupted their illusion of white superiority and black inferiority, and neatly manicured lawns of black containment and conformity while confronting the atrocities of systemic exclusion. As a “seed,” Hamer discovered a foundation of being and 13 14 15 16

Ross, “Religion and Civic Life,” 134. Hamer cited in Ross, “Religion and Civic Life,” 131. Hamer cited in Ross, “Religion and Civic Life,” Ibid. Charles E. Cobb, “Crabgrass Politician,” The Movement 1, no. 8 (August 1965): 6. https:// www.crmvet.org/docs/mvmt/6508mvmt.pdf.

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belonging that resulted in thriving, regardless of the circumstances, and she cultivated it with and for the people. In the use of agrarian symbols of a rural people, Cobb poignantly characterizes Hamer’s commitment to love the least. In Challenging the Mississippi Firebombers: Memories of Mississippi 1964–65, white male activist Jim Dann recounts how Hamer’s church had their tax exemption status and water use revoked by the mayor of Ruleville because the church was used as a base for “The Movement.”17 Moreover, Dann recalls She [Hamer] exuded love and affection to all the civil rights workers. Sometimes she worried about our safety, and other times she inspired us to find the courage to go forward. She was fearless herself, yet kind and understanding and always ready to listen. Virtually everyone in the black community looked up to her, as did the volunteers.18 Although Hamer was sick and tired, she found the strength to love and refused to hate. Her fearlessness and dependence on love were relentless even after being tortured in the Winona jail. Hamer told two black women grassroots civil rights workers, Unita Blackwell and L. C. Dorsey, about the need to love. More specifically, Dorsey recalled how she felt after Hamer’s admonition to love. When she got through talking you just wanted to go out and do something. You didn’t want to go out and hurt white folks which is absolutely an incredible phenomenon when you realized how much she had been abused, how much pain she had endured. That was not her mission. That was not her mission. Her mission was to love yourself enough to take this chance to get this freedom that God had prepared for us. And that these young people. She would always talk about the young people. And that these young people are here to help us acquire. … After that well I started feeling like I can do anything.19 Hamer’s attention to love was a healing, empowering presence for herself and so many others. The divine good was her primary end, as articulated by Ross, and thus, Hamer lived and died sowing, planting, and cultivating the seeds of Christian love. 17 18 19

Jim Dann, Challenging the Mississippi Firebombers: Memories of Mississippi 1964–65 (Montreal, Quebec: Baraka Books of Montreal, 2013), 57. Ibid., 58. L. C. Dorsey cited in Joan Sadoff, Dr. Robert Sadoff, and Laura J. Lipson, dir. 2002. Standing On My Sisters’ Shoulders. Women Make Movies. DVD.

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Hamer’s Theo-Politics of Love: Four Stages

Although Christianity and its corresponding message of love shaped Hamer, she struggled with the perceived and experienced limitations of Christian love in social change. For example, in her reflection on life before Freedom Summer of 1964, she notes, Ninety per cent of the Negro people in Mississippi have gone to church all their lives. They have lived with the hope that if they kept ‘standing up’ in a Christian manner, things would change. After we found out that Christian love alone wouldn’t cure the sickness in Mississippi then we knew we had other things to do.20 The inadequacy of Christian love, as she knew and experienced it, to change the hearts and minds of the white oppressors, and to strengthen the hearts and minds of the black oppressed to refuse to acquiesce to an unjust system was clear. Charles Marsh, religious studies scholar and project director on Lived Theology, argues in God’s Long Summer that “in [the] face of massive white resistance, black people could no longer assume that the faithful exhibition of Christian virtues would convict white Southerners of their social sins and overhaul Jim Crow’s mean rule.”21 Marsh continues by saying “Mrs. Hamer had learned all too well the unbending resolve of white racism.”22 There had to be something more to supplement Christian love to address the profundity of the sick ideology that plagued the people and the land. Christian love, as practiced and perceived, was impotent in providing a panacea to lynching, rapes, inadequate housing, poverty, economic exploitation, political disenfranchisement, and police brutality. Christian love needed to be broadened, tested, and refined in ways that entailed both personal and social change to stand against the laws enacted and practiced that dismissed the humanity of black lives. Hamer’s understanding of the social and political limitations of Christian love did not prevent her from acknowledging the value of it. As was stated in the previous chapter, Hamer was proud that love was integral to her identity and formation.23 The love she learned from her family, church, and civic communities inspired Hamer to have hope that social change was possible, to 20 21 22 23

Hamer, “Foreword,” vii. Charles Marsh, God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 32. Ibid. Hamer, “Foreword,” viii.

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recognize what that change should entail, and to care for self and others when powers and principalities dictated otherwise. She knew black Mississippians had something special to offer to the nation if white people were ready to participate in healing the people and the land. She implored, “And I hope white America learns to love, before they teach every one of us to hate. This is what is happening in this country.”24 In the nation, hate was trumping love according to Hamer. She invited and encouraged white Americans to reverse the trend by joining the black freedom struggle, a movement of love. One can deduce that Hamer understood Christian love at its most fundamental level to be expressed as not hating one’s enemy, one’s oppressor. Moreover, within and beyond the negation of what not to do, the affirmation consists of the necessity of loving one’s self through respect and standing firm on principles and beliefs. Thus, a three-part conceptual understanding of love is Hamer’s first stage of the theo-politics of love which constitutes black selfrespect, standing on principles and beliefs, and not hating white people. In this first stage, Hamer demonstrated what New Testament scholar, Warren Carter calls a disguised, ambiguous form of resistance to affirm one’s selfworth regardless of the pervasive domination of the Roman Empire. As we know, in Hamer’s case, it was the United States empire of white supremacy and Jim Crow segregation. In her own words and in her own way, she claimed “I just carried my little own protest…”25 Hamer’s protest on the plantation consisted of the following as a sharecropper on sunny days, and housekeeper on rainy days: I would eat out all of the spoons and watch them eat behind me. And then whenever they would leave home, I would get in the bathtub because I didn’t have one. I would get in the bathtub and I would take me a bubble bath. And I would put some of everything on me that they had been using because—one thing about it, you know, just like a man who drinks whiskey: if you drink, you can’t smell mine because you already got some in you. So they couldn’t smell this perfume because they had some on them. I would walk out feeling very proud.26 Hidden from the sight of the white landowner and his family, Hamer would exercise an act of resistance to the race-based social hierarchy. In the process, she created a buffer against the constant assault on her human dignity. 24 25 26

Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 117. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 106. Hamer, Ibid.

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Not only did Hamer think of herself, she also was sensitive to caring for the other black sharecroppers when they were working in the field. As a trusted and competent timekeeper on Marlow’s plantation, Hamer would use a different scale to ensure the sharecroppers received just pay for their labor. According to Hamer, the landowner’s scale was rigged and did not provide the hardworking sharecroppers their just compensation.27 She was the true lady of liberty as she negotiated how to financially care for the black masses, in her own way, while simultaneously maintaining the trust of the white male landowner. Though she was never able to recover the mass amount of compensation that generations of black sharecropping families were denied, Hamer at least demonstrated a sense of connection to the plight of the black land workers and acknowledged their humanity and valued their productivity. As a little girl, Hamer wanted to become white. Or, she was struggling with how to affirm and embrace who she was in her darker-hued, nonwhite skin. She provides a rationale for her desire when she stated, “The reason I wished that was they was the only people that wasn’t doing nothing, but still had money and clothes. We was working year in and year out and wouldn’t get to go to school but four months out of the year because two of the months we didn’t have nothing.”28 Even at a young age, Hamer was aware of the grave racial injustices and disparities. However, as stated in chapter 1, her mother’s encouraging words and gift of a black doll spurred Hamer on to confront, and oppose, white domination and oppression throughout her lifetime. Hamer’s commitment to self-respect and standing on principles were steadfast. During a stint of her leadership, activism, and community organizing as a member of SNCC and a major distributor of a federal food program, she was known to have challenged prospective food recipients to love themselves by registering to vote, too, or else to forego the food.29 Possibly, Hamer reasoned that although the food was necessary for individual lives and families, the vote was necessary for the long-term sustenance and resuscitation of a people and a place. In short, physical and political nourishment could not be separated in the hope of healing the people and the land. The aspect of not hating white people in this initial stage of Hamer’s theopolitics of love is phenomenal, and neither disguised nor ambiguous. Throughout her adult years as an activist and leader, a constant message was love, and not hate. She exclaimed,

27 28 29

Hamer cited in Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir An Army, 21. Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 50. Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir An Army, 80.

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We are not fighting against these people because we hate them, but we are fighting these people because we love them and we’re the only thing can save them now. We are fighting to save these people from their hate and from all the things that would be so bad against them. We want them to see the right way.30 In this articulation of love, Hamer placed responsibility on the shoulders of black people, especially poor black Christian Mississippians who were her audience during this speech. On one level, she framed the fight against racial injustice, and the fight for racial freedom in terms of saving white people from themselves. She shared the depth of her love for her white oppressors when she later claimed, “Every night of my life that I lay down before I go to sleep, I pray for these people that despitefully use me.”31 Although Hamer never shared the content of her prayer for the salvation of her white oppressors who professed to be Christian, it possibly was in the spirit of praying for them to find the courage to do the right thing as she had publicly told Senator Hubert Humphrey how she planned to pray for him. A petition to the divine on behalf of those who dismissed her humanity, violated her body, exploited her labor, misrepresented her interests, and terrorized her people was integral in Hamer’s theo-politics of love. Moving fluidly between prophetess and priestess, Hamer was conscious of white people as her oppressors and sisters and brothers. In other words, she seemed to have nurtured an interior life that enabled her to publicly resist her white oppressors while remaining open to embrace her white sisters and brothers as she loved and respected herself. In conjunction with this strong sense of self-respect, Hamer once lamented, “Four hundred years of love, nonviolence, turning the other cheek and still being lynched, hung, and murdered. There has to be something else. It’s always been a one-way street. It’s always been the black people that had to give nonviolently, that had to love.”32 Hamer was convinced that black people had maintained a posture of extending themselves to promote the well-being of white people for centuries, but it was not translating into white people, by and large, loving black people, too. Nevertheless, Hamer exclaimed, Regardless of how they have abused us for all these years, we always cared what was going on. We have prayed and we have hoped for God to bring about change. And now the time have come for people to stand up.33 30 31 32 33

Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 54. Hamer, Ibid. Hamer cited in The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer: Never Turn Back. Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 54.

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Black people, according to Hamer, were not indifferent about the political disenfranchisement, social degradation, and abject poverty they were experiencing. They did the best they knew how to do by respecting themselves, loving, and not hating, white people, and praying to God for change. To access systemic change, Hamer asserted more and more black people had to stand up in a public, direct way. They had to become the instruments of change in public life as they continued to love themselves, their white oppressors, and prayed. In short, part of their prayer would be answered as they “trust God and launch out into the deep” as Hamer called it.34 In stage two, Hamer’s theo-politics of love consisted of a broader public, systemic, and communal expression beyond the more private, disguised ways that occurred in stage one. As she moved from forced segregated spaces to a national landscape, Hamer began seeking to obtain civil rights that were being denied in political expression, political representation and misrepresentation, and material, economic well-being. In short, she wanted what already belonged to her according to the United States Constitution that she did not begin to learn about until she was forty-four years old because she did not know that such a document existed. “Stand up for your constitutional right” was one of Hamer’s rallying cries to those who were dispossessed.35 As has been previously discussed, Hamer and the MFDP stood strong and tall at the 1964 DNC. Her testimony to the credentials committee and subsequent refusal of the compromise of two at-large seats instead of having access to the five white men’s seats as planned demonstrated Hamer’s commitment to bridging the gap between stated democratic values and practices. She and the MFDP challenged the veracity of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution, and simultaneously invited decision-makers to cease and desist from perpetuating the mockery of democracy. As Humphrey had the opportunity to recognize, receive, and enter into love, so did the members of the credentials committee after hearing her testimony. In her rejection of the compromise, Hamer asserted, “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats.”36 In a comment to a reporter, she further exclaimed, “if the pie is mine… well then you don’t take it and dish out how much I should have of my own pie. You just don’t issue me my portion of pie if it’s my pie.”37 Hamer and many members of the MFDP were criticized by Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Bayard Rustin, a key organizer and architect of King’s March on 34 35 36 37

Hamer, Ibid., 53. Hamer, Ibid., 55. Hamer cited in Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir An Army, 103. Hamer cited in Brooks, Ibid.

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Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and King of the SCLC because of their refusal to accept the compromise. Although King originally supported the MFDP’s challenge, he later switched his position due to the threat of losing the white middle-class revenue stream to the SCLC.38 However, Hamer held fast to the necessity of a revolution, and not a watered-down act of reform. The MFDP challenge had the potential to “redress the past and alter the present, as well as protect against similar injustices in the future.”39 As poor sharecroppers, tenant farmers, domestics, and manual workers, they had put their lives on the line to unseat the five delegate and two at-large seats for a sixty-eight member interracial and economically diverse delegation was not viewed as an acceptable compromise. The notion of accessing what rightfully and inherently belonged to her, and every other United States citizen, grounded Hamer in her direct, public exhibition of love. Love was not merely a political strategy, but it was a way of life for Hamer too. In her experience, hate only destroyed the person who was consumed by it, and never benefitted either parties or groups in the relationship. The one who hated the other refused to accept and acknowledge their presence, and only perpetuated the alienation and estrangement. In one of her speeches to a white college audience in Chicago, Hamer said it this way, If I told you tonight that I hate you I would be lying to you, because I see what hate had done to you. And I am going to do good, where you have done evil about me. I’m going to do good. And I know it worked because in Ruleville, Mississippi, it was time that people couldn’t drive up to my house and they couldn’t stop. If they stopped for any length of time, they was arrested. But I remember a man, the mayor told me one time, said, ‘Fannie Lou, if you’re really tired of what’s going on in Mississippi,’ said, ‘you ought to leave.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what, mayor, if you sick of looking at me in Ruleville, then you pack your ass up!’40 The power of love to ‘stand her ground’ empowered Hamer to stand with the poor black Mississippians, as a member of them, and to stand against the prevalence of white hate and hostility. Regardless of one’s position and status, Hamer stood and spoke truth to power, and to the people. As an indigenous 38

39 40

Hamer, “‘We Haven’t Arrived Yet,’ Presentation and Responses to Questions at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, January 29, 1976,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 190. Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir An Army, 147. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 118.

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intellectual activist outside of the academy or guild, she became transformed by love and loving as she invited others to stand and be likewise. Both before and after the 1964 DNC in Atlantic City, NJ, Hamer began to see the grave limitations of civil rights activism. As she yearned for something to supplement her understanding of Christian love, she was also in search of something more than civil rights. After her beating in June of 1963 in the Winona jail and the subsequent acquittal of the officers, she stated, If them crackers in Winona thought they’d discourage me from fighting, I guess they found out different. I’m going to stay in Mississippi and if they shoot me down, I’ll be buried here. I don’t want equal rights with the white man; if I did, I’d be a thief and a murderer.41 For Hamer, civil rights became synonymous with equal rights, and since white people were supposedly the standard of rights and privileges, she apparently grew disenchanted with the notion. In a speech delivered in 1970, she made it explicit what she was, and was not, fighting for when she claimed, And you see I couldn’t tell anybody in my right mind that I am fighting for equal rights because I don’t want any. I’m fighting for human rights, because I don’t want to be equal to the people that rape my ancestors, dead, kill out the Indians, dead, destroyed my dignity, and taken my name.42 Hamer’s public stance of love now transcended civil rights to human rights which constitutes stage three of her theo-politics of love. Hamer’s critique of civil rights and adoption of human rights in her stage three theo-politics of love denounced whiteness as the pinnacle, the standard of what constitutes being human. Apparently, what emerged for Hamer was a deeper affirmation of self-respect, self-love, and clear understanding of her humanity that transcended the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, economic exploitation, and political disenfranchisement. Furthermore, symbolic and ideological whiteness were manifestations of evil to be resisted, and not something to be emulated or perpetuated. She proclaimed, And we are not dealing, you know, some people don’t like for you to call him a devil, but we are not dealing with men today. The sixth chapter

41 42

Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges,” 326. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 117.

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of Ephesians and the eleventh and twelfth verse say: ‘Put on the whole armor of God. That he may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.’ The twelfth verse say: ‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against powers, against principality, against the rulers of darkness of this world—spiritual wickedness in high places.’43 The magnitude of the problem was both spiritual and material. Hamer was wise enough to differentiate between whiteness as an evil presence that negates life from white people who were human, too, created by the same God. The sickness of whiteness, and the oppressive systems that emanated from such a symbol and ideology, did not prohibit Hamer from acknowledging the interconnection of humanity, and the need to fight for human rights for every human, regardless of race or class. Hamer’s revision of white people as not constituting the anthropological norm predated comparative human development psychologist Margaret Beale Spencer’s theoretical paradigm.44 Spencer’s Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST) recovers and reclaims the humanity of black people by focusing on resiliency instead of deficiency among African American children and adolescents. Moreover, her paradigm is a theoretical critique and corrective of human developmental models that presuppose stereotypical deficient development particularly for nonwhite people while uncritically espousing white, and often male, normativity of humanity and human development. Unlike many psychological and moral development paradigms, Spencer does not presuppose that to be human is to be autonomous, rational, and/or noncoerced. Instead, she posits a view that to be human is to be vulnerable.45 Her attention on vulnerability as a universal norm of the human condition does not negate the fact that some people are more vulnerable than others due to ideologies and systemic conditions of intersecting oppression. Nonetheless, her psychological research paradigm and scholarship, first and foremost, unveil the resilience of African American children and adolescents as they make

43 44

45

Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’” 101. Margaret Beale Spencer, “Old Issues and New Theorizing about African American Youth: Phenomenological Variant Ecological Systems Theory,” in African American Youth: Their Social and Economic Status in the United States, ed. Ronald L. Taylor (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995), 37–69. Margaret Beale Spencer, “Identity, Human Vulnerability, and Varied Social Opportunity,” in the Invited Session “Racial Identity and Developmental Issues” at the Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting 2009, April 3, 2009, Denver, CO.

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meaning of their respective contexts and the various protective factors that enable them to overcome the stressors/challenges of what W. E. B. Du Bois called, in The Souls of Black Folk, being perceived as a problem, as less than human in a darker-hued skin. Spencer et al. assert “it is critical to note that the theory is a perspective applicable to all humans, although it initially was conceptualized as a strategy for acknowledging the humanity of individuals of color (e.g., African Americans) who did not appear to exist in the human development literature.”46 Second, Spencer’s research and scholarship demonstrate the vulnerability and risk factors within various groups based on race, gender, and/or class and ways these diverse groups ascertain meaning while acting on and in their respective contexts. What Hamer proclaimed intuitively and existentially, Spencer, as well as Du Bois, capture theoretically regarding the humanity of black souls. With Hamer’s basic understanding of herself as human, she envisioned a nation in which black people would not experience housing eviction, economic exploitation, police brutality, lynching, political harassment and disenfranchisement, miseducation, food insecurity, landlessness, and social dehumanization for exercising their human vocation to identify, address, and represent the economic, political, educational, and social concerns of the people. Hamer was resilient as she found and accessed her Christian faith, and other, resources to keep standing her ground. In short, Hamer’s expression of her humanity was constitutive of black self-determination and self-governance in an open society free from overt discrimination that included, yet transcended, mere individual rights and choices. She argued, “community living and group decision making is local self-government. It is this type of community self-government that has been lost over the decades and thus created decay in our poor rural areas in the South and our northern ghettos.”47 Individuals participate in, and belong to, groups and communities to develop, represent, enact, and/or modify their collective interests. Hamer believed, If this nation is to survive we must return to the concept of local selfgovernment with everyone participating to the maximum degree possible. This is not to say, however, that we should not have a strong national 46

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Margaret Beale Spencer, Davido Dupree, Brian Tinsley, Ebony O. McGee, Jennifer Hall, Suzanne G. Fegley, and Tyhesha Goss Elmore, “Resistance and Resiliency in a ColorConscious Society: Implications for Learning and Teaching,” in APA Educational Psychology Handbook, vol. 1 Theories, Constructs, and Critical Issues, eds. Karen R. Harris, Steve Graham, and Tim Urdan (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2012), 463. Hamer, “‘If the Name of the Game is Survive, Survive,’” 142.

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or federal government, because these branches too must be responsive to the needs of all local and state governments through true representation of all men and women who have total commitment to a true democratic process.48 Communal freedom, governance, and healing was part of Hamer’s public, direct stance of exercising her humanity in her stage three, theo-politics of love. Walking as Christ did by preaching to the poor, mending the brokenhearted, setting the captives free, and proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor entailed more than just voter registration campaigns and electoral politics for Hamer. She reasoned, “now it’s no way on earth we can gain any kind of political power unless we have some kind of economic power.”49 Hence, another element of Hamer’s stage three theo-politics of love is the connection between political power and economic power. Both were necessary to engender change and to extend love in practical ways for self and others. As was discussed in previous chapters, Hamer labored and led in a way that modeled a radical Christian practice of care and communal responsibility in the Freedom Farm Co-op; those who were in need were fed, clothed, visited, housed, employed, and supported because they had access to the released, non-privatized abundance of the community’s resources for the well-being of one and all. From landless sharecropper to cooperative landowner and farmer, Hamer is an example of both a tiller and keeper of the land for communal-governance and flourishing. Hamer exuded a deep yearning for freedom that repaired and restored the dignity and humanity of people as well as the space and place they inhabited. In January of 1976, one year before her death in March of 1977, Hamer spoke to a crowd at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on the topic, “We Haven’t Arrived Yet.” After nearly fourteen years in the public square, Hamer asserted, But the shame that we have before us today is whatever happened to us … have to be legislated. But you can’t legislate love. That’s one thing you can’t do. And what America and the rest of the world need today— some kids put out a song some time ago is what the world need now is love—but today people is not seeking and trying to find love, one of the greatest things of survival on earth, but seeking for more power and power corrupt.50

48 49 50

Hamer, Ibid., 143. Hamer, “‘Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either,’” 127. Hamer, “‘We Haven’t Arrived Yet,’” 184. Italics are the editors’.

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Hamer spoke of the national disgrace of being over reliant on a political system that was not equipped to handle the source of the problem: white hatred, fear, and hostility, and black dehumanization and disempowerment. Practices of love, compassion, learning and serving of other people’s interests, not harming or wishing ill-will, nurturing of identity, belonging, and patience and longsuffering were needed both within and beyond the political machinery. Hamer argued that love is a necessity for survival on our planet yet far too many people were not seeking for that which would address the depth, breadth, height, and length of the sickness that plagued the people and the land. Hamer experienced love beyond the political machinery in stage four of her theo-politics of love that is best described as mutual respect and dignity shared between two or more freed humans while simultaneously transcending and transforming the environmental conditions of the master-slave narrative.51 Two concrete examples of Hamer transcending race, class, and gender, though momentarily, are discussed. First, recall the mayor of Ruleville who told her to leave Mississippi if she was not satisfied with the conditions, and her retort was likewise to him if he was tired of seeing her. These enemies had different perspectives on what constituted a healed people and land though Hamer kept on standing on principle, respecting herself, and expressed in public spaces her desire for the people and the land. Her transparency, vulnerability, and clarity were known both locally and nationally. She recalled the change that had occurred in the mayor when he sent her a letter on Sunday, March 5, “Fannie Lou Hamer Day” in the town of Ruleville, which stated, “You know it’s been people decorated for bravery, and battles won where they didn’t really face danger. This is not true in your case. You faced ever-present danger but you taken your troop and you walked them to the captain enemy. And your name is going to be in history.”52 The mayor found the courage and capacity to recognize and receive the love that was exhibited by Hamer and other black freedom fighters. He finally acknowledged the gift that was before him and on a certain level, recovered part of his humanity in the process. Second, Hamer spoke of an experience with the son-in-law of a white Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland who received government bailouts on his land to let it go fallow, and would vote against any policy or program that would benefit poor, black rural Mississippians. The son-in-law was an attorney 51

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This working definition of Hamer’s stage 4 theo-politics of love is informed by Howard Thurman’s description of Jesus of Nazareth‘s love ethic in Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 118.

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with whom Hamer claimed she constantly went “nose to nose”53 in court battles. As she was presenting the details of her encounter with Attorney Terney at the airport and differences between the South and the North, she stated, And when he walked in—now this is one thing that we have in the South that you don’t have in the North that it was hard for me to get used to: nobody speak in the North. But, you know you can be fixing to fight a person in the South and before you hit him you’ll say, ‘Good Morning!’ You know you got that kind of respect for each other—so, when I saw him in the airport I said, ‘Good evening, Attorney Terney,’ and he said, ‘Well, yes, Mrs. Hamer.’ So, he shook hands with me and he had another, older guy with him, and he said, ‘You meet Mrs. Hamer,’ said, ‘This is Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer from Mississippi.’ So the guy looked at me real funny and he said, ‘Howdy Fannie Lou,’ and I said, ‘Howdy.’ So we didn’t talk anymore.54 The younger, white male attorney acknowledged the humanity of Hamer by addressing her as Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, and not girl, auntie, or any other derogatory appellations that were used in reference to black people. Moreover, he invited his elderly male companion to recognize and receive the magnitude of the person that was before them. Although Attorney Terney’s companion was not ready to receive and reclaim a part of his own humanity, he was challenged to acknowledge, on a certain level, Hamer’s humanity by addressing her by her legal name. Hamer ran into the attorney again on the flight from Memphis, Tennessee to Greenville, Mississippi, and this time he said, “Hold it, Mrs. Hamer. You done fought to ride in the front. You ain’t going back to the back now; you going to sit down here with me.”55 Although Hamer fought for more than just to ride in the front on a bus, train, or airplane, the attorney nevertheless received the love, the humanity of the person who was before him, again, when it could have been costly to do so. Hamer was carrying a big picture of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for which she was harassed by the flight attendant, and other passengers with strange looks. The flight attendant tried to make her get rid of the picture by claiming, “you know you can’t carry it on that plane.” However, Hamer replied, “I brought it from Washington. I’m carrying it on home. If I

53 54 55

Hamer, “‘We Haven’t Arrived Yet,’” 187. Hamer, Ibid. Hamer, Ibid., 188.

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made it from Washington to Memphis, I certainly can go on to Greenville with it.”56 In the exercising of her humanity, self-respect and love, she accepted the invitation from the attorney and conversed with him from Memphis to Greenville. When they arrived in Greenville, he offered to give Hamer a ride home. Although she declined the ride home, she exclaimed, “So, that’s come a long way. Because I known the time that he would have got off the plane and kept from riding with me.”57 Attorney Terney could have returned to the Mississippi customs and ethos once the plane landed by choosing to deny the momentary transcendence of racism that he and Hamer experienced, but he did not. He continued to receive and honor the person that was before him, and Hamer accepted and affirmed the new way of being beyond the masterslave relation. In these two anecdotes, Hamer’s theo-politics of love in stage four reflected the interpersonal and mutually honoring encounters she had persistently prayed for. Although these abovementioned encounters were still in a broader social context of state sanctioned racial injustice and segregation, Hamer and the white men created and modeled alternative ways of being regardless. They were examples of what Howard Thurman, a Christian theologian and minister, describes how love is practiced between two people, who were once enemies, when he notes, The first step toward love is a common sharing of a sense of mutual worth and value. This cannot be discovered in a vacuum or in a series of artificial or hypothetical relationships. It has to be in a real situation, natural, free.58 In a real, concrete manner, Hamer’s practice of love both privately and publicly enabled her to experience love as more than a personal virtue. She could not make others love who had no interest, desire, or capacity to do so. However, Hamer did prepare herself, by resisting hate, fear, and bitterness, to encounter and receive the love of white people once they came to know themselves, and black people, as human, too. In this vein, Hamer’s stage four theo-politics of love captured the necessity of her intrapersonal work to be open to receive and give love from those who were both her enemy and kin. Although the natural settings in which mutual love between Hamer and the white men found expression were not repeated or broadened, to my knowledge, the contexts

56 57 58

Hamer, Ibid. Hamer, Ibid. Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, 98.

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nonetheless represent the mutually life-giving expression from one to another that is at once simultaneously personal and political, and immanent and transcendent without ever resorting to legislation and bureaucracy. The power of Hamer’s stage four theo-politics of love is the grace of loving and being loved in socio-political contexts which could have never occurred if Hamer did not learn to respect and love herself first. Hence, the ability to love an existing enemy as a potential neighbor is inextricably connected to affirming one’s own sense of worth. Furthermore, to love one’s enemy is more about loving one’s self without ever knowing if, or when, one will be able to love, more intimately and freely, and be loved by the one who was a former enemy. It is no lightweight task to learn to love oneself while observing and experiencing a world that says you are not human or worthy to have any rights and privileges that white people are bound to respect. Yet, Hamer did what was necessary to remain open and alive to the transcendent, divine precious gift, and the fulfillment of her mother’s words of receiving the respect from unlikely people in the way she had respected herself. In summary, Hamer’s theo-politics of love was comprised of the following five elements. First, it was strongly influenced by her belief in Jesus as a revolutionary person who served and ministered to the poor and the captives as described in Luke 4:16–20. Second, it was developmental yet cyclical in nature. Third, it moved from private, disguised ambiguous forms of resistance to public, direct acts of engagement and systemic change. Fourth, it entailed attention to both internal and external worlds in the struggle for freedom. Fifth, it was reparative on at least three levels. On one level, she sought to address past injustices while protecting against future injustices. Then, as is discussed in the next chapter, Hamer demanded monetary reparations from white Christians and Jews as a way for the white religious to acknowledge individual and collective responsibility in the oppression and dehumanization of black lives. On yet another level, Hamer assumed leadership and communal responsibility by creating initiatives, campaigns, and programs that primarily focused on black self-determination and empowerment while advocating for healing and justice for all humanity. Hamer’s practice of Christian love was rooted and grounded in new ways of being, seeing, and doing that were contrary to white imperialism.

3

Hamer’s Theo-Politics of Love: Analysis and Outcomes

Hamer’s understanding and expectation of Christian love to engender social and political change reflected her faith in the power of God, and the power of love. Even when she realized that Christian love in and of itself was not

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adequate to transform white people’s hearts and minds on the issue of racial domination, discrimination, and segregation, she was open to supplementing, and not abandoning, it with something that would provide her desired outcome of freedom and justice in the socio-political realm. Hamer’s initial perception of love could be seen as unrealistic and naïve, or off the mark. Concerning the latter, Jesus’ teachings on love and to turn the other cheek, was neither anemic nor apolitical according to Warren Carter. Jesus taught his first century poor and oppressed Jewish sisters and brothers to exercise their humanity in the face of Roman rule and model that they belong to another God, another King instead of Caesar.59 Turning the other cheek was not acceptance of Roman rule but choosing to not conform to it by resisting and denouncing it. Praying for one’s enemies was not endorsing Roman rule but cultivating an interior life to remain open to seeing the divine manifested in the enemy while asserting one’s allegiance to a divinity other than Caesar. In looking at Hamer’s theo-politics of love through the lens of Carter, it can be ascertained that she was on the right track. However, apparently, she was not confident in or satisfied by her witness of Christian love before Freedom Summer of 1964 to enact the broader change of succor she needed and desired. Hamer’s self-critique on the inadequacy of the Christian love virtue in addressing the problem of race and racism can be likened to Thurman’s assessment of Christianity and the Church’s teachings on Jesus back in the middle of the twentieth century. Thurman asserts, I belong to a generation that finds very little that is meaningful or intelligent in the teachings of the Church concerning Jesus Christ. It is a generation largely in revolt because of the general impression that Christianity is essentially an other-worldly religion, having as its motto: ‘Take all the world, but give me Jesus.’ The desperate opposition to Christianity rests in the fact that it seems, in the last analysis, to be a betrayal of the Negro into the hands of his enemies by focusing his attention upon heaven, forgiveness, love, and the like. It is true that this emphasis is germane to the religion of Jesus, but it has to be put into a context that will show its strength and vitality rather than its weakness and failure.60 Like Thurman, Hamer was seeking to experience and practice love in a milieu that would be a fortress against, and antidote for, white elite male domination

59 60

Carter, The Roman Empire and The New Testament. Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, 29–30.

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and oppression, and not a mere capitulation to racial violence and injustice. Unlike Thurman, it is unclear if Hamer ever explored or examined why love was experienced as inadequate in the face of white supremacy. However, for Hamer, love was a constant in her public engagement of race-based, genderbased, and class-based violence and injustice that became powerful enough to recognize and receive the white college students who joined SNCC in Freedom Summer of 1964, black and white middle class northern women of Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS), poor white rural people who, too, were denied access to proper housing, food, water, and education, and poor black rural people who were her neighbors and fellow sufferers. It was a love that applauded and stood with the young people. It was a love that challenged black middle-class male and pastoral leadership. It was a love that unabashedly and unapologetically proclaimed her Christian faith regardless of the audience or institutional context. It was a love that embraced difference beyond the fear of the consequences. It was a love that lamented the racial violence and injustice yet labored to create a new just order. It was a love that sprung up from the soil of Mississippi that bore witness to a redemptive Christianity for the people and the place. Hamer’s practice of love in the public sphere, especially as one who was oppressed based on race is germane for engaging one’s enemy and systems of oppression that also challenges certain ascribed myths and misperceptions regarding love. First and foremost, Hamer had learned how to properly love herself in her darker-hued skin regardless of the external forces, rules, and principalities that would dictate otherwise. In this vein, the potential to love one’s enemy, and engage systems of oppression, is not about self-sacrifice, self-abnegation, and/or merely giving one’s self away. The various theological, homiletic, and pastoral terms used to define the virtue of love in action leave women of African descent perpetuating systems of oppression in the continuing denial of selfhood while affirming the personhood and selfhood of others. Clinical psychologist and pastoral theologian Chanequa Walker-Barnes argues “in psychodynamic terms, extolling self-denial among those who lack a core sense of self is akin to trying to encourage the development of the super-ego in a person who lacks a healthy ego identity.”61 A well-developed, mature selflove, and not self-sacrifice, is necessary in loving one’s enemy, or even one’s kin, neighbor, and the divine. As previously cited by Thurman, love between enemies, the estranged, can only be experienced when there is “a common

61

Chanequa Walker-Barnes, Too Heavy A Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), 146.

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sharing of a sense of mutual worth and value.” Hence, if Hamer’s family and black church had not provided her with a strong sense of self-love, respect, and worth, loving her enemy and engaging the systems of oppression would have been virtually impossible and ineffectual. Second, Hamer’s practice of love did not focus on mere sentimental attachments or individualistic self-interests and outcomes. Only when there was a mutuality in the sharing of life, an acknowledgement of seeing and being seen, could any form of sentimental attachment emerge. Moreover, as Thurman aptly notes, these kinds of encounters would have to be sustained beyond the moment by both parties participating in transcending and transforming the oppressive, alienating conditions. Nonetheless, prior to, and after, those moments of a common sharing of mutual value and worth, Hamer’s practice of love was both a resource and value that nurtured her sense of individual, communal, racial, multigenerational, and national well-being. Her way of loving encompassed seeing, naming, and responding to contradictions and injustices within the United States and the church with a sense of disciplined urgency to realize the divine interconnectedness within a supposed democracy.

4

Healing Vision and Accolades

Individual and national acknowledgement of the sickness and suffering are necessary to healing the people and the land. Pastoral and practical theologian Pamela Cooper-White speaks of suffering as an act of “empathic witnessing— or recognition—is one that demands patient co-suffering from us.”62 Hamer served as a pastoral, practical presence to her personal suffering as well as to the nation through her theo-politics of love. Hamer’s body bore the wounds and diseases (hypertension, kidney damage, blood clot, cancer, and diabetes) of a suffering one in public, institutional spaces with an aim of calling others to join the quest for healing and relief. In more ways than one, Hamer was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” As Simon of Cyrene assisted Jesus in his suffering in carrying the cross, Hamer encouraged her black Christian audience and the nation to do likewise through her theo-politics of love. Another pastoral and practical theologian, Susan J. Dunlap argues that “Healing intersects with caring. Transformation towards wholeness in any

62

Pamela Cooper-White, ”Suffering,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, ed. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 30.

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realm often happens in the context of compassionately administered care.”63 Hamer exhibited comprehensive, intentional, and in-depth care for the people, place, and space, regardless. Hamer addressed basic needs such as food, land, vocational training, and housing to the more difficult ones of human dignity, decision-making, and belonging. Healing of the national malaise required the skills and compassion of Hamer that modern-day healers of physicians, politicians, pastors, psychiatrists, and psychologists could employ because her love generated indigenous, empowering medicines that no synthetic drug could treat, or legislation eliminate in a piecemeal fashion. Womanist theologian, Karen Baker-Fletcher asserts, “Salvation in this life is found in communities of solidarity and resistance, those who are faithful to realizing the positive side of the American dream in which all peoples and the entire earth might experience social, economic, and ecological justice without domination.”64 Here, Baker-Fletcher suggests that healing can be seen through the lens of soteriology in which redemptive communities comprised of individuals participate in delivering both people and the planet from degradation and denigration. In fact, The New Testament term sozo (‘to save’ or ‘to heal’), which is used for both physical healing and soul salvation … Therefore, from a Christian perspective, the aim of healing is the complete well-being of the person. It entails being in right relation to God, oneself, others, and the rest of creation.65 Hamer, undoubtedly, practiced healing, freeing, delivering, and saving of the people and the nation. Her American dream consisted of ensuring all of God’s creatures would have access to their daily bread and that humans would practice a righteous, reciprocal relationship with the land that would sustain communities and the places and spaces they inhabited. Hamer could attest to Baker-Fletcher’s claim that “… this land is multicolored in its soil, waters, trees, 63

64

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Susan J. Dunlap, “Healing,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, ed. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 33. The italics are Dunlap’s. Karen Baker-Fletcher, “How Women Relate to the Evils of Nature,” in Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader, eds. Katie Geneva Cannon, Emilie M. Townes, and Angela D. Sims (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 64–5. Tammy R. Williams, “Is There a Doctor in the House?: Reflections on the Practice of Healing in African American Churches,” in Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life, eds. Miroslav Volf and Dorothy C. Bass (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2002), 100.

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vegetation, creatures, and humans from state to state, region to region.”66 This American land, in Hamer’s vision of healing and theo-politics of love, was truly made for you and me to care for and not to manipulate for individual, selfish gain. At her funeral on March 20, 1977, numerous dignitaries and common folk attended to pay their last respects. Of the 2,000 people who attended, only 350 had access to view Hamer’s remains at William Chapel Missionary Baptist, the place where she became formally initiated into the black freedom struggle. Former United States Ambassador and member of King’s SCLC, Andrew Young eulogized and proudly proclaimed, the hand that once picked cotton, picked a President in 1976 when Mississippi was the state that helped Jimmy Carter win his bid to the presidency.67 Former SNCC member and Black Power proponent, Stokely Carmichael, eulogized Hamer in his book by writing, We knew and loved this stout, earthy, kindhearted lady … Yes, she represented something important to us … [S]he did not merely represent an idea, some SNCC theory of grassroot leadership … Mrs. Hamer was the grassroots … I’m talking here about Mrs. Hamer’s spirit. Her warmth. Her values. A fundamental decency and generosity … She simply embodied in her jes’-plain-folks way all the qualities and values we were coming to admire in local peoples. She was smart and really funny, and by virtue of her history and experience, politically very astute.68 Hodding Carter III, a former Mississippi reporter who was then appointed by Jimmy Carter as assistant secretary of state of public affairs said these words at her funeral, “Mrs. Hamer did a lot of freeing in her lifetime and I think history will say that among those who were freed more totally and earlier by her were white Mississippians,” especially “if they had the will to be free—from themselves, from their history, from their racism, from their past.”69

5

Summary

Hamer’s four-stage theo-politics of love moved from private to broader public domains and encompassed love of self, neighbor, stranger, enemy, oppressor, 66 67 68 69

Baker-Fletcher, “How Women Relate to the Evils of Nature,” 65. Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir An Army, 229. Carmichael cited in Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir An Army, 228. Carter cited in Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir An Army, 226.

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and the divine. Hamer’s will and strength to love the unlovable is commendable and humbling. Even those who resisted change and those who were afraid of change lived within the circle of her capacity to love. In the next chapter, Hamer is constructed as one who revolutionizes contemporary paradigms of diversity and inclusion as yet another example of her revolutionary practical theology.

Chapter 5

Revolutionizing the Diversity and Inclusion Paradigm: Hamer’s Leadership for Jubilee and Black Reparations Hamer lived and worked prior to the emergence of diversity and inclusion in education, the workplace, and national consciousness. Integration and desegregation were the dominant terms and discourses that attempted to address racial diversity and injustice. Nonetheless, Hamer articulated and embodied an integrationist approach that demands attention. Hence, in this chapter, I argue that Hamer’s critical, hopeful, and embodied approach to integration can be surmised as one who adhered to jubilee and black reparations.1 This claim is developed by first providing a discussion on why the current diversity and inclusion paradigm must be revolutionized. Second, Hamer’s practices and processes of narrative/storytelling and nonviolence are discussed to illuminate how narratives can be empowering and redemptive for both nonwhite and white people groups in the church and theological academy. Third, as a paradigmatic model, an extensive discussion on Hamer’s leadership for jubilee and black reparations is provided. In this section, I also touch on Hamer’s project work in Wednesdays In Mississippi (WIMS). Finally, a discussion of Hamer’s diversity praxis and practical theology concludes the chapter to further highlight a more radical, imaginative vision of diversity and inclusion.

1

Revolutionizing Diversity and Inclusion: A Necessity

In a nutshell, I contend that diversity and inclusion, as it is conceived and practiced within Christian academic institutions, is bankrupt and cyclical.2 In

1 Although Hamer cites Luke 4:18 in her inaugural speech, she never employs the term “jubilee.” The use of the term is the author’s interpretation of Hamer’s life and legacy and the biblical text. Then, I put the term “black” in front of reparations to signal something specific, and slightly different from jubilee. The term “jubilee” is broader than black reparations. Both terms, I believe, are accurate descriptions of Hamer’s Christian thought and practice because she cared for black people, and other people too. 2 I think diversity and inclusion is bankrupt and cyclical in general although my focus is based on my experience in the church-related academic institutions. In addition, I realize that

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004438071_007

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general, from my perspective, diversity and inclusion focuses on appeasing and accommodating whiteness which is communicated in bodily, orally, and unspoken ways while black and other nonwhite people experience harm in both macro and micro ways. The pace, “initiatives,” and decision-making are dictated by those in power who want to preserve a religious institution, a place and a space as well as their place of authority in it. Conversations about doing what is right or what is just do not typically emerge until one or more of the following occurs: someone risks disrupting the space, a race-based incident occurs and is exposed, and/or an issue of compliance is violated. Some of us, regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, color, creed, gender, denomination, religion, and/or sexuality, in these respective church-related academic Christian institutions have discerned a call and understand ourselves to be “missionaries” of a Gospel of redemption, healing, and justice in and to them. Believing to be invited and sent by the divine, we go and encounter numerous pitfalls and landmines.3 What follows is a discussion of certain pitfalls and problems I have observed and experienced that lead me to believe that diversity and inclusion is bankrupt and cyclical while also hoping to create a way for the development of new wine and new wineskins for Christian higher education and seminary institutions when addressing racial harm, injustice, and various forms of difference. A major problem within the existing discourse on diversity and inclusion is the oversight of the historical fact that European cultures are the ones who demonized difference upon their encounter of non-European people groups, and then systemically and treacherously colonized, trafficked, and/or murdered non-Euro-Americans to assert European (or what became constructed as white) imperialism and supremacy. Homiletician and practical theologian Dale P. Andrews puts it this way, “Modernity, ironically named the age of ‘Enlightenment,’ fashioned this unique human speciation and construction of race and racism, which spawned initially.”4 The Europeans who had become free from the institutional, medieval church’s authority vilified cultural, cosmological, linguistic, color, and phenotypical differences to advance their others may disagree with the perspective on and experience of diversity and inclusion in the particular context named, and therefore may not see the need to revolutionize diversity and inclusion. 3 Some of my experience and ideas on diversity have been presented at two conferences in 2017. One presentation was at the fourth Annual Faculty Women of Color in the Academy Conference at Virginia Tech University, and the other one was at Rooted and Grounded Conference on Land and Christian Discipleship at the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary. 4 Dale P. Andrews, “Race and Racism,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, ed. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 405.

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interests alone at the expense of everyone else. Thus, for Euro-Americans, diversity was neither an ideal to be valued or something to be achieved. Instead, it was a constructed, unnatural means to exclude, subjugate, suppress, and segregate any people who primarily were not a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant male. Contemporary leadership and discourse on diversity and inclusion must not neglect the historicity of how nonwhite people were deemed as a negative “Other,” an object or thing that was not human. Otherwise, the work becomes focused on assimilating and including nonwhite people into a historically white-dominated church or academic institution. Put differently, a cosmetic change occurs on the surface with increased numbers of nonwhite people without any concerted effort or desire of changing the culture of the church or educational institution. The devastation of being constructed as a negative “Other” has been discussed throughout the text, and a revolutionary person of diversity and inclusion must engage this painful reality as well as unearthing the redemptive elements. For example, Kimberly N. Ruffin, an ecoliterary scholar, argues that due to the ways black people have been adversely “othered,” African Americans have developed an “ecological burden-and-beauty paradox,”5 in which An ecological burden is placed on those who are racialized negatively, and they therefore suffer economically and environmentally because of their degraded status. Simultaneously, however, the experiences of ecological beauty results from individual and collective attitudes toward nature that undercut the experience of racism and its related evils.6 Ruffin makes it clear that the burden that was placed on black people had both economic and environmental consequences that was lightened when personal and communal attitudes resisted and undermined the negative status as “Other.” Womanist theologian Elonda Clay also addresses the ecological and social impact on black people by positing and answering the question: “How does it feel to be an environmental problem?”7 Clay broadens black people’s religiously informed relationship to the environment by focusing on postcolonial and postindustrial contexts and points to epochs prior to the 1980s, 5 Kimberly N. Ruffin, Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 2. 6 Ruffin, Black on Earth, 2–3. 7 Elonda Clay, “How Does It Feel to be an Environmental Problem?: Studying Religion and Ecology in the African Diaspora,” in Inherited Land: The Changing Grounds of Religion and Ecology, eds. Whitney A. Bauman, Richard R. Bohannon II, and Kevin J. O’Brien (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011), 149.

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the period that is considered to be the beginning of black Protestant Christianity’s response to environmental concerns, that underscores a richer, more complex history and current reality of African diasporic religions relation to the natural world. Both Ruffin and Clay offer historical analyses and frameworks on race and ecology that are significant in addressing contemporary challenges of difference and diversity. To champion the remembering of a painful past that still haunts us in society, the church, and academy is no easy task, but it must be done. Latinx Christian educator and practical theologian Patrick B. Reyes provides a glimpse of what a contemporary practice of revolutionizing the diversity and inclusion entails.8 Reyes shares his experience as an administrator and only voting faculty of color at a faith-based academic institution that had become more racially and ethnically diverse in its student-body while the college was struggling to stay alive, and not close its doors due to financial challenges. He states, I began to look at diversity and inclusion across the college—curriculum, faculty hiring practices, mentoring, training faculty and staff, student affairs, leadership, and applying a level of critical inquiry to every practice of the college with the attention to diversity. This was not simply because I thought these initiatives were a good idea, but because it was a matter of life and death for many of the students and myself.9 Reyes’ leadership scrutinized and interrogated institutional and departmental structures and practices that contributed to the non-sustainability particularly of non-white students. The conscious and unconscious death-dealing practices questioned the viability of not only the institutional space and place, but also the people who occupied it. Diversity and inclusion were focused on how to live and thrive, and creating conditions, processes, policies, and practices that were necessary for all to do so. His fundamental leadership question consisted of: “Was what we were doing calling our students to life?”10 Jesus, the one who had come to give abundant life operated in Reyes and his leadership with concerned faculty and administrators as they developed inquiries such as “What does education look like in this context? How do we

8

9 10

Reyes employs the term Latinx, “rather than Latino or Latina, to highlight the diversity of the Latinx experience across gender, sexuality, nationality, place of birth, and local community commitments,” in Nobody Cries When We Die: God, Community, and Surviving to Adulthood (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2016), 4. Ibid., 160. Ibid., 161.

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hold a space where healing can happen?”11 In this vein, diversity and inclusion, identity and belonging, were centered on healing wounded history and people by providing educational curriculum, leadership, faculty hiring and training practices, and co-curricular experiences towards the ends of life and healing. In no uncertain terms, he champions education for healing when he asserts, My belief was and continues to be that if education has any purpose, it should be to heal. It should heal the pains of colonialism by using its resources to investigate the lost and subjugated histories and bodies of people of color. It should heal by researching cures to the day’s illnesses, cancers, and traumas. It should heal by creating safe spaces, where students can come completely and wholly into the classroom, and educators are able to mine for the knowledge and wisdom of generations that rests in their narratives and cultivate an inner peace and genuine curiosity about life.12 Reyes’ education for healing repositions the teaching-and-learning process, context, content, and outcomes in a way that is explicitly student and personcentered, culturally relevant, historically redemptive, socially transforming, and inclusive of ancestral wisdom and knowledge. He definitely gives concerted attention to recovering and reclaiming the past that is necessary, and potentially redemptive. Furthermore, he announces that the students, especially the nonwhite learners, are not a tabula rasa, but people who bring epistemologies that do not readily register as such in white dominated educational spaces. He champions an education in which the human desire to be understood and to understand is modeled, valued, and cultivated. The revolutionary practices of diversity as exhibited by Reyes do not give attention to white standards of identity and belonging by focusing on trying to close the achievement gap that exist between white and nonwhite students or by increasing graduation rates, enrollment numbers, or faculty appointments to demonstrate a commitment to diversity. Furthermore, unlike many white decision-makers and stakeholders who tend to focus on institutional preservation by not lowering the academic rigor or admissions process, finding qualified employees, and accessing public and private grant and philanthropic dollars with a paternalistic posture towards nonwhite employees, students, and communities, Reyes’ approach invites us to consider the gifts of all people in

11 12

Ibid., 160. Ibid., 161.

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the place and space being accessed for the healing and well-being of both the people and the institution. In short, the pitfall of dismissing issues of race, power, and privilege must be avoided in the contemporary discourse on diversity and inclusion. Otherwise, diversity and inclusion are dictated and determined by white standards and decision-makers. Asian American religious educator and practical theologian Courtney T. Goto reveals the conundrum for the field of practical theology and broader theological academy when practices of diversity and inclusion tokenize and exoticize nonwhite people especially when structural issues of race, power, and privilege are missed.13 Goto narrates an existential experience as researcher and scholar of when she was invited to write a chapter on Asian Americans in an edited practical theology text entitled Opening the Field of Practical Theology: An Introduction. In clear, succinct, profound, and painful ways, Goto unveils, … those with power and privilege in the field speak about what is privileged (often without realizing that the field itself and they are in fact privileged), while those who are historically marginalized address what is often treated as marginal.14 Being socially from and professionally relegated to the margins, Goto poignantly and persuasively points out that every author/scholar of each chapter in the volume, regardless of race, power, and privilege, should address issues of race, power, and privilege. Otherwise, what Goto frames as the racialized zoo (all parties conforming to either roles of white privilege who are the zookeepers or those on the margins who are in the cages) and conundrum of coercive mimeticism goes uncontested and “whiteness” in the name of diversity and inclusion continues to reign. According to Goto, coercive mimeticism is A process (identitarian, existential, cultural or textual) in which those who are marginal to mainstream Western culture are expected, …, to resemble and replicate the very banal preconceptions that have been appended to them …, a process in which they are expected to objectify

13

14

Courtney T. Goto, “Writing in Compliance with the Racialized ‘Zoo’ of Practical Theology,” in Conundrums in Practical Theology, eds. Joyce Ann Mercer and Bonnie J. MillerMcLemore (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 110–33. Ibid., 111.

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themselves in accordance with the already seen and thus to authenticate the familiar and imagings of them as ethnics.15 This process and conundrum is difficult to navigate for various reasons for both the marginalized and the privileged, and Goto points to ways of modestly, but persistently, naming and responding to the harms of the conundrum collectively as practical theologians to be more life-giving.16 Significantly, as does Reyes, Goto points to practices of healing harms done to people and creating redemptive responses (practices, processes, and competencies, etc. …) to address the systemic, historic, and institutionalized nature of coercive mimeticism. Both Goto’s and Reyes’s experience in the academy invite us to move beyond the language of trying “to fix” a perceived diversity and inclusion problem because, first, people are not machines to be fixed or projects to be solved. Then, the magnitude and protracted nature of the problem defies the logic of fixing or solving the problem. The work of diversity and inclusion requires healing as Reyes notes, and the disrupting of the racialized zoo as Goto notes. Hence, placing emphasis on the need “to fix” the diversity and inclusion problem is yet another pitfall to avoid. Another major pitfall and problem in current diversity and inclusion practices in Christian higher and theological education is the uncritical acceptance of the proverbial phrase of being “at the table.” For many of us who are on the margins of social, political, professional, and institutional power, we, far too often, become complicit in what Goto calls the racialized zoo because we covet a place or position at a table of white male power and domination not to disrupt or agitate it, but for selfish, individual gain. Then, at other times, to our utter dismay, we are placed at the table of white male power and domination to assume the role of zookeeper over the marginalized or to advance white only interests and concerns in diversity and inclusion. Hamer encouraged her audiences to know “that whenever the white man gives something, when he gets ready, he can always take it back.” Hence, to revolutionize diversity and inclusion, all must know that the very existence of a table that does not care for all people must not be coveted in and of itself. People must analyze who is present, who is not, why, what is the current capacity to respond and how can it be increased to help ensure a table exists that allows for humanization, redemption, and life-giving decision-making for all stakeholders. This kind of leadership and participation “at the table” can be likened to Latina religious

15 16

Ibid., 114. Ibid., 122–30.

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educator and practical theologian Elizabeth Conde-Frazier’s vision and practice of multicultural Christian education. She states, Multicultural Christian education is not a program or a set of results. It is a ministry and, as such, must bear fruit. Fruit is seed producing, which means that it contains the seeds for continuous life to come forth. This type of teaching must involve the entire teaching/learning environment, the students, the administration, the congregation, the chapel services, the connections the school has with the community and the board of trustees, and their vision for the entire teaching ministry of the school.17 Within this broader notion of Christian religious education, leaders with decision-making power in theological educational institutions are invited to see themselves, and the people they work with and for, as Christian ministers of education who labor to participate in an educational ecology that tends rightly to people, places, and spaces towards, hopefully, bearing witness to God’s just, redemptive reign. The discussion of four pitfalls and problems in diversity and inclusion is by no means exhaustive.18 Also, the emphasis on the pitfalls do not show how many of us, more so as individuals than communities, have positively benefitted from diversity and inclusion. For example, I am a product of diversity and inclusion dating back to when affirmative action was alive and well in California’s public higher education system. Through affirmative action, I was admitted to both UCLA and UC Berkeley in 1987. Although I played collegiate basketball, I was not a recipient of an athletic scholarship. I graduated in four years from UCLA, and when I went to graduate school, I became the recipient of the United States government’s Patricia Roberts Harris Fellowship for underrepresented minorities in the field of early childhood education at California State University, Fresno, a land-grant public higher education system. When I returned to graduate school for theological education in 2000, I became the recipient of the Fund for Theological Education’s19 doctoral fellowship for 17

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Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, “From Hospitality to Shalom,” in A Many Colored Kingdom: Multicultural Dynamics for Spiritual Formation, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, S. Steve Kang, and Gary A. Parrett (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic Press, 2004), 168–9. The four diversity and inclusion pitfalls and problems discussed are 1) not identifying Europeans as the people who demonized difference, 2) not interrogating race, power, and privilege, 3) employing the language of “fixing” the problem, and 4) uncritical acceptance of the proverbial phrase of being or having a seat “at the table.” In 2000, FTE was the Fund for Theological Education but today its new name is the Forum for Theological Exploration.

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African Americans to increase the representation of African Americans in the theological and religious academy. Through the doors that were being opened for me to access higher learning and training, I carried with me my family, community, and people, and the yearning for a critical education that would address multiple raced-based ills in the church and society. From academic matriculation in public higher education and then on to private, Christian theological education, diversity and inclusion programs and policies helped to make possible what was not an option for many of my black foremothers and fathers. Thus, when I contend that diversity and inclusion is bankrupt and cyclical, I am speaking to the way it is envisioned, practiced, and implemented that does not adequately address and transform the immensity of systemic, entrenched, and seemingly unrelenting racial violence and injustice. Diversity and inclusion cannot begin and end with maintaining white domination and control if it will ever become more substantive in form and scale. Or, possibly, the diversity and inclusion paradigm, as a racial justice seeking process and paradigm, demands various prerequisite social and institutional changes before it can be properly implemented, and lived into, like John the Baptist prepared the way for the people of first-century Palestine to be ready to receive the Anointed One of God. Whichever approach is taken, both require a qualitative change in and of diversity and inclusion.

2

The Powerful Practices of Storytelling and Nonviolent Direct Action

Hamer embodied and enacted an approach to racial injustice and difference in her day that simultaneously addressed conditions, institutions, and ideologies of harm. Moreover, Hamer created practices, processes, and paradigms that modeled integration in a way that empowered those who were marginalized and challenged those who wanted to maintain white power and privilege. According to Hamer biographer Brooks, the kind of integration that Hamer advanced was one that sought to coexist with all people who chose to participate in enacting freedom and justice especially with and for the masses of poor, black people in Mississippi.20 Jacquelyn Grant, a womanist theologian, speaks of Hamer’s “ability to make the necessary human connections and interconnections in the Christian movement toward liberation.”21 With freedom on 20 21

See Brooks’ A Voice That Could Stir An Army. Jacquelyn Grant, “Civil Rights Women: A Source for Doing Womanist Theology,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965, eds. Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing Inc., 1990), 49.

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her mind and in her soul, Hamer’s vision of integration focused on achieving the United States democratic ideal infused with, and influenced by, a Christian morality that espoused human interconnection and divine intervention, and zero-tolerance for the oppressive system that denied human freedom and flourishing.22 Now, Hamer’s practices of narrative/storytelling and nonviolent direct action are examined to demonstrate her revolutionary vision of integration. Hamer’s use of storytelling in public, institutional (academic, civic, political, and religious) contexts as a means of exercising human freedom and building awareness of racial violence and injustice exposed what was hidden to many and empowered those who shared a similar fate. Her testimony on life in Mississippi, and God’s power to sustain one in the struggle for freedom and justice reminds us of the power of stories, both individual and collective, in re-membering fractures and trauma caused by the multigenerational, psychosocial impact of racial violence and injustice. To be made whole as a people and a nation was her aim as she infused morality into United States politics, and thereby challenged her white “Christian” oppressors, and the church, to consider the message and ministry of a revolutionary Jesus. She could not be consoled by mere access into a dysfunctional, unjust playing field. She had up close and personal experiences of the internal workings of the so-called democratic republic and knew intimately its failures and false promises. She asserted, Sixty-four I was in the convention—out of the convention—wishing I could go in. In 1968, I was in there wishing I could get out. I composed a song when I was there: “Jingle Bells, Machine Gun Shells, Convention All the Way!” Because I had never in my life seen in the land of the free and the home of the brave—which we have translated to land of the tree and home of the grave—I had never seen a convention that had to be held with fixed bayonets … That mean, they would stick you if you stand there and shoot you if you run.23 With her life under constant surveillance and apparently no way out, Hamer retold and relived her story again and again and again for audiences comprised of blacks and whites, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and atheists, females and males, young and seasoned, northerners and southerners, and the economically destitute and privileged. For Hamer, the way forward entailed repairing

22 23

Grant, Ibid., 43–4, 49. Hamer, “‘Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either,’” 125–6.

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the historical, and contemporary, harm and violence of systemic, institutional, ideological, and individual racial domination and injustice—jubilee and black reparations. Hamer’s leadership over diverse Christian congregants and non-Christian congregants in organically-formed assemblies within and beyond local congregations was phenomenal. She always brought her story, her lived experience, herself regardless if people were ready to hear truth proclaimed from a divinely-educated poor black woman from Mississippi. She mounted pulpits, podiums, radio and television stations with confidence in God, herself, and her cause all the while knowing that death was always knocking at the door. Leadership studies scholar, Lea E. Williams argues that Hamer “exemplifies a rarer type [of leadership style], characterized by Robert K. Greenleaf as servant leadership. The servant-leader is committed to serving others through a cause, a crusade, a movement, a campaign with humanitarian, not materialistic, goals.”24 Williams’ assessment of Hamer’s humanitarian focus aligns with Hamer’s self-acclaimed commitment to, and focus on, human rights for people of diverse races and socio-economic backgrounds. Including yet transcending mere individual and black group rights, Hamer’s leadership and narrative were able to appeal to a broad range of people by defining and redefining what it means to be human, regardless of one’s race, ethnicity, gender, or class. For example, as the title of one of her speeches suggests, “Until I am Free, You are not Free Either,” Hamer contended bondage or freedom is not merely an individual, existential experience or condition because humans are interconnected. Instead, the individual condition of freedom or bondage affects the whole of humanity, and I would add, the environmental landscape too. As stated in chapter 3, Acts 17:26a served as a foundational biblical text for Hamer’s belief and contention in the unity of humanity created by a divine parent.25 A second, more frequent biblical text she cited in her speeches was the application of Jesus’ response to the Pharisees that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” In her mind and experience, the United States of America was a divided nation in which white people were provided with advantages while nonwhite people were disadvantaged

24 25

Lea E. Williams, Servants of the People: The 1960s Legacy of African American Leadership, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 143. Acts 17:26a is mentioned on several occasions in Hamer’s speeches, and to date, there has been no discovery of her referencing Genesis 1:26–28, or the theological category of Imago Dei. Her apparent silence on Genesis 1:26–28 may suggest that she placed sole emphasis on understanding humanity as being created by God instead of trying to exegete the significance of being created as human in the image of God.

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and disenfranchised, and poor people, regardless of race or ethnicity, were suffering from economic exploitation, hunger, malnutrition, poor education, and lack of access to quality health care. The division ran deep especially in Sunflower County, the residence of Hamer and home of Senator James O. Eastland, until she claimed, There’s something, there’s something else funny too. There’s something very funny when a man like Senator James O. Eastland, the biggest welfare recipient in the whole country, there’s something wrong when he can help to set policies for Vietnam and own fifty-eight hundred acres in the state of Mississippi and people on the plantation suffering from malnutrition. There’s something wrong with that.26 Unity and interconnection were Christian principles and thought that guided Hamer’s critique of affirmative action for white elite males coupled with the insistent, consistent discrimination and injustice against black people. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King called this phenomenon, as described by Hamer, The Other America.27 The drastically different outcomes related to the national divisions along race, class, health, housing, and education were unnecessary and immoral, and jeopardized the well-being of all people and the nation in Hamer’s revolutionary practical theology. Hence, change was championed for everyone even for those who wanted to maintain the status quo and those who were too fearful to join the struggle. Pastoral theologian and minister, Jacqueline J. Lewis, examines and discusses the power of narratives in healing divisions and fissures within individual, group, and national stories. Lewis focuses on developing leadership capacities in ministering to and in multi-racial, multi-cultural congregations by examining the lived texts of pastors and their respective congregations. She argues, “Congregational leaders help form and re-form identity with the stories they rehearse about the peaceable realm of God. Using sacred texts and 26

27

Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’ Speech Delivered at the Vietnam War Moratorium Rally, Berkeley, California, October 15, 1969,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 100. In another speech entitled “To Tell It Like It Is,” Hamer identified and exposed how Senator Eastland had received $255,000 from the federal government to let his land waste while people were starving. The land could have been used to produce food for the hungry and needy, but instead, it, too, was exploited, in the racist, capitalist, and patriarchal system. Hamer, “‘To Tell It Like It Is,’” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 89. Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Other America,” Speech Delivered at Stanford University, April 3, 1967. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3H978KlR20. Accessed on January 28, 2018.

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other texts as sources, leaders weave together congregants’ stories, cultural stories, and the story of God’s relationship with humanity to answer existential questions and make meaning of life.”28 Although Lewis does not have Hamer’s lived text in mind in her examination, Hamer’s leadership is a living testimony of how she helped form and reform various, diverse conflicting identities in her proclamation of the peaceable, just realm of God that focused on jubilee and black reparations. Hamer operated within a non-self-contained “congregation” that included people of Mississippi towns, counties, and religious communities, black and white college students and adult professionals, activists, and organizers from all over the country, and white public officials and law enforcement officers. John Wesley said the world was his parish, and Hamer exhibited that the nation was her parish. There was no one who existed outside of her care as she held the hope and healing of the nation in her prayers, analysis, activism, and rehearsing of her story at interpersonal, institutional, local, state, and national levels. My interpretation of Hamer’s leadership as broadening the boundaries of what constitutes a congregation is partially due to her exclusion from traditional forms of pastoral leadership,29 and frustration with the black churches in Mississippi on one hand. However, on another hand, Hamer’s faith, passion, creativity, ingenuity, and storytelling ability should not be overlooked in how these tangible and intangible skills and gifts enabled her to create space for “congregational” leadership of a different kind. Remember Hamer’s conversation with God when she prayed, “And I have asked God, I said, ‘Now

28 29

Jacqueline J. Lewis, The Power of Stories: A Guide for Leading Multi-racial and Multicultural Congregations (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2008), 5–6. To date, there is no record of Hamer possessing the desire or sensing a call to be a pastoral leader within a local church or denominational setting. She probably never considered it as an option for various reasons including her status as a sharecropper and only seeing black and white men in pastoral roles. Hence, the fact that women were excluded from certain religious roles probably did not pose a problem for Hamer. What is significant to note is that she would have been an eligible, and possibly, a highly sought candidate for the pastorate had she been a male with her skills and gifts of reading, speaking, singing, praying, and storytelling. In a now classic sociological study of the Black Church, C. Eric and Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya underscore how the pulpit has been the space of men whereas women have been relegated to the pew, and the obstacles women faced when pursuing a call or desire to preach were exacerbated by the fact that many black men perceived and experienced the road to ministry as affirmation of black masculinity and status which would have been negated if women were allowed to participate. C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, NC and London, UK: Duke University Press, 1990), 274–8.

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Lord’—and you have too (sic)30—ain’t no need to lie and say that you ain’t. Said, ‘Open a way for us.’ Said, ‘Please make a way for us, Jesus.’ Said, ‘Where I can stand up and speak for my race and speak for these hungry children.’ And he opened a way…”31 Seeking access and authority from the divine, and not a mere mortal male, Hamer was not confined to traditional religious contexts in responding to institutional, social, and cosmic dimensions of violence, oppression, and injustice. Hamer was a “woman out of order” who defied traditional stereotypes of poor black women and defined ways of pastoral leadership and caring for the person and their pathos that attended to the deep malaise within local, state, and national municipalities.32 Hamer’s pastoral leadership and care orientation can be seen in the way former SNCC member and fellow co-worker with Hamer, Bernice Johnson Reagon perceived the depth and breadth of Hamer’s leadership when she states, Fannie Lou Hamer was an activist and a cultural leader who assumed major responsibility for the creation and maintenance of the environment within which those who struggle for freedom lived and worked. She positioned herself so that she was constantly in great danger; she operated in the open, aboveground, confronting the entire system that was organized to keep her and all Black people subjugated. When Mrs. Hamer found her voice as a fighter, she became a transmitter of the culture of that struggle. 30

31 32

I am not sure if the word “too” should be “to.” If Hamer has an incomplete thought, then it is plausible that she is referring to God as having “too” much of something in order not to answer her prayer in the affirmative. However, in the context of the statement/prayer, Hamer is making an appeal to God and apparently trying to convince God what the divine has to do. Most of Hamer’s speeches were oral and therefore had to be transcribed by Brooks and Houck. In this instance, the mistake would be the editors and not Hamer’s. Hamer, “‘I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,’” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 5. In my presupposition that Hamer was a pastoral leader who was a “woman out of order” and tended to the person and pathos in her leadership of care is informed by academic women pastoral theologians. First, Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner and Teresa Snorton, eds., Women Out of Order: Risking Change and Creating Care in a Multicultural World (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006) point to the ways women from diverse racial-ethnic cultural backgrounds have created space to care as pastoral leaders sometimes within restricted boundaries, and other times transcending them. Then, to clarify, and espouse, the difference between academic pastoral theology and practical theology, Bonnie MillerMcLemore argues, “Whereas practical theology is integrative, concerned with broader issues of ministry, discipleship, and formation, pastoral theology is person- and pathoscentered and focused on the activity of care.” Bonnie Miller-McLemore, “Introduction: The Contributions of Practical Theology,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, ed. Bonnie Miller-McLemore (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), 6.

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Her work as an organizer was grounded in her own testimony. She called and urged others to join in battling racism, poverty, and injustice. A natural and fearless community leader, master orator, and song leader, she used her stories and songs to nurture the air we breathed as fighters.33 From Reagon’s perspective, Hamer was a cultural carrier who audaciously created and sustained breathing space for present and future generations of change agents who envisioned, and then acted accordingly, a free and just nation with a free and just people. Modeling the way to go and the way to be through song, sermon, and story, I contend Hamer was the pastor as cultural carrier and transmitter. Furthermore, Reagon recounts how Hamer would open with a song that united those who were gathered and then would proceed with quoting or reading Scripture. Next, she would relate the biblical text and teachings of Jesus to the existential reality that poor black Mississippians faced and then extended a call to action.34 The pastoral call to action was an invitation to follow Jesus, and to carry the cross to demonstrate one’s political, social, religious, and spiritual allegiance to values that were contrary to racial dehumanization, segregation, exploitation, and injustice. The call was to let one’s light shine for freedom and justice, a prayer of sorts to let God’s kingdom come and be done on Earth, in Mississippi, as it is in heaven. It was a salvific call that focused on this world, and the one to come. Hamer’s pastoral practices in the Civil Rights Movement created breathing space to exhibit Christianity in the public square for the good of all people. Individually and collectively, people were challenged and inspired to transcend and transform death-dealing and alienating conditions to create a different, redemptive story. According to womanist religious ethicist, Rosetta E. Ross, once Hamer joined the Civil Rights Movement, she began “immediately interpreting civil rights activism as corresponding with her understanding of Christianity.”35 Ross’s analysis of Hamer is illuminating on multiple levels. First, Hamer’s Christian principles and beliefs were the foundation of her public engagement in the Civil Rights Movement. Although Ross does not elaborate on the content and core of Hamer’s Christian understanding as is done here, Ross,

33

34 35

Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Women as Culture Carriers in the Civil Rights Movement: Fannie Lou Hamer,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965, eds. Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing Inc., 1990), 204. Reagon, 203, 210–11. Rosetta E. Ross, Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 98.

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nonetheless, draws attention to the prominent role religion played in Hamer’s leadership and freedom struggle. Second, prior to the Civil Rights Movement, Hamer indicated there was no authentic or adequate structure, institution, or collaborative work that supported her more public, socio-political expression of the faith in Mississippi. More specifically, she stated, Freedom Summer of 1964 was “the beginning of a New Kingdom right here on earth.”36 Citizenship education, literacy development, experiential learning, voter registration campaign, precinct meetings, nomination of delegates and candidates, founding of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, challenging white misrepresentation and nonrepresentation, and proclaiming her story to an ever increasing national audience, Hamer experienced all of the above, and more, in the summer of 1964.37 Implicitly, Hamer seemed to have been saying that her understanding of Christianity was not merely private or pious acts. Rather, for Hamer, Christianity was also inherently communal, social, and political that exhibited practices of care for humanity, especially the poor and oppressed, allegiance to God and the divine realm as manifested in and through Jesus, and others who choose to pick up the cross to redefine interpersonal, social, and political relationships that were divisive and destructive.38 Put differently, the Gospel was inclusive of social and political dimensions of life for Hamer that compelled and empowered her to risk life and limb for the freedom Christ extended on earth. Although I do not think Hamer saw the Civil Rights Movement as being synonymous with the kingdom of God, her civil rights activism brought to life her Christianity and vice-versa. The difference among the participating Jews, Gentiles, Catholics, Protestants, atheists, agnostics, humanists, black and white people, women and men, rural, urban, and suburban people, educated and miseducated people, Southern and Northern people, employed, unemployed, and underemployed people, and children, youth, college students, adults, and seasoned adults were all encompassed in Hamer’s interpretation and experience of the kingdom of God. In the process, her Christian thought

36 37

38

Fannie Lou Hamer, “Foreword,” in Stranger at the Gates, vii. The list of what happened in the summer of 1964 does not include the number of church bombings, the death of three civil rights workers: James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, and the constant surveillance and threat of death that Hamer had to endure. Many contemporary readers may posit that Hamer was following the school of thought of Black liberation theology or Latin American liberation theology. However, her Christian theologizing on her civil rights activism predates both Black and Latin American academic liberation theologies.

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was able to breathe beyond her black family and church without losing sight of either.39 Hamer’s public leadership entailed the use of her Christian faith as a tool to deconstruct white domination, and to instruct and encourage the masses through her story. Her complex identity of being a poor, black, female Christian of rural Mississippi was embraced and embodied by Hamer in her display of self-respect as well as openness to others. Hamer exhibited a radical subjectivity that captured a broader, communal, and universal yearning that transcended her particular social location. What is important to note is that a neutral or “objective” self, or ignorance of one’s own story and identity within a diverse context, are not healthy and helpful in leadership. Lewis affirms this point when she argues, “leaders are griots—storytellers who preach, teach, and train leaders through their own complex identity stories.”40 Although Lewis is speaking in the context of leading a multi-racial and multi-cultural congregation, she reminds us that within any diverse context of leadership it requires a recovery and reclamation of one’s humanity due to the way racism and other forms of oppression diminish and distort the human self. Pastoral theologian and minister, Russ Parker believes in the power of stories like Lewis. Furthermore, like Hamer, his context extends beyond a congregational, institutional setting to include the past of people and places towards reconciliation and restoration as individuals in communities. From the perspective of a white male in pastoral care provided in the United Kingdom, Parker engages in healing at a national and political level to address the atrocities of group and governmental harm and violence. He claims, before a Christian contribution can be offered to heal places and people, the environment, “… we must face up to the charge that it is western Christianity which set the trend for plundering the earth.”41 Significantly, Parker unequivocally admits to the damage wreaked by western Christianity although he does not give an extensive analysis on the nature of the charge. He acknowledges that the story of western Christian environmental degradation and injustice must be confronted before any substantial contribution can be made towards healing the land, the past, and communities associated with the land. With his confession, Parker situates himself within the community called western Christianity, a confession which then opens the door to developing the capacity to become

39 40 41

Fannie Lou Hamer, “Foreword,” in Stranger at the Gates, viii. Lewis, The Power of Stories, 6. Russ Parker, Healing Wounded History: Reconciling Peoples & Restoring Places (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2001), 28.

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sensitive to hearing the stories and lived experiences of indigenous and dislocated people of Africa, Australia, the Americas, and Asia. Parker’s practice of acknowledgement and confessional storytelling, from a place of privilege, can yield the possibility of dialogue between those who were/are violated and those who were/are the perpetrators so that people like Parker can develop the capacity to hear the stories of people like Hamer without denying, dismissing, or diminishing the legitimacy of the story. Without the basic acknowledgement, western (white) Christianity stands alienated from, and closed off to, the historical trauma of nonwhite people and the land, and thereby unable to access healing for the past and present of both people and the land. Parker’s focus on group identity without forsaking the individual rebuffs contemporary notions of individualism expressed by many white people in the United States on one hand, and on the other hand, he centralizes all people groups’ stories in relation to the land or place.42 He assumes responsibility for something that he did not do as an individual, but cannot deny as a member of the group, western Christianity, that did. Hence, Parker encourages, and models for white individuals who were not the direct perpetrators of the historical violence to nonetheless assume some form of group identity to contribute to healing the past and the present. For example, he cites Nicholas Frayling, priest of the Church of England, saying We [the British people] cannot live in the past, but unless we find a way of owning past deeds, unless we can discover some corporate sense of responsibility based on our common humanity, as well as nationality, then we shall be led, as successive British governments have been led, into tinkering with consequences instead of addressing causes.43 The significance for Christians of European, western descent to begin to selfidentify as white as a group may be difficult due to white guilt and shame, and the prevalence of individualism. Unrelenting, Parker continues to push his point that it must be done. He cites John Dawson to underscore why corporate or cultural, and not individual identity, is important for the people to assume responsibility for healing the past. Dawson notes,

42

43

Parker limits his exploration of group identities to family, church, community, and tribe or nation. He acknowledges that there are other groups he could have chosen such as race, gender, and academic institutions of training. See Parker, Healing Wounded History, 13. I incorporate race into his framework to advance his claim on the significance of group identity and healing in relation to Hamer’s story and identity. Ibid., 47.

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Paradoxically, the greatest wounds in human history have not happened through the acts of some individual perpetrator; rather through institutions, systems, philosophies, cultures, religions and governments of humankind. Because of this, we as individuals are tempted to absolve ourselves of all individual responsibility. However, unless someone chooses to identify themselves with corporate entities, such as the nation of our citizenship, or the subculture of our ancestors, the act of honest confession will never take place. This leaves us in a world of injury and offense in which no corporate sin is ever acknowledged, reconciliation never begins and old hatreds deepen.44 Parker clearly articulates how corporate, cultural (i.e., race, gender, class, religion, etc.) identity matters not to accentuate the differences among the one human race, but to acknowledge that we, as individuals, belong to broader groups, systems, and institutions that have either perpetrated violence, or been the victims of violence, based on a corporate, group identity. Regarding the centralization of all people’s stories in relation to the land, Parker gives attention to a biblical, theological jubilee and critiques individual monopolizing of the land as did Hamer.45 Although Parker does not use the term reparations, he does provide an extensive discussion on reconciliation, restoration, and redemption. He explains a five-part process of reconciliation that entails a relational process and practices between victims and perpetrators. Hence, in the context of racial violence or harm, nonwhite and white people would need to be in the same space and given time to: 1) remembering, 2) lamenting, 3) confessing, 4) repenting, and 5) forgiving. Steps one, two, and five are for the victims of violence to tell their wounded story and to have the space, the freedom to release the depth of the pain as the person is comfortable. In an encouraging and positive manner, Parker does not seek to accommodate the perpetrator in the process by diminishing the storyteller’s voice and experience. Furthermore, he asserts, “… the process of reconciliation most truly begins with the victim: the perpetrator cannot set the pace for his or her own forgiveness.”46 Parker acknowledges that the victim may not be satisfied initially with a verbal or written apology, and demand more such as joining efforts in structural change,47 or in Hamer’s case the unseating of 44 45

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Ibid., 59–60. Ibid., 23–7. Parker also includes the term Sabbath that is also found in Leviticus as is Jubilee. He uses Jubilee and Sabbath as a foundation for understanding that land is both a sacrament and gift, and that all land belongs to God. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 85.

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five white politicians, jubilee, and black reparations. However, it is a starting place to begin healing for both parties, and for the perpetrator to own the past individual and/or group racial harm in the present.48 Parker’s vision and practice of healing wounded history of people and place amongst diverse groups is primarily addressed to western, white Christians who are evangelicals. Moreover, restorative justice philosophy and process is incorporated into his broader western Evangelical Christian reconciliation framework. Issues of diversity and inclusion are addressed implicitly in the way he and his primary audience are not lauded as the center of human good and development, but as major culprits to a problem that is devastating human and non-human beings—God’s creation—especially people who were/are considered as less than human like Hamer. Parker challenges his readers to recover a story about themselves in relation to self, diverse people, the land, and the divine that facilitates acknowledging and moving beyond white shame, denial, and guilt towards an encountering of the pathos, the person(s) who suffered, and a renewed, hopefully collaborative, path forward. Jubilee in the sense of returning land, pardoning debt and perpetual economic exploitation, or white relocation so that indigenous people could rightfully return to their once inhabited spaces of life and living are not mentioned in the numerous instances of apology and statements as described by Parker. Granted, he does not deal with race. However, the observation, and not necessarily a critique, extends also to the ways Parker engages historical, multigenerational harm in the family, church, community, and tribe or nation. Dealing with structural change and processes are not described or accounted for. It seems as if jubilee as a Christian practice of restoring material resources, or pardoning of unjust debt, individually or nationally, are yet to occur in Parker’s experience of healing people and place. Hamer, Lewis, and Parker provide extensive insight concerning the powerful practice of storytelling that can be redemptive and empowering regardless of one’s social location. Far from many negative, disempowering experiences of storytelling in the current diversity and inclusion discourse, Hamer, as a 48

In the twenty-first century, far too many white people claim reverse racial discrimination because of white entitlement, and distortions and misperceptions about historical and contemporary systemic white group racial violence on black people in the United States. Admittedly, some black individuals are guilty of harming some white individuals. However, the harm done is not, and has never been, intentional, systemic black group violence on white people as a group. Black people, individually and collectively, have resisted white group, and state-sanctioned violence. Hence, I want to be clear that in the discussion of Parker’s work, I am talking about white group racial violence on black people as a group.

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public pastoral presence, community organizer, and agent for personal and social change, owned and conveyed her story. Hamer’s practice of storytelling disrupted and disoriented the powers and the people responsible for her oppression, and today, if adhered to in the spirit of Parker, white individuals, groups, communities, and Christian religious institutions would be assuming racial responsibility by healing historical harm and joining Hamer’s integration vision of unseating powers and people that do not reflect God’s peaceable realm as coined by Lewis. In African American Practical Theology, black practical theologian and homiletician, Dale P. Andrews presents a thorough, in-depth review of black theologians in womanist studies, systematics, ethics, pastoral care and counseling, preaching, Christian education, and congregational studies.49 Of note is that many of the scholars employ narratives in their research methods or as a practice in pastoral care and counseling, preaching, and/or teaching toward the goal of black liberation. Thus, black practical theologians in the academy stand alongside Hamer in the use of narrative to expose and recover what has been hidden and to empower the people to speak their story, their truth, regardless. However, Andrews is mindful of the difficulty of escaping “the marginalization of studying the marginalized,”50 because the dominant culture of the theological academy and church have yet to study themselves in a broad, intentional, and systematic way for liberative ends. Hamer’s public witness as well as Parker’s work is instructive for the dominant culture to begin to assess itself through individual, group, and institutional narrative identity and responsibility. If narratives were employed for jubilee and black reparations, and not just for recognition, a new day would emerge for theological education and the church. In addition to the powerful practice of storytelling, Hamer practiced nonviolent direct action to advance jubilee for all and black reparations. Integration in the public square beyond the desegregation of schools, which was not happening in Hamer’s town of Ruleville and the broader state of Mississippi, required the black masses to be courageous, cooperative, and creative to address white occupation and terror in the land. For Hamer and many others in the black freedom struggle, the practice of nonviolent direct action must be seen beyond the myopic standard of many white liberals from peace church traditions. Hamer’s thoughts and practices on nonviolent resistance illuminate the 49

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Dale P. Andrews, “African American Practical Theology,” in Opening the Field of Practical Theology: An Introduction, eds. Kathleen A. Cahalan and Gordon S. Mikoski (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 11–29. Andrews, “African American Practical theology,” 27.

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ethical complexity of those who are members of the exploited and primary victims of race-based structural, institutional, social, and interpersonal forms of violence. Furthermore, Julie Marie Todd, a scholar-activist of justice and peace studies and elder in the United Methodist Church (New England Conference), acknowledges and argues that nonviolence as practiced and envisioned by white, middle-class Christians “… has been neither sufficiently selfcritical nor sufficiently revolutionary.”51 Hamer, SNCC, King, and the SCLC did not learn about the philosophy and practice of nonviolence from white peace churches such as the Quakers, the different strands of Mennonites, or white mainstream congregations.52 Moreover, it is believed that King’s charges as rendered in the Letter from a Birmingham Jail in April of 1963 provoked the National Council of Churches (NCC) to “… change from a race relations policy focused primarily on ‘preaching, teaching, and proclamations,’ to one of sustained direct involvement in the civil rights movement.”53 Hence, Hamer’s vision and practice of nonviolence must be understood on different terms and conditions than on the judgmental norms of white Christian practitioners of nonviolence who, according to Todd, have yet to properly evaluate their own nonviolent and inadequate practices for social change. For many black Mississippians like Hamer and the college-age students in SNCC, nonviolence was employed as a risky, direct confrontation to systemic oppression and white supremacy that afforded a way for the black masses to move beyond inaction, despair, and acceptance of the status quo.54 For many black people, including Hamer, nonviolent resistance was a pragmatic political

51

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Julie Marie Todd, “Evaluating Violence and (Non)violence: A Critical, Practical Theology of Social Change” (PhD Diss., University of Denver and the Iliff School of Theology, Denver, CO, 2012), 8. https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/652/. Accessed on April 29, 2018. Rev. James M. Lawson, Jr., a United Methodist black minister, is noted as the young minister who taught black college students on nonviolent direct action at First Baptist Church in Nashville in the late 1950s. Rev. Lawson was approached by Rev. Dr. King to partner with SCLC in training and advancing nonviolent direct which King had learned from Gandhi. See Wesley C. Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Mark Newman, Divine Agitators: The Delta Ministry and Civil Rights in Mississippi (Athens, GA and London, UK: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 5. According to Newman, “… between 1963 and 1964, the NCC created a Commission on Religion and Race, participated in the March on Washington, successfully lobbied members of the U.S. Congress on behalf of the civil rights bill, sent race relations mediators to several cities, and made a significant contribution to the civil rights struggle in Mississippi that culminated in the creation of a long-term project, the Delta Ministry.” Newman, 1. Charles E. Cobb, Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Durham, NC and London, UK: Duke University Press, 2016), 2, 4.

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tactic and strategy that included the use of armed resistance, if necessary, for personal and/or communal self-defense. For example, Hamer claimed, The new militancy on the part of blacks and many young whites have caused, not only in the Deep South but the North as well, to realize that racism is an unnecessary evil which must be dealt with by ‘men and governments’ or by ‘men and guns.’ If survival is to be the name of the game, then men and governments must not move just to postpone violent confrontations, but seek ways and means of channeling legitimate discontentment into creative and progressive action for change.55 Framing racism as an evil in a supposedly civilized, democratic nation, Hamer is nonetheless aware of how oppressed humans are subject to find any means necessary to rebel against an ill-responsive government and their yearning to be free from the perpetual conditions of violence and injustice. In a nonjudgmental manner, Hamer invited her audience to understand the responsibility of both governments and the people in responding to the unnecessary evil of racism while simultaneously acknowledging members of the oppressed who did not employ nonviolent resistance in the public sphere. Hamer honored the anger, frustration, and desire for change of the oppressed who used armed resistance not so much to increase their use of lethal violence, but not to dismiss anyone’s valid, human response to the death-dealing, immoral, and insane nature of racism and white supremacy. Hamer asserted that lethal resistance is one among many responses under such violent conditions, and the people who did not concede to nonviolent approaches should not be overlooked when seeking viable solutions between the people and government. Hamer biographers have two different views on Hamer’s perspective and practice of nonviolence. Brooks argues that Hamer did not believe in retributive justice in the freedom struggle while Lee contends that Hamer did become consumed by the militant times of Black Power, and retaliation was an adopted view by Hamer.56 Hamer became a woman of her time, argues Lee, who did not find it to be a contradiction to be Christian and retaliate against her white oppressors and certain members of the black middle class such as ministers and teachers. Charles E. Cobb, Jr., a former SNCC field secretary in rural Mississippi, clarifies, on a certain level, the opposing views of Brooks and Lee when he states, “… because nonviolence worked so well as a tactic effecting

55 56

Hamer, “‘If the Name of the Game is Survive, Survive,’” 142. Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir An Army, 137; Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 130–31.

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change and was demonstrably improving their lives, some black people chose to use weapons to defend the nonviolent Freedom Movement.”57 The use of lethal violence was not an aggressive move, by certain black people, to attack white people but was rather employed in defense of the black individuals and communities who endured increased intimidation and terror once they became a part of the movement. Hamer candidly confessed, “I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won’t write his mama again.”58 Furthermore, Hamer offered Stokely Carmichael, the one who is known to have popularized the term “Black Power,” a loaded gun when he stayed at her home.59 Clearly, personal, familial, and communal self-protection motivated Hamer in having guns in her home. To date, no scholarship mentions Hamer taking a life or documents her using a gun. However, what is on record is Hamer believed that the black ministers and teachers who were supporting the white power structure would probably be more supportive of the freedom struggle if they received a good whipping60 or were left at the river.61 Moreover, as I have been arguing, Hamer advanced jubilee for one and all accompanied by a vision of people learning how to develop just, righteous relations and structures on stolen land comprised of colonizers, settlers, involuntary and voluntary immigrants, and native people groups. Hence, as Brooks asserts, Hamer was not in favor of extinguishing white people or wishing they would receive the harm they had inflicted although she was ready to defend herself, community, and cause, in the private sphere, if necessary, with the use of a gun.62 Hamer’s commitment to political nonviolence is further underscored when she stated to an audience of black Mississippi Deltans, “We don’t have 57 58

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Cobb, Jr. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, 2. Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges,” 12. As a child, Hamer learned that her mother carried a gun on the plantation for protection. It was stashed in one of the baskets that she would carry to the field. Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir An Army, 18. Hamer cited in Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 130. Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’” 101. The discussion on Hamer’s vision and practice of nonviolence as a political strategy does not attempt to overlook her “violent” tendencies such as desiring a “good whipping” for black professionals or leaving ministers at the river just to name a few. The bigger issue of evaluating Hamer’s use of “violence” and nonviolence is beyond the scope of the chapter and book. While I agree with Todd when she argues “In the purest sense, there is no such thing as nonviolence” (7), it is my hope that Hamer’s Christian thought and practice, which included nonviolence as a political strategy, be given it’s just due and advanced to underscore the complexity and nuanced Christian praxis of people from oppressed social locations in their respective freedom struggles.

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anything to be ashamed of here in Mississippi. And actually we don’t carry guns because we don’t have anything to hide. When you see people packing guns and is afraid for people to talk to you, he is afraid …”63 Hamer is right to claim that she and many others in the movement did not carry guns in public. Gun-toting was not consistent with nonviolent political resistance. According to Cobb, “It was often stated at the time that organized self-defense groups who confronted police authority with weapons would endanger the movement by triggering a murderous response from the state.”64 Although this assumption was not proven to be true,65 Hamer, nonetheless, distinguished the public use of guns by white people as a sign of fear from black people who did not need to carry a gun because they had nothing to hide. She implied that public use of lethal violence would be a distraction from achieving the greater end because it could falsely suggest that black people were the problem or had done something wrong. As discussed in chapter 3, Hamer refused to play into the criminal stereotype although she had to learn how to navigate being under constant surveillance. Then, on another level, Hamer employed Psalm 37, a passage of the “First Testament,” to encourage her audience by: 1) informing them of the justice of the cause, 2) encouraging them not to fear the workers of iniquity for they will be cut down like the green grass, and 3) inspiring them to delight in the Lord and the divine’s promise to fill them.66 At the Vietnam Moratorium Rally in Berkeley, California, in 1969, Hamer claimed, “I’ve heard, I’ve heard several comments from people that was talking about with the people, for the people, and by the people. Being a black woman from Mississippi, I’ve learned that long ago that’s not true; it’s with a handful, for a handful, by a handful.”67 In Hamer ’s anti-Vietnam War speech, she clearly positioned herself as a black, female, poor southerner who had wisdom to impart regarding the limited nature and scope of democracy in the United States. Speaking in a citadel of liberal higher education on the west coast of the country, Hamer invited her predominantly white liberal, college educated, peace activist audience to see the violent, unjust conditions from 63 64 65

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Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 53. Cobb, This Nonviolence Stuff’ll Get You Killed, 16. Ibid., The Deacons for Defense and Justice was an organized group of armed resisters in Louisiana and were not called upon to assist SNCC’s work in Mississippi because of the assumption that it would exacerbate the dangerous situation and lead to an increased number of fatalities. According to Cobb, the assumption was unfounded for the Deacons for Defense and Justice presence did not lead to increase deaths by intensified, reactionary police violence. Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 49. Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’” 99.

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a different perspective. She exposed her audience to how the white male oligarch power structure was wreaking havoc both in the United States and Vietnam. In this space, drawing on her Christian roots, Hamer quoted Ephesians 6:11–12 and called the collusion of black ministers with the white ruling oligarchy demonic, and that the parties did not reflect the practices of humans.68 She encouraged her audience to be aware of the war at home, and not just in Vietnam. As noted above, Hamer’s nonviolent political resistance and anti-war stance were relatively new tactics in the freedom struggle while self-defense was more longstanding. Hamer’s mother, Lou Ella Townsend, carried a 9 mm Luger pistol to the cotton fields as a sharecropper.69 Hamer discovered her mother’s weapon as a child when she peeked into a covered bucket that contained the weapon.70 On one occasion, when a horseback riding white man approached Mrs. Townsend with the intent to whip and rape her niece, she replied, “You don’t have no black children and you’re not going to beat no black children. If you step down off that horse, I’ll go to Hell and back with you before Hell can scorch a feather.”71 The white man left upon hearing the intention of Mrs. Townsend, a rural black woman, who was ready to die, and kill, to protect and defend the human dignity of her female kin. Significantly, Cobb argues, “because guns are so common a part of the southern culture, there was far less controversy about their use in the nonviolent Freedom Movement than one might imagine.”72 According to Cobb, nonviolence as a political strategy was new to everyone, both black and white in Mississippi, although some such as Rev. James Lawson, the organizer of the student movement in Nashville, did practice nonviolence as a way of life and King is believed to have slowly adopted this view.73 What King eventually came to practice, and Lawson taught students as a way of life beyond a mere political strategy was not the dominant practice of Hamer and many black Christian Mississippians. In the context of political suppression, economic exploitation, social dehumanization, educational misinformation, malnutrition, starvation, forced sterilization, no legal protection, and psychosocial terror, Hamer did not develop or adopt a normative hermeneutic of Jesus in the Gospels as being a purist nonviolent resister as many white liberals in peace church traditions do. However,

68 69 70 71 72 73

Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’” 101. Cobb, This Nonviolence Stuff’ll Get You Killed, 93. Hamer cited in Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir an Army, 18. Cobb, This Nonviolence Stuff’ll Get You Killed, 94. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 8.

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Hamer’s theo-politics of love and leadership of, and for, jubilee and black reparations reflect, on many levels, the ethic and practice of a Jesus whom she understood to be revolutionary. She discipled and loved people to enter into volatile spaces and places proclaiming a different way of life and values that were more consistent with the peaceable realm of God, and not the status quo of racial oppression and dehumanization. Hamer’s practices of storytelling and nonviolence revolutionize the current diversity and inclusion paradigm ideologically, pragmatically, and theologically. Hamer and other black people ceased to operate in fear, and neither were they the aggressors of intentional violent harm in and against part of God’s creation. Their narrative of resistance, of seeking to actively protect and preserve the people, regardless of race, gender, or age, and the movement invite leaders of educational institutions and congregations to see diversity and inclusion through new lenses and practices.

3

Hamer’s Paradigm of Jubilee and Black Reparations

The following construction of Hamer’s leadership paradigm regarding jubilee and black reparations is comprised of five key categories: 1) Christ’s freedom, 2) the cross, 3) structural, systemic renewal, 4) Black Power, and 5) some of her collaborative and diverse projects. Her practices of storytelling and nonviolence in public spaces and institutions coupled by her sound theo-political and socio-political analyses provide insight to the distinctive elements of her revolutionary practical theology. 3.1 Christ’s Freedom The clear, concise tone of Hamer’s leadership, life, and legacy is freedom. “And I don’t mind my light shining; I don’t hide that I’m fighting for freedom,” Hamer proclaimed, “because Christ died to set us free.”74 With these statements, Hamer explicitly and implicitly asserted the following. First, freedom, unfortunately, is not a given and must be acquired through struggle. One must fight for and against, engage and disentangle, and announce and denounce through various available means and sources to experience individual and collective determination. Second, the light of freedom within her was inherited

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Hamer, “‘I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,’” 6. Hamer referenced and appropriated the statement Matthew attributes to Jesus in 5:14b (ESV) which says, “A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.”

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and unmerited. The light was also in others, and they had to be encouraged to project it and keep it burning brightly. Third, freedom is a public endeavor with socio-political intentions and consequences. Fourth, the efficacious work of Christ on the cross in dying to set people free was not believed to be fully realized by Hamer although Christ’s work was a primary motivation and affirmation in her struggle for freedom. Thus, freedom is not merely bound to or by what constitutes a just democracy or independence from unjust systems and conditions.75 By connecting the condition of poor black people in Mississippi, and the nation at large, to the liberating work of Christ, Hamer introduced moral, spiritual, and theological dimensions into the notion of freedom. There had to be continuity or a reconciliation between what Christ did for all people and the reality of black people in the United States because as Grant argues “… Hamer’s basic understanding of God and Jesus Christ was that they meant freedom.”76 For Hamer, the death of Christ was placed in proper context with his life and ministry. After she mentioned the motivation of her fearlessness, she also proclaimed, “And he stayed here until he got thirty-three years old, letting us know how we would have to walk.”77 Here, Hamer placed emphasis on Christ’s exemplary life that is redemptive and instructive for her and her audience. She challenged her audience to rethink the significance of Christ’s life and death for their current condition and circumstances, and thereby renounce a way of life that did not contribute to the abundant, creative, dignifying, and productive life that Christ had modeled and ushered in. In this vein, Hamer infuses the significance of Christ’s life into the black freedom struggle in a way that shifts the focus from merely fulfilling the promise of the United States democracy and independence from white domination to a deeper, pre-existing truth of human identity and dignity, right relations, and communal care and governance. Free and freed persons, at whatever level they could access, were to be

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Lincoln and Mamiya argue that while the word freedom resonates deeply within the religion of African Americans and the black church, they also contend that freedom was more contingent on the time and context of the moment. More specifically, they state “during slavery it meant release from bondage; after emancipation it meant the right to be educated, to be employed, and to move about freely from place to place. In the twentieth century freedom means social, political, and economic justice.” See The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 4. I think Hamer transcends and/or nuances their understanding of freedom by appropriating Christ’s death on the cross into the struggle for freedom and reconstituting what it means to be human that denounces whiteness as the norm or standard. Grant, “Civil Rights Women,” 44. Hamer, “‘I Don’t’ Mind My Light Shining,’” 6.

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about the business of living freedom, as Christ modeled, and inviting others to do likewise according to Hamer. The mere shouting and living a lie in forced segregated black congregations were a descent into hell in Hamer’s mind because people were not taking seriously the charge of protecting and preserving their own human freedom that came through Christ.78 Hamer’s appropriation of the liberating/freeing work of Christ for the black poor and oppressed concurs with Howard Thurman’s interpretation of Jesus in Jesus and the Disinherited. Thurman wrote the text nearly fifteen years before Hamer’s appearance in the public square, and he presents how Jesus and his Jewish minority kin, under Roman domination, had to answer a crucial question in relation to Rome: “Was any attitude possible that would be morally tolerable and at the same time preserve a basic self-esteem—without which life could not possibly have any meaning?”79 Notice, Thurman does not reference political expediency though he is not ignorant of Jesus’ political landscape. The goal under external political and social domination is to enact religious morals that nurture the individual and collective self towards a meaningful life within and beyond oppression. In his awareness of the context of the historical Jesus, Thurman continues by stating, The question was not academic. It was the most crucial of questions. In essence, Rome was the enemy; Rome symbolized total frustration; Rome was the great barrier to peace of mind. And Rome was everywhere. No Jewish person of the period could deal with the question of his practical life, his vocation, his place in society, until first he had settled deep within himself this critical issue.80 Thurman delineates the ubiquitous psychological, social, and spiritual presence of the political Roman empire. Although the invasion was deep and broad, Thurman understood Jesus, as did Hamer, as one who provided a viable means for freedom and to live with human dignity and creativity in the struggle. According to Thurman, Jesus’ message to the oppressed was that the power of the kingdom of God was within them which was accessible to enable them to respond to Roman oppression. Furthermore, Thurman posits that with this power, Jesus modeled a radical love-ethic that challenged his Jewish kin to love oneself, one another, God, and even the Roman enemy and oppressor so

78 79 80

Ibid. Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, 22. Ibid., 22–3.

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that they could overcome fear, deception, and hate. In short, both Thurman and Hamer espouse an interpretation of Jesus that foregrounds his message of freedom and love for and by the disinherited. Thurman’s attention to the kingdom of God is within is comparable to Hamer’s attention to the light of freedom from within that had to shine, and not be hidden. Then, although Hamer does not articulate a love-ethic of Jesus, she was clear on a theo-politics of love as demonstrated in chapter 4 that flowed from her understanding of Jesus and her Christian faith. In attempting to live true to the freedom that Christ initiated, Hamer’s public critique and challenge of United States symbols and ideologies of freedom exhibit her commitment to humanity, poor people, and the oppressed. On seeing the Statue of Liberty, Hamer recounted, When I got out of jail and couldn’t hardly sit down and a man carried me to see the Statue of Liberty and a woman standing with a torch and facing another problem. I told the man that I was riding with that day, I said, “I would like to see this statue turned around to face her own problem. And the torch out of her hand with her head bowed because we have many problems in this country as they trying to point to in other countries.”81 To be a true witness of freedom, according to Hamer, the United States would have to assume responsibility for conflicts and harms within its own borders, first and foremost. The posture of being a light of life and liberty for nonnative people distracted the administration from tending to the gravity of needs and issues on native soil. Humility and not arrogance, acknowledgement and not denial, and introspection and not imperialism were characteristics of a free nation in Hamer’s mind. Moreover, Hamer made it plain that the acknowledgement of the flag and singing the national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner, was not a sincere practice because “poor oppressed people throughout this country don’t have anything to hail.”82 In her own way, she preceded the twenty-first century black professional football players who took a knee during the playing of the United States national anthem to display their concern of what the country is not, and hope of what the country can become. When Hamer stood, instead of taking a knee, she was not acknowledging the grandeur of the country, but the pain and sorrow of black women,

81 82

Hamer, “‘Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either,’” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 129. Ibid.

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men, and children who were without nutritious food, running water, adequate housing, livable wages, quality education, accessible healthcare, and political representation. When Hamer stood, she was hoping for an end to black surveillance, police brutality, political intimidation, economic reprisals, legalized segregation, house and church bombings, and governmental silence. When Hamer stood, she was hoping for the liberation of all people and the abundance of creative spaces in which the masses and decision makers of institutions and governments could gather to resolve problems and address needs. When Hamer stood, her allegiance was to God and working for Christ, regardless. When Hamer stood, she proclaimed to a predominantly white Wisconsin audience during the bicentennial celebration of the country, Now I just want to ask one question: how do you think black people, Indian people, and any other oppressed folk feel celebrating something that, years ago, that destroyed over twenty-five million of my people that was being brought here on the slave ships of Africa? Wiped out our heritage; raised families by our grandmothers; and taking our name …83 Hamer invited her audience to rethink their allegiance by considering the feelings and conditions of the oppressed and displaced blacks and natives. She challenged them to think critically, feel deeply, and respond differently so that the country’s celebration of independence would be a reality of the masses regardless of race, class, or gender. Today, Hamer continues to stand because “… in her hometown of Ruleville, a memorial garden replete with a nine-foot-tall bronze statue of [Hamer] the civil rights stalwart pays tribute to her legacy.”84 The statue was unveiled on October 5, 2012, and generations to come can now go and encounter the light of Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer.85 3.2 The Cross Hamer’s loyalty reflected her identification with a liberating, revolutionary deity and her desire to participate in transcending and transforming an antiblack, death-dealing government and national ethos. Her freedom fighting examples and practices demonstrated her willingness to assume responsibility for picking up her cross and living for Jesus. Hamer’s cross bearing was not a

83 84 85

Hamer, “‘We Haven’t Arrived Yet,’” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 183. Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir An Army, 3. Ibid., 238.

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feeble attempt to satisfy or appease God, or to endure human-created structural suffering. Rather, her bearing of the cross constituted letting go of the values, ideology, and fear associated with the Jim Crow South system, and picking up the values of freedom, justice, dignity, love, peace, forgiveness, and hope that Jesus had modeled. She saw the cross as an empowering religious symbol to overcome, and not acquiesce to or be complicit with, a societal system and structure that denied her freedom that Christ had accomplished. Recall, she was not afraid to be a luminating, transparent presence in her fight for freedom because of Christ’s efficacious work in death and belief that Christ lived a life for thirty-three years “letting us know how we would have to walk.”86 In short, God was not the author of her suffering. She was clear that it was white people who were the source of her dis-ease in their fabrication and legitimation of a lie that were contrary to the life and teachings, and person and work of Christ. Hamer’s diverse thought on the significance of the cross predates the critical work of contemporary womanist, black and white feminist, and black liberation theologians as well as Protestant ministers and peace-tradition examinations of atonement. The contemporary scholars and ministers provide insightful interpretations of the cross that do not glorify violence while seeking to empower vulnerable populations who suffer under oppressive empires and regimes.87 Like Hamer, many contemporary theologians and ministers focus on the life and teachings of Jesus as salvific instead of privileging the violent death of Jesus as do the penal substitution and ransom theoretical paradigms. Christ’s death on the cross is not understood as a need to appease the divine or to wrest the souls of humanity from the evil one. Instead, the suffering of Christ on the cross is caused by the Roman state due to its desire to control and terrorize any person who reflects and propagates different values, ideologies, and practices than the Roman Empire. In this vein, the suffering of Christ is not condoned but it does expose the powers, rulers, and principalities who operate contrary to the life-giving, humanizing, and redemptive will of God for the masses. Womanist theologian Delores S. Williams argues that Jesus’ grand

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Hamer, “‘I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,’” 6. See Marit A. Trelstad, ed., Cross Examinations: Readings on the Meaning of the Cross Today (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2006); James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011); Mitri Raheb and Suzanne Watts Henderson, The Cross in Contexts: Suffering and Redemption in Palestine (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2017); Brad Jersak and Michael Harden, eds., Stricken by God?: Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, MA: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2007).

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invitation to the masses proved to be a threat for the dominating class when she states, “The response to this invitation by human principalities and powers was the horrible deed that the cross represents—the evil of humankind trying to kill the ministerial vision of life-in-relation that Jesus brought to humanity.”88 Furthermore, to underscore the significance of the life and resurrection of Jesus, Williams contends, The cross is a reminder of how humans have tried throughout history to destroy visions of righting relationships that involve transformation of tradition and transformation of social relations and arrangements sanctioned by the status quo. The resurrection of Jesus and the kingdom-ofGod theme in Jesus’ ministerial vision provide black women with the knowledge that God has through Jesus, shown humankind how to live peacefully, productively, and abundantly in relationship. Humankind is therefore redeemed through Jesus’ life and not through Jesus’ death.89 For Williams, Christ’s life is redemptive though the cross must not be forgotten.90 Similarly, Hamer claimed Christ’s life, more so than his death, inspired her to invite people of diverse backgrounds to go and do likewise—expose the powers that oppress—so that a new realm of values, race relations, and life could be realized on Earth in Mississippi and the nation. Although Hamer did not have a robust contemporary theology of the cross, her civil rights’ era interpretation and appropriation of the cross was instructive and inspiring. On one level, Hamer challenged individualism, greed, discrimination, oppression, and segregation when it was neither popular nor safe. Then, on another level, as a member of the disinherited and dispossessed, Hamer was a Christian who knew structural, racial suffering in an intimate way, and yet, responded to both individual and collective needs from a place of love and compassion for self, the divine, and others. It can be argued that Hamer’s Christian praxis was a precursor to white feminist theologian Marit A. Trelstad’s yearning for a redemptive, contemporary theology of the cross. Nearly three decades after the death of Hamer, Trelstad argues that new understandings of the cross are necessary for the following reasons:

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Delores S. Williams, “Black Women’s Surrogacy Experience and the Christian Notion of Redemption,” in Cross Examinations: Readings on the Meaning of the Cross Today, ed. Marit A. Trelstad (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2006) (Ebook), loc 481 of 4661. Williams, Ibid., loc 502 of 4461. Williams, Ibid., loc 510 of 4461.

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First, it is a symbol that opposes the “prosperity gospel” present in Western cultural and economic philosophies that support individual prosperity despite mass human need. Second, a theology of the cross may encourage Christians to know reality through the eyes of suffering and therefore to address the world’s needs compassionately and appropriately.91 Hamer knew reality and Christianity through suffering. From this location, she, nonetheless, shared her story of torture, forced sterilization, malnutrition, and so much more with love and compassion. In many ways, Hamer’s life is symbolic of Trelstad’s redemptive vision of the cross because Hamer exposed the state-sanctioned violence inflicted on the disinherited and championed national, cross-cultural economic, social, and political justice for all. She was bold enough to critique and challenge many black preachers who were afraid to stand for justice and proclaimed salvation for the next world when she asserted, “I’m sick and tired of seeing these cats telling me that I should expect milk and honey—I can’t drink sweet milk, and I don’t eat honey—when I get to the other side, and him riding in a good car.”92 Prosperity for a few at the expense of the suffering masses was not tolerated by Hamer regardless of one’s race or profession. Unfortunately, far too many white mainstream and Evangelical Christians have the racial privilege to dismiss or deny the symbol of the cross in opposition to contemporary empires. Or, for many Evangelical Christians, Christ already appeased the divine on the cross so they do not have to suffer in this world unless it is due to disobedience and/or a lesson to be learned. In both instances, a theology of the cross or suffering that Hamer reflected and Trelstad imagines is often perceived as either weak or often misguided in the lives and communities of many white Christians. Both Hamer and Trelstad speak clearly that the cross is a symbol to be understood in the current context, regardless of one’s social location, for a redemptive response to powers, principalities, and rulers that negate life, human connection and flourishing. 3.3 Structural, Systemic Renewal Jubilee in Hamer’s Christian praxis is not to be confused with mere inclusion into a system or entity that once excluded black people. As previously stated 91

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Marit A. Trelstad, “Introduction: The Cross in Context,” in Cross Examinations: Readings on the Meaning of the Cross Today, ed. Marit A. Trelstad (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2006) (Ebook), loc 107 of 4661. Hamer, “‘To Tell It Like It Is,’” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 91–2.

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in chapter 4 on Hamer’s theo-politics of love, equal access or inclusion into a dehumanizing society does not constitute liberation or freedom for anyone. The social system and all individuals who participated in it needed to be made anew. Social renewal entailed responding to the moral imperative that issued from Hamer’s faith in the life and ministry of Jesus as described in Luke 4:18–19. She claimed and bore witness to “… we are our brother’s keeper”93 through her leadership and participation in such programs as Head Start education for young children, vocational training for women, community cooperative farming, and procuring of quality land and housing for both black and white people. In her attempt to encourage the black middle-class to respond likewise to their less economically endowed and educationally experienced black sisters and brothers who reside in both rural and urban areas, Hamer expressed her grave discontent with the black middle-class for colluding with the white power structure that exacerbated the poverty of the working, exploited poor black people. In Mississippi, she claimed black “… teachers and preachers … don’t have the dignity … they have these degrees but they don’t have the dignity and respect for their fellow man to stand up for a cause.”94 An educated black person in Mississippi seemed to be a detriment, and not a benefit, to jubilee in Hamer’s experience.95 The limited access into a dehumanizing educational system was not contributing to a new society, but to the increased number of black faces who could represent the desires of the white power 93

94 95

Hamer, “‘The Only Thing We Can Do Is to Work Together,’ Speech Delivered at a Chapter Meeting of the National Council of Negro Women in Mississippi, 1967,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 72. Hamer, Ibid. Brooks mentions how white segregationists and black middle and upper-class conservatives of Mississippi joined forces to thwart the work of Hamer in the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), a federally funded Head Start program. Staff in the CDGM was accused of being communists and using federal aid for advancing civil rights activities. See Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir an Army, 157–9. Senator James Eastland was leading the way for the white segregationists. In a 1967 congressional record entitled National Conference for New Politics, he cites individuals and organizations such as Mrs. Hamer, SNCC, the MFDP, and the Child Development Group of Mississippi as part of a communist conspiracy who, or that, were inciting racial violence towards a Negro revolution. Senator Eastland, 90th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record (September 22, 1967): 26537–26540. In the Fannie Lou Hamer (SNCC/MFDP) Collection at University of Texas at Austin. https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/13029/ _Hamer_MFDPLdrs.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y. Accessed on April 4, 2020. Sadly, Senator Eastland refused to acknowledge the social, political, and economic violence perpetrated on black Mississippians by federal, state, and local governments. Consequently, Hamer and her various political and civic affiliations were demonized as being antiAmerican instead of as a unifying and healing force in the land.

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structure. In observing educational outcomes for black people of increased alienation from and decreased compassion for humanity, Hamer proclaimed, You see, this make me begin to raise a question about my children. Raise, the question is: ‘Do I want my child to go through a system and then come out to be ashamed to be yourself?’ And be ashamed, if it is necessary to die for a cause?96 In these rhetorical questions, Hamer seems to have implied that she was raising her adopted children with a strong sense of self-esteem and black dignity as she was nurtured as a child although it could have been insufficient to withstand what occurred in Mississippi public schools and higher education. Hamer was protected, in part, because she only received six years of the white formal education, and a life-time of education from the black family and church coupled with the alternative, redemptive education she received in SNCC, Freedom and Citizenship Schools, and CORE in her later years. Hence, in Hamer’s mind, an education of jubilee, and diversity, constituted a system that nurtured human compassion, black self-worth, communal identity, and belonging to something greater than the individual. The cause of black freedom, of human freedom, had to be foregrounded even unto death because, again, Christ died to set people free according to Hamer. Hamer championed a new educational system especially in the form of curriculum in the discipline of history. When speaking at a Vietnam War Moratorium Rally in Berkeley, California, she informed her audience that the educational system was sick, and she questioned if she wanted to be part of a system that would “… rob me [Hamer] of having real love and compassion for my fellow man?”97 Again, Hamer saw United States public education as a system that was contrary to the educational values she learned at home, in church, and as a participant in the Civil Rights Movement organizations. To be allowed into the classrooms of schools, colleges, and universities that once denied access to black people was not deemed as a sign of jubilee or progress for Hamer. Instead, it was deemed as sick and incapable of producing Hamer’s desired ends of jubilee. Hence, she further argued, “We got to start, we got to start in every institution in this country because the history that we been getting, baby, had never happened and it never will.”98 Hamer had learned from her alternative, 96 97 98

Hamer, “‘The Only Thing We Can Do Is to Work Together,’” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 72. Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 102. Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’” Ibid.

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redemptive education that Christopher Columbus did not discover the Americas because Indigenous, nonwhite people were there to meet, welcome, and assist him and his crew. Moreover, Hamer had learned about both Africa and America prior to the European encounter, conquest, and colonization, and therefore cried out, And what kids are saying to you throughout the country is why didn’t you tell us [black people] that we have the longest history of civilization of mankind? And why didn’t you tell us it was a black man that made the alphabet? And why didn’t you tell us it was also a black man that discovered science? And why didn’t you tell us something about Dr. Drew, the man that learned to save blood plasma that died out in a hall because he didn’t get a blood transfusion? And all we want to know now is all that stuff that you’ve had hid from us, bring it out, because you see, this is where your children is rebelling; because you told your children that we were dumb, we were ignorant and we couldn’t think. And you see, honey, we would be in your house thinking …99 Although Hamer only mentions one name, Dr. Drew, Ethiopia, the eastern part of the continent of Africa, is understood as the place in which the oldest human remains have been found, and additional younger human remains have been excavated in other parts of the African continent including South Africa. Like Hamer, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu cites Acts 17:26 as a biblical warrant of humanity’s interconnection, and muses about Africa, not Europe, being the cradle of human civilization when he states, … it may be one of God’s little jokes. Not far from my home are caves which have been identified by geologists and those who study these things as the cradle of humankind. After all the fuss about racism and superiority, the divine joke is that we are all Africans! What was all the fuss about? It has been established by the experts that humankind first saw the light of day in Africa, and from there spread out to populate the globe. For those of us who are not African or dark-skinned, might it just be a salutary thing to bear in mind, that those you might have tended to look down on are actually your ancestors?100 99 100

Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on The Critical List,’” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 119–20. Desmond Tutu, In God’s Hands: The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent Book 2015 (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2014), 36.

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In an apparent attempt to be polite, and not overly striking, Archbishop Tutu names Africa as the scientific and divine origin of humanity. On the other hand, Hamer raised critical, provocative questions for her listening audience that reflected her prophetic style of truth-telling.101 The educational historical content that had been intentionally deleted, overlooked as inconsequential, or excluded due to white ignorance needed to constitute the core canon of an education for jubilee for all students in primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools. In the end, as Hamer contended, if she and other black people were not free, then no one was free.102 Hamer’s connection of Africa to education in the United States to nurture black self-esteem, compassion, freedom, and justice in the public square constitutes a decentering of Euro-Americanism and a jettisoning of learning that only perpetuates the status quo. Hamer was not merely demanding for Africa and black people in the United States to be included in the curriculum, but dismissing the truth claims of the white developed curriculum as either false or incomplete. While visiting Guinea, West Africa, in 1964 after the DNC, Hamer recalled her initial apprehension when visiting the African country because, “Just to see Africa and try to—we had learned and heard so many things about Africa. I wasn’t sure whether I would be frightened or what, because what little we had read about Africa was just wild. We didn’t really know; we really

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Even though Hamer does not name the black male inventor of the alphabet, ancient Kemet/Egypt/Africa is the place in which the earliest form of the human alphabet was developed according to Afrocentric ethnolinguists. See Shaba Shabaka and Ernie A. Smith, Nigger: A Divine Origin (Los Angeles, CA: Milligan Books, 2003) and Kimani S. K. Nehusi, “From Medew Netjer to Ebonics,” in Ebonics and Language Education, ed. Clinton Crawford (New York, NY and London, UK: Sankofa World Publishers, 2001), 56–122. Also, Hamer does not mention the name of the black man who invented science. She could have been referring to Percy Julian or George Washington Carver both of whom were born in the United States. Or, she could have been referring to the scientists and mathematicians of Ancient Kemet/Egypt/Africa. Finally, Hamer does name Dr. Drew as the inventor of the blood plasma and transfusion. However, the myth that he died in a hallway in the hospital because white physicians refused to treat him has been discounted. Hamer probably was unaware of the correct information, or it had yet to be revealed during her lifetime. See Dhadon Dhadon, “Drew, Charles R. (1904–1950),” http://www.blackpast.org/aah/drew-charles-r-1904-1950. Accessed on March 3, 2018. Hamer’s various speeches included the theme regarding the interconnection of freedom. Her thought can be seen in the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement that espouses the belief that when black lives begin to matter to state and federal governments, law enforcement officers, penal institutions, landlords, and educational systems, then all lives will matter because no one group would be left behind.

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didn’t know that they were our people.”103 Hamer, in another interview, admitted to some of the “wild” preconceptions and misconceptions about her African roots that were communicated to her. Hamer stated, “The way everybody talked to us, everybody in Africa was savages and really stupid people.”104 However, when Hamer encountered a black stewardesses attending to her on the Ghanaian flight to Guinea and a black man proceeding from the cockpit, both new experiences of black people to Hamer, she indicated, “… right away then this meant that it was going to be different from what I had been [used to], what had been taught to me.”105 Hamer discovered that Africans were competent and qualified to do what Euro-Americans only claimed white people could do. She saw intelligent black people running banks and the government, and therefore came to the realization, “I was really learning something for the first time. Because then I could feel myself never, ever being ashamed of my ancestors and my background.”106 Hamer had reconciled with the origin of her people and human civilization; she had encountered a people, a country, and part of the African continent that were contrary to the myths and falsifications that had been propagated in United States textbooks, schools, television, and society.107 In recalling her newfound moment of what could be considered as jubilee/liberation, Hamer was also wise enough to assert, “But I’ve seen more savage white folks here in America than I seen in Africa.”108 What white people in the United States had claimed about black people on the continent as being savages was more true of them than the African people Hamer encountered in Guinea. An unannounced visit she and other SNCC members received from President Touré was

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Hamer, “Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer by Dr. Neil McMillen, April 14, 1972, and January 25, 1973, Ruleville, Mississippi; Oral History Program, University of Southern Mississippi,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 158. Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges,” in Mississippi Writers, 329. Hamer, “Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer by Dr. Neil McMillen, April 14, 1972, and January 25, 1973, Ruleville, Mississippi,” 158. Ibid., 159. Brooks presents the specific white supremacist arguments that Hamer was inundated with prior to her trip to Guinea. She cites how Delta CEO and Princeton graduate, Carleton Putnam published a book entitled Race and Reason: A Yankee View that purported the inferiority of black people to white people based on genetics. According to Brooks, this book was required reading in the high school curriculum in both Mississippi and Virginia. In addition, Putnam was interviewed on television which provided another medium of spreading the white supremacist claims. See Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir an Army, 128–9. Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges,” in Mississippi Writers, 329.

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so unbelievable and overwhelming that Hamer was dumbfounded.109 She later claimed, “I’ve tried so hard so many times to see the president in this country and I wasn’t given the chance. But the president over there cared enough to visit us.” Not only did President Touré come to where SNCC was staying, he also invited them to his palace and visiting black leadership in a palace was another first for Hamer.110 From these new, redemptive experiences, Hamer had a broader perspective between the races. She also noticed, “… and even the shame that we have here in this country, they don’t have it there. In performing and all that kind of stuff, we have been made to feel ashamed of so many things that they’re not.”111 The black psyche in the United States had to heal from the shame of thinking and behaving as being less than human became more apparent to Hamer when she saw black people in Africa as human beings. Possibly, this is one of the reasons she demanded an education that captured the beauty and brilliance of African people and the geo-political space. Hamer knew first-hand the toll on the black soul by white supremacy and segregation, and envisioned education as an integral part of jubilee. Like Hamer, Thurman articulates the disintegration of the black self who faces the perpetual onslaught of dehumanization. He argues that the performance of deception that black people exhibited in the face of white supremacy requires “a profound sense of surgery … in the very psyche of the disinherited before the great claim of the religion of Jesus can be presented.”112 Thurman speculates that the problem of black disintegration looms large that even before Jesus’ radical ethic of love of neighbor, enemy, and God can be received and practiced, the black psyche must undergo repair and mending. For physical survival, many black people learned to perform and convey a falsity that social and racial injustice were not problematic. Both Hamer and Thurman saw the depth of the harm of a false portrayal of self as well as the conditions that existed that made it life-threatening to respond otherwise. 3.4 Black Power In Hamer’s Christian praxis of jubilee, both the black psyche and racist conditions were addressed especially in her unique interpretation of “Black Power.” In general, Hamer stated,

109 110 111 112

Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir an Army, 128. Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges,” in Mississippi Writers, 329. Hamer, “Interview with Dr. Neil McMillen,” in Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 159. Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, 68.

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What we mean by “Black Power” is we mean to have not only black political power, but black economic power, to have a voice in the educational system that our kids will know—not only the black kids, but the white kids should know—the kinds of contributions that have been made by black people throughout this country. We want to determine some of our destiny and this is what “Black Power” means.113 Along with fellow SNCC member, Stokely Carmichael, Hamer announced and advanced black freedom, humanity, agency, and responsibility. The focus on “Black Power” in Hamer’s mindset was not the exclusion of white people from participating in restructuring the nation. Recall, Hamer believed in the parenthood of the divine and the kinship of humanity. Her expression of “Black Power” was consistent with this biblical and theological worldview, and consequently, as has been demonstrated, she championed freedom for all people, and not just black people. All people, in their diversity and difference yet with a human and divine connection, must discover a way to coexist as a unified nation instead of a divided one in Hamer’s vision. In short, black supremacy was not her end goal although the use of the term “Black Power” incited fear in many white people who thought “Black Power” was a substitution for white power, control and domination. Hamer understood white fear as self-inflicted because of the way they were treating black people. White people were afraid of black retaliation. Therefore, any time there was an expression of blackness that transgressed the borders and orders of the Jim Crow South, white people were threatened, and responded out of fear. When discussing an incident of an expression of “Black Power” from her childhood, she observed, The lynch mob came. I ain’t ever heard of no one white man going to get a Negro. They’re the most cowardly people I ever heard of. The mob came to get Mr. Pullum but he was waiting for them and every time a white man would peep out, he busted him. Before they finally got him, he’d killed thirteen and wounded twenty-six, and it was awhile in Mississippi before the whites tried something like that again.114 113 114

Hamer cited in Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir an Army, 156. Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges,” in Mississippi Writers, 323. Hamer tells the backdrop to the story on why the lynch mob came after Mr. Pullum [spelled Pullum in O’Dell’s interview and Pulliam by Brooks though it is the same incident that is described]. I have intentionally excluded it because for black people, both then and today, a lynch mob in the form of law enforcement or white vigilantes can strike just because they feel threatened or fear for their life by a black person.

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White people never acted alone in their terror, lynching, and killing of black people from Hamer’s perspective. She saw them as a fearful, cowardly people who needed liberation too. In the above quote, Hamer intimates that “Black Power” can, also, be understood as self-defense. This issue of personal and communal self-defense practiced among Hamer and SNCC was addressed in the previous section in this chapter. Nonetheless, unbeknownst to many, King argued that personal and communal self-defense was morally justified when he stated, Violence exercised merely in self-defense, all societies, from the most primitive to the most cultured and civilized, accept as moral and legal. The principle of self defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been condemned, even by Gandhi … When the Negro uses force in self-defense, he does not forfeit support—he may even win it, by the courage and self-respect it reflects. … But violence as a tool of advancement, involving organization as in warfare … poses incalculable perils.115 As is discussed, Hamer, too, understood the purpose of self-defense and the limitations of violence in the freedom struggle. Although Hamer witnessed and practiced self-defense, her “Black Power” orientation, nevertheless, included redemptive possibilities for white people and governments at all levels as well as empowering, humanizing action of, and for, black people. However, there were proponents of “Black Power” who contended that it was futile engaging white people because they had no intention of sharing power and conceding to the humanity of black people. This approach to “Black Power” focused on building awareness among the black masses and finding creative, alternative ways to demand and not beg, and to take and not ask for permission to access basic human resources and rights for life, for jubilee. Hamer was sympathetic to this approach of “Black Power,” but not in full alignment with it. When recalling the MFDP challenge of the white democrats at the DNC in 1964, she noted “But we learned the hard way that even though we had all the law and all the righteousness on our side—the white man is not going to give up his power to us.”116 After such a harrowing 115

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King cited in Nicholas Johnson, eblog, “The what and why of Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms,” The Washington Post, January 27, 2014. https://www .washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/01/27/the-what-and-why-of -negroes-and-the-gun-the-black-tradition-of-arms/?utm_term=.36ab0d75f6c7. Accessed on May 10, 2018. Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges,” in Mississippi Writers, 327.

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experience in 1964, Hamer could have given up on God, the right to life for all people, and nation healing and building. However, she did not. Instead, Hamer stated, “we have to build our own power.”117 This power entailed preparing people to run for local, state, and national political offices, including Hamer, herself. Furthermore, it entailed creating programs and projects such as the pig bank and Freedom Farms, Inc. that addressed health and nutrition, quality, affordable housing, subsistence farming, and vocational skills at the community, grassroots level. It consisted of unionizing so that black, low-skilled laborers could be protected from the age of mechanization and ongoing economic exploitation. For Hamer, what the white man refused to share was merely an obstacle to be overcome, and not a fixed, permanent condition to be endured. In summary, Hamer became no longer dependent on white people for change and for the expression of her human dignity and creativity. Yet, neither was she opposed to collaborating with white people who were ready to participate in human freedom for all people, and helping those whites who suffered, too, from poverty and structural, ideological racism. Proponents of “Black Power” who were further to the left of Hamer did not believe in the redemption of white people, the racist structure, or the appropriation of the colonizer’s religion (Christianity). For example, psychiatrist and social psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), in the Afro-Caribbean context of Martinique, understood there would be an inevitable tragic end in black resistance to white oppression and colonization because both colonizer and colonized felt their cause was right, and the other side was wrong.118 Decolonization, the process of undoing colonization, constitutes a love for life as a new humanity beyond the inherently violent structure of colonialism, according to Fanon.119 In this struggle, the nonwhite native experiences white people as enemies, as invading foreigner settlers, who have ordered a dichotomous world in which conciliation is impossible.120 Race, as constructed by the European foreigner, was instituted as a morose category into human diversity. Therefore, Fanon wholeheartedly argues, “the destruction of the colonial world is no more and no less that the abolition of one zone, its burial in the depths of the earth or its expulsion from the country.”121

117 118 119 120 121

Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges,” Ibid. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York, NY: Grove Press, Inc., 1963), 36 [originally published in Paris, France: François Maspero, 1961]. Ibid. Ibid., 37–8. Ibid., 41.

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Fanon calls for the removal of European colonialism and the exclusionary, death-dealing aspect of diversity based on race. He desires for human belonging and identity—key terms in contemporary diversity discourse—not to be defined nor confined by irrationality and fallacious biological science. Instead, he offers a vision of a post-colonized, unified world, for the native, of healing, of recovery from the pathology inflicted by what he perceived as an irredeemable colonialism. Fanon defines the terms and conditions of the struggle as a member of the oppressed with clarity and boldness with little to no concern for how it would be perceived by white people. The European colonizer was not accommodated or consulted in Fanon’s hope of raising consciousness among the colonized in the freedom struggle. As a staunch proponent of black consciousness, anti-colonialism, and revolution, Fanon’s humanist approach sought to empower the people who desired to eliminate the oppressive structure of colonialism.122 “Man [humanity] is what brings society into being,”123 argues Fanon, and therefore both the individual and social levels must be engaged in the decolonizing process. In this vein, black consciousness, or “Black Power” constitutes a resistance to one’s inferior status as a subjugated, nonhuman by participating in history and on the environment as one really is, human. Without supernatural influence or acknowledgement, Fanon posits a path of disalienation and consciousness “to persuade [his] brother, whether black or white, to tear off with all his strength the shameful livery put together by centuries of incomprehension.”124 Both white and black people have lived a lie in which the white group assumed an identity of superiority and the black group, in the words of Fanon, epidermalized/internalized an inferior complex.125 Much more can be said on Fanon’s revolutionary, social psychoanalytic theories, philosophy, and clinical examinations, for he engaged European male giants such as Adler, Lacan, Freud, and Jung in the field of psychology, and was highly influenced by Sartre’s existential humanist philosophy. The purpose of incorporating Fanon into a discussion of Hamer’s leadership for jubilee and

122 123 124

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Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1967), 11 [originally published in Paris, France: Éditions Du Seuil, 1952]. Ibid. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 12. Fanon does not use gender inclusive language, and may appear to exclude women, especially black women’s roles and contributions in his vision of a new humanity. However, bell hooks is one black feminist voice who acknowledges Fanon’s theoretical, liberative paradigm as useful for black women’s liberation too in spite of his seemingly dismissal of women. Ibid., 11.

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black reparations is to demonstrate that diversity, as is understood in contemporary parlance, does not reflect a legitimate honoring of black humanity, or anyone’s humanity and difference on one hand. Then, on another hand, Hamer’s and Fanon’s visions of “Black Power” and diversity should be taken seriously to revolutionize the current diversity and inclusion paradigm because they honor black humanity, self-governance, self-respect, and self-love that challenge white people to become human, at the least, by either removing themselves from the colonizer-colonized relationship or be moved by a force and movement that does not comply with the oppressive relationship. Both Hamer and Fanon employed “Black Power” unapologetically as a central component in their struggles although they differed in the role that white people could play. For Hamer’s Christian revolutionary approach, white people were extended the invitation to join the black freedom struggle for the redemption of themselves, black people, and the nation. To use contemporary environmental justice language, Hamer admonished white people to decrease their political, social, economic, agricultural, and environmental footprint because there were nonwhite people who had a right to occupy spaces and places as part of the divine creation and human family without white control and domination. However, Fanon did not invite the white colonizer to become in solidarity with the black colonized. His humanist approach called for white people to either get out of the way by going back to the European land of their birth, or to be buried in the process of black people dismantling the colonial system if they decided to stay as colonizer and settler. There was no room to love and embrace the colonizer, in Fanon’s vision, because black people had to first learn to love themselves as a non-colonized person. This endeavor required an awareness of negritude, “Black Power,” and internal healing from the need to be approved by white people and the desire to be white. As discussed in chapters 1 and 4, Hamer’s ability to know and practice love in her black family and church enabled her to affirm, respect, and love her black self, and it simultaneously buffered her against the temptation of hating white people. Like Fanon’s vision of healing the colonized from wanting to be white and approved by white people, Hamer, too, struggled with the desire of wanting to be white though it was resisted at an early age by her conscious mother, supportive family, and religious community. Thus, it could be argued that Hamer’s stage one theo-politics of love represents Fanon’s desired end for the people of Martinique because she learned to love and respect herself while struggling for freedom and justice. Furthermore, although Fanon did not ascribe to white and black collaboration in the freedom struggle as did Hamer, he should not be construed as one who espoused hatred for white people. Instead, Fanon’s revolutionary vision is filled with love, too, though expressed

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differently than Hamer. It was imperative for Fanon that black people would become solidified in loving themselves in their black skin just to resist the colonial system. In the context of colonial violence,126 Fanon sought to create breathing space for black people to love and respect themselves without any interference or influence from white people. In short, white people were not hated. They were just deemed unnecessary to the black freedom struggle in the Afro-Caribbean setting and were encouraged to get out of the way or suffer the consequences for attempting to stay and maintain a dehumanizing system. Hamer’s assertion and articulation of “Black Power” included black reparations.127 The inclusion of black reparations was another way in which Hamer differed from proponents of “Black Power” such as Fanon. Hamer is the only woman who endorsed the “Black Manifesto,”128 a black reparations project spearheaded by James Forman, executive secretary of SNCC, and was generated during the BEDC (Black Economic Development Conference) sponsored by IFCO (Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization) in April of 1969.129 The Black Manifesto demands and appeals to white churches and synagogues to acknowledge their complicity in the subjugation, economic exploitation, social dehumanization, and political exclusion of black people and to demonstrate their commitment to healing the historical and contemporary

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Fanon speaks extensively on violence in the opening chapter of The Wretched of the Earth. According to Lewis R. Gordon, a philosopher and Fanonian scholar, many people, errantly, perceive Fanon as promoting and inciting militant, violent resistance towards the white colonizer. Gordon argues that Fanon is just articulating the nature and scope of the violence inflicted by colonialization, and what to be prepared for when one chooses to love their black self because it is a direct affront to the colonizer and colonial system. See Lewis R. Gordon’s more extensive lecture entitled Fanon & Violence at https://vimeo.com/43036768 and Brooks Kirchgassner, “On Frantz Fanon: An Interview with Lewis R. Gordon,” The African American Intellectual History Society. February 11, 2016. https://www.aaihs.org/on-frantz-fanon/. Accessed on April 2, 2018. Hamer’s endorsement of and demand for black reparations was not new, and it is still a live issue for certain communities and groups of the African diaspora in the United States and beyond. For a historical and contemporary understanding of black reparations see Johnita Scott-Obadele, “The Modern Struggle for Reparations,” in Race and Resistance: African Americans in the 21st Century, ed. Herb Boyd (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002), 143–51 and Raymond A. Winbush, ed., Should America Pay?: Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2002). National Black Economic Development Conference Participants and Supporters, “The Black Manifesto,” in Black Manifesto: Religion, Racism, and Reparations, eds. Robert S. Lecky and H. Elliott Wright (New York, NY: Sheed and Ward, Inc., 1969), 124–5. James Forman, “Control, Conflict, and Change: The Underlying Concepts of the Black Manifesto,” in Black Manifesto: Religion, Racism, and Reparations, eds. Robert S. Lecky and H. Elliott Wright (New York, NY: Sheed and Ward, Inc., 1969), 34.

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wounds through economic reparations for liberation in the initial amount of $500 million dollars. According to Forman, religious institutions were believed to be one of seven major sources of United States capital who must be viewed as an extension of the United States government in the enslavement, segregation, and dehumanization of black people.130 Furthermore, he asserted, The Christian church and Jewish synagogues must not be seen merely as religious institutions. They are more than that. They are more than just a control mechanism with their ideology of servitude. The Christian churches and Jewish synagogues must be seen as financial giants operating in a new trinity—the church, business, and government.131 Hamer stood with Forman and the BEDC even though the “Black Manifesto” and Forman’s underlying principles were more Marxist in nature than Hamer’s theo-political and faith-oriented grounding analysis. Hamer was nevertheless aware of the scapegoating that occurred when United States officials and segregationists would employ the term “communist” to stir up confusion and misrepresent the black freedom struggle. Her response was, “Now I know as much about communism as a horse know about New Year, but nobody, and that mean nobody, have to tell me that it’s not something wrong with the system. And no communist have to tell me that I’m without food and clothing and a decent place to live in this country [United States].”132 In short, Hamer knew experientially and intuitively what Forman described theoretically from a Marxist perspective. Furthermore, Hamer’s endeavor to include black reparations in the freedom struggle was another way of expressing and exercising black humanity, dignity, creativity, and self-determination, and was a protracted and proactive struggle. Hamer knew that many people would come and go before the healing and improving of local black communities and the erasure of white domination and black subjugation occurred.133 Although the process was slow and non-linear with the status quo seemingly unyielding, Hamer encouraged each generation and local community to remain steadfast in the struggle for and creation of jubilee and black reparations. The discussion of Hamer’s vision of jubilee and black reparations provides a distinct model of revolutionizing the diversity and inclusion paradigm. Hamer 130 131 132 133

Forman, “Control, Conflict, and Change,” 49. Ibid. Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 100. Hamer, “‘If the Name of the Game Is Survive, Survive,’” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 143–4.

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practiced black self-love and advocacy for the liberation of all people by extending an invitation to both black and white people to join with black freedom fighters to create a new society and a new life on Earth. As a participant and leader of jubilee and black reparations that explicitly and unapologetically served the interests of black people, Hamer modeled a diversity that critiques and challenges contemporary models of “inclusion” and institutional “fit.” As demonstrated in chapter 4, Hamer’s Christian praxis evolved as she moved from desiring to be white and advocating for equal rights (i.e., struggling to be included or to fit in) to redefining what it means to be human in the United States for herself and others regardless of race, class, gender, or national origin. She was no longer looking for white people to recognize and respect her to legitimate her humanity because she had experienced freedom from the power of the white, dehumanizing gaze. The two warring ideals and conflicted ways of being, African and European, black and white, in Du Bois’ double-consciousness theoretical, existential paradigm was resolved by Hamer without the need for reconciliation. Whiteness as an ideology and way of being in the world became unattractive and trumped as Hamer matured in loving herself in her darker hued skin in public, redemptive ways. Her sense of “Black Power” was both particular and universal because Hamer understood human suffering and oppression within and beyond black suffering and oppression. As Harriet Tubman led herself and others to physical freedom, Hamer led many to ideological and intrapsychic freedom in a way that created new spaces for physical freedom, too, within the seemingly permanent structures of white domination and control. In this vein, Hamer was not looking to belong to institutions and a social system that denied her right to be human. Instead, her diversity leadership for jubilee and black reparations was about creating and fashioning structures, systems, and self-governing processes that would nurture the well-being of all humans and the environmental place and space in which they inhabited. 3.5 Hamer’s Projects Now, a brief turn is made to some of Hamer’s specific projects, beyond the Freedom Farm Coop and SNCC voter registration campaign. Beyond what she did among and with poor and middle-class black communities, Hamer’s struggle for freedom included collaboration with interracial and interfaith women organizations. For example, Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS) was a clandestine operation spearheaded by Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women and Height’s Jewish friend, Polly Cowan. In the summer of 1964, Height and Cowan invited black and white northern professional, Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant women to enter the lives of black and white

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southern Christian women by providing supplies, resources, and a genuine interest to understand the plight of southern women. The project’s goal was “opening the lines of communication between black and white middle-class women, particularly in Mississippi, to facilitate acceptance of integration and black enfranchisement in the South.”134 Unlike the northern college students that descended into Mississippi to work with SNCC on voter registration and freedom schools, the professional women had to work underground and comply with local customs in order to be a calming presence in the middle of violence and vitriol. On the surface, they adhered to the race, class, religious, and gender norms of southern life in Mississippi by not mixing the races and communicating that they were there to relieve human suffering on one hand, and to learn of southern recipes because they were developing a cookbook of such cuisine. However, the complex operation entailed site observations of SNCC’s Freedom Schools, documentation, reporting back to northern connections, distributing supplies, providing resources, and critical interracial, interreligious, and intercultural dialogues in the homes of southern women without participating in any civil rights demonstrations or marches.135 In short, WIMS women were performing a “ministry of presence,”136 and Height referred to this ministry as a quiet revolution.137 Hamer participated as a southern host to northern black and white women, built on the work of WIMS as coordinator of NCNW sponsored southern regional conference, and a workshop and grant development attendee which resulted in Hamer receiving funds to launch a Head Start program in her hometown of Ruleville that is still in existence today.138 Another example of Hamer’s collaboration with white women includes her work as co-founder and speaker at the inaugural meeting of the National Women’s Political Caucus.139 Even though Hamer was anti-abortion and did not feel the need to be liberated from the black man, she was nonetheless committed to working across racial and class lines for the freedom of all. Concerning abortion, Hamer argued, “The methods used to take human lives, such as abortion, the pill, the ring, et cetera, amounts to genocide. I believe that 134 135 136 137 138 139

Debbie Z. Harwell, “Wednesdays in Mississippi: Uniting Women across Regional and Racial Lines, Summer 1964,” The Journal of Southern History 76, no. 3 (August 2010): 617. Harwell, “Wednesdays in Mississippi,” 634. Ibid. “Wednesdays in Mississippi: A Documentary Film.” http://www.wimsfilmproject.com/. Accessed on May 13, 2018. Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 193–7. Hamer, “‘Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free,’” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 134–9.

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legal abortion is legal murder and the use of pills to prevent God’s will is a great sin.”140 Hamer’s suspicion of what many white middle-class women touted as sexual reproductive rights was prevalent in the black community. For black and poor women in the United States and beyond, involuntary sterilization was commonplace.141 Thus, for Hamer, an opportunity for black women to do to themselves what was already done to them was ludicrous. This is probably why she claimed, “If you want to abortionize somebody, do it to yourself because [I’m] going to try to keep the children.”142 The babies in the womb and the world were precious to Hamer.143 Moreover, Hamer saw the propaganda in the supposed right to abort connected to black genocide and the influx of white immigrants. Hamer felt legalized birth control methods were not necessary because she argued, “… if you can bring folks over here from everywhere else, and then two years they have a better position than we have, then you got room for these folks here.”144 In Hamer’s mind, the United States was not overpopulated if white voluntary immigrants had the opportunity to come and thrive in such a short period of time. Hamer’s projects included work with individuals from diverse faith traditions, political affiliations, and social locations. Freedom and justice, or jubilee and black reparations were integral even in death and dying. On her sickbed, she asked her closest confidante and comrade in the freedom struggle, Charles McLaurin, to ensure that she would not be buried on a plantation.145 Her experience of freedom, even in death, was to continue for she desired to be interned on soil that was not controlled by a white male. Hamer rested in power, and peace, as her final wishes were honored.146

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Hamer, “‘Is It Too Late?,’” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 133. See Davis, Women, Race, & Class, 202–21. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 119. L. C. Dorsey, a comrade of Hamer’s in the southern freedom struggle, claims that Hamer’s love for children motivated her to become involved in anti-poverty programs such as Head Start. Hamer, and many other political freedom fighters, were concerned that the money was a ploy to decrease involvement in political change and would leave the people dependent on the government. See Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 205. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 119. Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir an Army, 237. In memory of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, The Final Call, a Nation of Islam publication, notes how many people employed the phrase “rest in power” to honor the revolutionary role she played as a leader in South Africa’s anti-apartheid, post-apartheid, and freedom struggles. I think it was appropriate to apply the phrase to Hamer as well especially in the way she chose to live, and to die, for freedom and justice. See 2–3, 16.

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Hamer’s Diversity Praxis and Practical Theology

In Disciplines of the Spirit, Thurman argues that the practice of reconciliation stems from what he deems to be a literal fact, the underlying unity of life, with the purpose of repairing ruptured human relations as well as internal, disharmony within one’s self.147 Within this discipline, Thurman describes the significance of the human desire to understand and to be understood as integral to one knowing that she matters, is cared and accounted for in and against the vicissitudes of life. When one experiences being understood, she can be a vessel of understanding to others in concrete, particular relations. However, “when the need to be cared for is dishonored, threatened, or undetermined, then the individual cannot experience his own self as a unity and his life may become deeply fragmented and splintered.”148 Put differently and succinctly, we, as humans, must matter to each other to survive. Moreover, when the deep need for understanding is denied or deprived for generations by systems and structures that overwhelm the individual in her respective community, both the individual and community need healing, restoration, and reparation. Hence, the work, the practice of internal and external integration and wholeness is relational, mutual care that is comprised of the self and at least one additional individual promoting the development and well-being of the self, the community, and the broader world. Ubuntu is an African worldview and practice that rightly captures what Thurman describes in his discipline of reconciliation. According to pastor emeritus of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, IL, Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. argues Its [ubuntu’s] rich meaning is perhaps best captured in the Zulu saying, umntu, ngumntu, ngbantu, which means, ‘an individual can only be fully human by being in relationship with other human beings, all of whom have their humanity validated by virtue of the ntu [breath of God!] within them.’149 147

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Howard Thurman, Disciplines of the Spirit (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1977), 104–5 [originally published in New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1963]. Many may not agree with Thurman’s proposition concerning the literal fact or reality of the unity of life, and therefore may need to see it as his presupposition to nor readily dismiss the value of his contribution on wholeness and being human. Thurman, Disciplines of the Spirit, 107. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. “Doing Theology for Ordinary Folk,” in Black Practical Theology, eds. Dale P. Andrews and Robert London Smith, Jr. (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2015), 91.

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When this African worldview is lived out in community and in the struggle for jubilee and black reparations, “all persons are valued as equal because all have the breath of God in them and all are made in the image of God.”150 Although it has yet to be discovered if Hamer ever employed the terms ubuntu or Thurman’s discipline of reconciliation in her diversity leadership, it should be clear that her embodied subjectivity, in principle and practice, adequately captured what they describe. Furthermore, Hamer articulated a diversity praxis of identity and belonging that invited each one who heard or encountered her to see their human beauty and worth beyond the debilitating, divisive conditions created, and sustained, by a racist, sexist, classist, and capitalist nation. Moving beyond the superficiality of identity and belonging that was socially manufactured by the white dominant elite male class, Hamer encourages us to gaze with a lens of jubilee and black reparations so that the phenotypical racialized and other politicized constructions are healed and rightly integrated. Hamer audaciously infused life in racial, gender, class, and political categories that were imposed upon her and the black masses. She confronted the epithets, ideologies, signs, and symbols that were designed, and legitimized, to harm, demean, and crush one’s sense of self. Simply put, black people did not matter. Earlier in this chapter, it was mentioned how Hamer claimed she was not knowledgeable about the political label of being called a communist. On another occasion when she was accused of being “leftist” and liberal, she redefined what it meant to be far left when she claimed, I know it’s people talked about destroying my life and they’ve talked about me as being from the far left. One man told me, he said you will admit ‘you are from the far left.’ I said, ‘I admit I’m from the far left. To be exact I am four hundred years being far left. I don’t think it could be any further.’151 Here, Hamer expressed her human identity and sense of belonging to a nation, a geopolitical space and place that was comprised of many people who wanted her either dead or to remain in the inferior, non-human place they had designated for black people. Her succinct moral and social analysis of a political, degrading accusation invited the accuser to confront his inhumanity, 150 151

Ibid. Hamer, “‘Testimony Before the Democratic Reform Committee,’ Jackson, Mississippi, May 22, 1969,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is, eds. Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 96.

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in addition to the discontinuity between United States democratic ideals and practices. Hamer made it clear that she was not the problem nor the cause of the discrepancies within a machine that was creating people who did not have the capacity, or desire, to understand and to be understood. Hamer defined being “far left” not as a political affiliation or worldview, but as an existential, material reality of the black masses that was primarily caused by those who claimed to be religiously and politically “right.” As early as 1969, she saw the farce of so-called urban renewal and model cities for what they were: further displacement and disposing of black poor people in the urban centers.152 Again, her religious and political orientation was grounded in Christ, the revolutionary, and towards the end of her life, she no longer remained as a registered Democrat. Pointedly, Hamer asserted, “… the Democratic Party hasn’t been loyal to me at all. So I am going to be running as an Independent.”153 Hamer asserted her autonomy from political parties that had not demonstrated any commitment or loyalty to black people. In another speech addressed to the National Council of Negro Women, she claimed, “We are being used from coast to coast for political football. And only thing that’s going to make us exist—and the only thing that’s going to carry us through: first place, we’ve got to have God on our side.”154 In many ways, Hamer’s leadership and politics on gender, race, class, and belonging were revolutionary and then, in other ways, she was less disruptive of a white-male dominated elitist oppressive patriarchal, sexist culture.155 Nonetheless, philosopher, scholar, and prison abolitionist activist Angela Y. Davis notes how black women’s bodies were rendered genderless during slavery because “Where work was concerned, strength and productivity under the threat of the whip outweighed considerations of sex. In this sense, the 152 153 154

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Hamer, “‘To Make Democracy a Reality,’” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 101. Hamer, “‘Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free,’” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 138. Hamer, “‘The Only Thing We Can Do Is to Work Together,’” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 73. Hamer’s use of the language “… God on our side” is somewhat akin to black and Latin American liberation theologies. However, Hamer does not make the definitive claim that God is on the side of the oppressed. Moreover, she seems to be trying to persuade the black educated middle-class women of the National Council of Negro Women that in finding a way to overcome class differences would be a sign that God is on their side. If class divisions prevailed, God would not be pleased in Hamer’s theological imagination. Hamer, at times, proclaimed views that upheld the status quo regarding gender and sexual roles. For example, she held that the strength of the nation resided in men, and men must make the “decisions concerning life, comfort, and security … Women can be strength for men, women can help with the decision making, but men will ultimately take the action.” Hamer, “‘Is It Too Late?,’” 133.

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oppression of women was identical to the oppression of men.”156 This lack of division of labor among black women and men was evident in Hamer’s context of sharecropping labor too. Hamer had worked alongside black men and boys on the plantation field as early as six years old. Possibly due to her literacy and analytical skills, she was given additional duties within the sharecropping system that she was able to leverage for jubilee and black reparations. As noted earlier in the text, Hamer was a timekeeper on W. D. Marlow’s plantation and she meted out justice whenever she could to the black genderless workers who were being cheated.157 Reiterating her statement to address the problem, Hamer stated, “So, I would take my pea to the field and use mine until I would see him coming, you know, because his was loaded and I know it was beating people like that.”158 Hamer addressed the economic and psychological wounds of the black family. When she could, Hamer gave equal, just pay to black women and men for their labor. For her action of jubilee, she humbly noted, “I didn’t know what to do and all I could do is rebel in the only way I could rebel.”159 Hamer turned her apparent powerlessness into power and experienced what many womanist theologians call, in reference to black women and their God, “making a way out of no way.” Without the apparent adequate resources, Hamer found a way to respond, resist, and rebel. However, there were numerous occasions when Hamer was the victim of gender and sexual violence without any recourse. Her hospital sterilization, jailhouse torture and sexual assault, and a host of mulatto aunts and uncles were evidence that black bodies, especially women, were controlled by the lust and sexual whims of white men. From slavery to sharecropping, black women’s bodies and reproductive practices were dictated by the needs of the white land-owning aristocracy. Davis argues “During the decades preceding the Civil War, Black women came to be increasingly appraised for their fertility (or for the lack of it): she who was potentially the mother of ten, twelve, fourteen or more became a coveted treasure indeed.”160 The abolition of the slave trade created a demand for labor to sustain slavery. Hence, black women’s bodies became a breeding space for the production of enslaved labor.161 Then, during the Jim Crow era, black women

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Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, & Class (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1983), 6. Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 18. Hamer cited in Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 19. Ibid. Davis, Women, Race, & Class, 7. Hamer’s enslaved grandmother, Liza Bramlett had three girls and twenty boys. Hamer, “‘Until I’m Free, You’re Not Free Either,’” 124.

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were incentivized to be “fruitful and multiply” because they were given fifty dollars for each additional field hand produced.162 Both Hamer’s mother and enslaved grandmother were victims of the aforementioned gender and sexual violence. Planned parenthood was not an option or privilege for Hamer’s grandmother, mother, or even Hamer due to her forced sterilization. Depending on the era, needs, and fears of white men, black women’s bodies and sexual reproduction practices were controlled by forces beyond their immediate control. Hamer exposed the powers, rulers, and principalities invading the wombs of black women when she responded to white men’s fears of school desegregation after the passing of Brown vs. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, in 1954. When the mayor of Mississippi questioned if she really wanted her kids to go to school with his kids, she replied, “Look, fellow, you’re not afraid of your kids going to school with mine. You’re afraid of your wife’s kids going to school with mine, because you got them in every damn school in the state.”163 The white male systemic sexual violence and injustice on black women, families, and communities was not dismissed or overlooked by Hamer in her work of jubilee and black reparations. Unlike white men who disowned their darker-skinned progeny and kin, Hamer embraced and acknowledged the diversity of natural skin tones within the human family. It can be argued that Hamer offers a sound response to a conundrum in the field of practical theology as outlined by Phillis I. Sheppard, a womanist practical and pastoral theologian. As Goto does, Sheppard challenges scholars and researchers in practical theology to take seriously raced bodies and lived experiences in ways that theorize race without reifying the socially constructed, biological fallacy.164 Sheppard candidly states her intention to “… poke and pry and problematize the near absence of raced bodies in practical theology,”165 in which she unveils the limited number of nonwhite scholars in the field and thereby underscores the increased dangers, difficulties, and risks of privileging and prioritizing raced bodies. Hamer’s practical theology was practiced by reading and interpreting texts which included her Bible, body, and culturalbodily polis in ways that enabled her to encounter, disrupt, and reconstruct 162 163 164

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Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir an Army, 11. Recall Hamer’s parents had six girls and fourteen boys and Fannie Lou Townsend (Hamer) was the youngest of twenty children. Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 120. Phillis I. Sheppard, “Raced Bodies: Portraying Bodies, Reifying Racism,” in Conundrums in Practical Theology, eds. Joyce Anne Mercer and Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore (Boston, MA and Leiden: Brill, 2016), 219–20. Ibid., 219.

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raced bodies and the environs in which they inhabited. Negative, degrading images and stereotypes of blackness and poverty were debunked while pristine notions of whiteness were dethroned. Hamer publicized her suffering in a way that portrayed racist acts, practices, and rituals by raced bodies as well as forms of resistance and rebellion. Black bodies, white bodies, red bodies, brown bodies, yellow bodies, gendered bodies, impoverished bodies, disenfranchised bodies, exploited bodies, and any-body that desired freedom were embraced in Hamer’s embodied subjectivity. Hence, Hamer confronted what Sheppard calls a practical theology conundrum in bodily form and diverse communities. Hamer raises how academic practical theologians, regardless of their respective race or ethnicity, should read and interpret their own raced bodies to increase their capacity and awareness of additional raced bodies, dead and alive, in their research and scholarly publications. Like Hamer, Sheppard is an apparent example for reading and interpreting raced bodies. However, she does not explicitly position herself as one who does. As an academician, Sheppard not only raises the conundrum, but skillfully, and humbly, bares her raced bodily story and those of her students, womanist colleagues in theology (pastoral, practical, and systematic), ethics, and sociology, institution, and nation to provoke change and the necessity of taking seriously raced bodies. Thus, experiences of teaching-and-learning, research, and scholarship are interwoven to portray multiple, diverse raced bodies while reminding readers of the conundrum. With hope, Sheppard describes what is possible when she asserts, “Given the commitment to describing lived experience, practical theology will more thoroughly inhabit its identity and aims when it pays attention to raced bodies.”166 Then, Sheppard closes with a call for an ethical turn, and not an epistemological or theological one. She says, “The metaethical: The fact of the lived experience of raced bodies demands both a metaethical and normative turn in practical theology.”167 Hamer’s and Sheppard’s examples of how raced bodies are instructive to remove the veil of raced hidden bodies and figures must be expanded to include congregations too.168 Congregations and denominations, too, have failed to consider their respective raced congregational bodies/communities and ways to heal, confront, and transform historical, and contemporary, racial harm

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Sheppard, “Raced Bodies,” 226. Ibid., 244. Sheppard mentions how research and scholarship on raced bodies in the academic field of practical theology demands an ethical response both individually and communally. However, she is not explicit in naming congregations or faith communities as is done here. Ibid., 244–5.

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and violence. Unfortunately, many black Christians in either multicultural churches, predominantly white churches, or historically black churches are ashamed of being both black and Christian or feel that Christianity trumps one’s racial or ethnic identity. Furthermore, as discussed earlier in this chapter, typically, white people see themselves as individuals and the norm, and not affiliated to a group or racial identity. Contemporary racist, ignorant, and fearful cries from many white people include “we are one human race,” and in response to Black Lives Matter, they assert “All Lives Matter.” Hamer knew and proclaimed as a black Christian woman that we are all created from God and championed the way, in thought and deed, that all lives matter could only become a reality once black lives mattered. Hamer’s desire to be white as a little girl and then rejecting whiteness as the norm of humanity as an adult, unfortunately, is a form of maturation that is apparently difficult to achieve. Today, black practical theologian and Christian educator Anthony Reddie creates the context for which he does an emancipatory Christian education to restore the dark-skinned body and self that has undergone physical and psychological displacement as well as alienation from knowing how to respond to God’s call for LIFE in a raced body.169 Reddie’s approach to educating in the faith for identity and self-esteem confronts and challenges the fact that many black Christians have internalized and inculcated the colonizer’s attitude and values concerning the black body.170 Although Hamer did not have access to Christian education experiences from the likes of Reddie, nonetheless, she was able to grasp the significance of her personhood in her darker-hued skin and can serve as a model for black people in the African diaspora who struggle with being both black and Christian. On the African continent, the problem of low self-esteem and inability to integrate being both black and Christian is common even though Hamer observed something entirely different while visiting Guinea in 1964. According to theologian Tim Hartman, Ghanaian African theologian Kwame Bediako articulates what it means to be both African and Christian by dismissing the myth that European missionaries brought Christianity to Africa.171 Although 169

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Anthony G. Reddie, “Beginning Again: Rethinking Christian Education in Light of the Great Commission,” in Teaching All Nations: Interrogating the Matthean Great Commission, eds. Mitzi J. Smith and Jayachitra Lalitha (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014), 240–43. Ibid., 243–6. Tim Hartman, “An Act of Theological Negritude: Kwame Bediako on African Christian Identity,” in Religion, Culture and Spirituality in Africa and the African Diaspora, eds. William Ackah, Jualynne E. Dodson, and R. Drew Smith (New York, NY and London, UK: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2018), 81–95.

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Hamer never apparently queried if Christianity was of African origin or not, after her visit to Guinea, she was clear on some significant continuities between Guinean continental Africans and African descendants who resided in Mississippi in the United States. She reminds black people everywhere that there is nothing to be ashamed of concerning our cultural origins and traditions because black, African racialized people are not what the Europeans and Euro-Americans claim. As a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Hamer challenged and invited political leaders at the highest level to respond justly and quickly to the black lives in Mississippi. Then, five years later in 1969, she challenged and invited white churches and synagogues to respond to the cry of Black power and reparations. Leaders of the respective political and religious institutions had an opportunity to move in ways that acknowledged moral injury, and historical and contemporary violence and injustice, and respond to the demands of the black masses to heal the land and the people. When the demand came in the tune of $500,000,000 to white religious sites and leaders, according to religious ethicist Jennifer Harvey What did not result were robust financial commitments to eradicating racial inequity and bolstering Black power. What did not result were responses of repentance for racism and repair of racial harm on the part of white churches. What did not result was an era of improved regard between white and Black Christians. If anything, quite the opposite occurred.172 In a nutshell, Harvey claims the religious congregations neither dismissed the charges nor did they admit to the charges because they lacked the moral capacity and agency to do so.173 Thus, Hamer’s cry for a step towards freedom, justice, healing, and change fell on deaf ears and fallow hearts. Those who should have been in a much better place to hear and receive than the national politicians were not morally and religiously prepared to see their raced bodies and the material and relational harm they have inflicted on nonwhite raced bodies. Whiteness was unable to be named, judged, and potentially healed or transformed by those who had constructed it. In the end, Hamer’s call and support for black reparations, in conjunction with Harvey’s analysis, exposes 172

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Jennifer Harvey, “White Protestants and Black Christians: The Absence and Presence of Whiteness in the Face of the Black Manifesto,” Journal of Religious Ethics 39, no. 1 (2011): 125–6. Harvey, “White Protestants and Black Christians,” 127–8.

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the shallowness of white Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish religion in response to white supremacy, racism, “integration,” diversity, and the legacy of slavery. Regardless of where white religionists were on addressing racial harm and violence, Hamer was relentless and clear while being grounded in a sound, Christian praxis. 4.1 Appropriating Hamer’s Thought Leadership Hamer’s predating of the discourse on diversity and inclusion does not render her speechless on the topic. Through her leadership for jubilee and black reparations, she invites church-related historically white academic institutions to follow a path that would facilitate the removal of the pitfalls and landmines that were discussed in the first section of the chapter. Creating structures, processes, and practices for naming and taking responsibility for the racial harm and injustice inherited and inflicted would be an appropriate start.174 In addition, hiring external and internal black and other nonwhite consultants to provide a critical lens and literature that white leaders would not be able to see on their own would suggest the possibility of the institution and its respective leaders becoming “new wineskin” for the new wine. Can historically white dominated church and non-church-related theological academic institutions begin to provide an alternative, redemptive education like Hamer received from the institutions of the black family and church, and civic movement affiliations? Could they begin to identify and tell institutional and individual narratives, as Lewis and Parker instruct, that would create space and engender policies and practices to heal wounded history that include people, place, and space? Can Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant worship institutions find a way to respond to the demand for black reparations that came in 1969? Would new conceptualizations of diversity and inclusion emerge to respond to multigenerational, multifaceted forms of oppression at the intersection of race, gender, and class? Possibly, Truth, Reconciliation, and Reparations Commissions (TRRC) can be implemented in the church and theological academy to demonstrate an intense, affirmative, and intentional commitment to realizing the freedom of and in Christ for humanity and all of creation.175

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Brown University Committee on Slavery and Justice, that was launched in 2003 and led by African American now president emerita Ruth J. Simmons, is one such example of potentially revolutionizing the diversity and inclusion paradigm. For those who need more of a biblical warrant for the case of reparations than what Hamer provides, Anthony G. Reddie’s Working Against the Grain: Re-imaging Black Theology in the 21st Century (New York, NY and London, UK: Routledge, 2014) and the particular chapter entitled “A Biblical and Theological Case for Reparations” should be consulted.

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Hamer, in the era of integration and desegregation, sought to make integration substantive as she worked to create the necessary conditions for just relations, participatory democracy, and the kingdom of God to be realized on Earth. Through powerful practices of narrative/storytelling and nonviolent direction action for jubilee and black reparations, Hamer healed and empowered many to know themselves as the divine had designed instead of through the fictitious lenses of race and racism that governed and oppressed. Integration was about renewal and enacting the freedom that Christ had ushered in. Hamer’s practices, processes, paradigms, projects, and political engagement for revolutionizing diversity and inclusion are instructive and inspiring.

Chapter 6

Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology: Sources and Relevance to the Field of Practical Theology Through the raced body Christian praxis of Fannie Lou Hamer, the ideals and ideas of liberation, freedom, healing, love, justice, education, and reparations broke in on a closed, unjust, and violent Mississippi, and nation. Norms, thoughts, analyses, and practices that were contrary to the national and statebased objectives of white domination were lived and narrated in the person of Hamer.1 She integrated, through her embodied subjectivity, various perceived conflicts and tensions such as theology and practice, faith and public life, and the church, community, and academy. In this chapter, first, the sources of Hamer’s revolutionary practical theology are discussed using the Wesleyan quadrilateral of [lived] experience, tradition, scripture, and reason.2 This first section includes how Hamer bore witness to a ‘womanist idea,’ as defined by Layli Maparyan.3 Next, Bridget Green’s protowomanist construction and appropriation of Hamer is briefly discussed and analyzed. Then, Hamer is placed in dialogue with academic practical theology to demonstrate the relevance of Hamer’s Christian praxis for theological academic institutions in general, and black theologians (womanist, systematic, and practical) in particular.

1 Hamer Biographer Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 310, notes a comment from Ella Baker’s eulogy in which Baker commended Hamer for not only speaking about the ideals and ideas of the movement, but also living them. 2 The Wesleyan quadrilateral is chosen because of its clear, succinct description of sources for doing theological reflection especially for laypersons. I chose not to use James Cone’s six sources of black experience, black history, black culture, revelation, scripture, and tradition for two reasons. First, Cone speaks of doing academic black theology and Hamer was not an academician. Second, I speak of lived experience as a source for Hamer which slightly differs from both Cone’s academic source and the Wesleyan quadrilateral use of experience. Hamer is constantly making meaning of her life in light of the faith, and vice-versa, I believe, that constitutes more than just selecting a particular experience of the past or present to develop a disciplined practice of theological reflection and action. For Cone’s sources see Frederick L. Ware, Methodologies of Black Theology (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2002), 39. 3 The concept “womanist idea” is coined by Layli Maparyan’s The Womanist Idea (New York, NY and London, UK: Routledge, 2012).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004438071_008

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Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology: Sources4

Hamer’s revolutionary practical theology, as presented in former chapters, points to the privileging of personal, familial, communal, and national lived experience in the past and present as a primary source of doing and living theology. In this vein, Hamer’s revolutionary practical theology as constructed from her speeches, oral interviews, and autobiographical writings, are indigenous sources and were used by Hamer to make meaning of what was going on (or wrong) towards discerning, envisioning, and enacting what should be going on, especially for those who claimed to be followers of the religion of Jesus. 1.1 Lived Experience Two remarkable aspects of Hamer’s attention to lived experience as a source of doing theology are nearly unparalleled for practical theologians in the church and academy. First, Hamer’s theological reflection and socio-political analyses on lived experience did not operate as an unjust, myopic, and exclusionary norm. Instead, the opposite occurred. She was aware of differences and similarities among race, class, gender, sexuality (i.e., black women’s reproductive harms through rape and forced sterilization, and genderless labor), and geographical location while always looking to protect and project the experiences and voices of vulnerable and marginalized people groups such as poor black, rural women and children. In short, Hamer’s consciousness of her lived experience empowered her to sit, challenge, and collaborate with those whose experience was different from her own. Through her faith and communal connections, Hamer was enabled to affirm the beauty and brilliance of blackness, hold the death and despair that filled the air, and externalize her belief in the kinship and interconnection of all humanity. 4 When this project began, there was no intent or awareness of positioning Hamer as a womanist for two reasons. First, it would have been anachronistic because I understand academic womanist theology to have begun as a response to white male theology, black liberation theology, and white feminist theology in the early 1990s. Although Hamer could have been positioned as a proto-womanist practical theologian, it was not my intent to tease out her womanist sensibilities. I did not want to make her fit within a paradigm if she did not although she was a poor, black woman of Christian faith who focused on liberation, survival, and quality of life for herself as well as various other communities. Second, and foremost, Hamer was not positioned in the theological academy who had to speak, write, and analyze for academic communities. She was from, and of, the grassroots while also being on the margins of the church, academy, and mainstream society/community. However, now that my view of womanist scholarship has been broadened by Maparyan, I can speak of Hamer’s ‘womanist idea’ with integrity to both Hamer and womanist scholarship.

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Second, Hamer’s revolutionary practical theology is “indigenous” theology. Regardless of the activist and participatory role Hamer occupied in areas such as voter registration, electoral politics, anti-poverty programs, women’s rights, cooperative economics, community development and decision-making, quality and affordable housing, agriculture and land acquisition, early childhood and public education, vocational development, or labor rights, she never failed to advocate for self and others with a belief in the human capacity for change and a divine empowering presence to engender change in people and society. For Hamer, Jesus was the model for the kind of work required for change which was revolutionary. In a similar fashion, womanist systematic theologian M. Shawn Copeland argues, “The Christian gospel is an invitation to metanoia, to change; the standard against which that change is measured is the life of Jesus Christ.”5 In accepting the Gospel’s invitation to change, we learn how Hamer was transformed from an oppressed sharecropper to a protestor, resister, educator, community organizer, political candidate, prophetess, and pastoral presence in both private and public spaces. Moreover, as has been documented, people, places, and spaces, underwent change, too, as Hamer spoke truth to power, to the people, and when a way was made, inside power.6 Although Hamer never occupied a seat of political authority, Hamer did occupy, though momentarily, places and spaces of political power which were more than just performative, perfunctory expressions of discontent when she entered the halls of government, educational institutions, or white women dominated organizations. Hamer spoke from a place of moral authority, of love for a new, changed, and healed nation and humanity, and an abiding faith in the God that had made a way for her to speak on such a grand scale. Debunking bifurcations, compartments, and abstractions, Hamer embodied and engaged people, places, spaces, powers, and principalities as she went, and wherever she was. Her encounters with, entrances into, and exits from nonMississippi contexts enabled her to see the scope of the problem beyond her state of residence without ever losing her indigenous Mississippi voice and accountability to the people, places, and spaces of the Deep South. 1.2 Scripture Although it is unclear if Hamer privileged scripture over the other three sources in her revolutionary practical theology, undoubtedly, the Bible played 5 M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 6. 6 The phrase “speak truth inside power” comes from Maparyan’s discussion on South African member of parliament Pregs Govender’s womanist activism within the post-apartheid government, 230–53.

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a prominent role.7 In a similar vein to Womanist Christian educator and practical theologian N. Lynne Westfield’s testament of the role the King James translation of the Bible plays in her scholarship of African American women’s resiliency in concealed gatherings,8 Hamer’s speeches and life are replete with KJV biblical references from both testaments that were cited and song at will to breathe life and hope into the existential moment. However, unlike Hamer, Westfield makes the explicit claim that for many black women, the Bible is the highest source of authority.9 Hamer’s apparent silence on making this claim explicit invites us to consider a more nuanced understanding of her relationship to and interpretation of the Bible that is more reflective of New Testament and Early Christian Origins scholar Vincent Wimbush’s typology.10 In making meaning of her existential reality, the Bible functioned and was employed in numerous linguistic ways by Hamer that allowed her to communicate in religious, socio-political, and symbolic terms for revolution and new life in this world. For example, religious historian Vincent Harding notes, “Wherever the Mississippian carried the word of hope and commitment in the movement, especially at hundreds of mass meetings in her state and beyond, the words of Jesus in his synagogue became her own mantra: The spirit of the Lord is upon me …”11 Hamer not only cited the Bible at mass meetings in public gatherings, but also in jail cells during the time she and others were tortured, and integrated biblical passages and themes into freedom songs and Negro spirituals. Concerning the latter two contexts, Hamer’s movement anthem was “This Little Light of Mine” and she took creative license to assert, “I’ve got the light of freedom. I’m gonna let it shine,” “… All in the jailhouse. I’m gonna let it shine” “Down on the picket line, Lord … I’m gonna let it shine,” “Tell Senator Eastland,

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My lack of clarity on if Hamer privileged the bible, or not, over experience, reason, and tradition is significant especially within black Protestant Christianity. While it is clear that Hamer used the Bible and was informed by it, Hamer does not necessarily privilege the Bible as the highest source of authority in theological reflection and development as are done by many in the Black Church. Perhaps, Hamer invites the Black Church to consider new ways of doing theological reflection that does not have to privilege the Bible while also not diminishing its significance. N. Lynne Westfield, Dear Sisters: A Womanist Practice of Hospitality (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2001), 5. Ibid., 108–9. Vincent L. Wimbush, “The Bible and African Americans: An Outline of an Interpretative History,” in Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1991), 81–97. Vincent Harding, “The Anointed Ones: Hamer, King, and the Bible in the Southern Freedom Movement,” in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (New York, NY and London, UK: Continuum, 2000), 542.

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I’m gonna let it shine,” and “All in the Ballot Box, I’m gonna let it shine.”12 When Hamer was not reciting “a city that’s set on a hill cannot be hid. Let your light so shine that men would see your good works and glorify the father, which is in Heaven,”13 in speeches and rallies, she was singing it to encourage, inspire, and affirm people in the movement. Harding further argues “… Fannie Lou Hamer’s most powerful uses of the biblical texts … was in her songs, songs she freely shared with the people who were working for a new way of living for themselves, their community, their state and their nation.”14 Hence, Harding’s interpretation of Hamer’s use of Christian scripture connects back to her lived experience and embodied subjectivity as she struggled for freedom through song and a rich tradition of the Black Church spirituals. Hamer contended that negro spirituals should be sung by many more people because it was her belief that the practice of singing the spirituals made black people strong and enabled them to survive conditions of the slave trade, slavery, and a slow genocide.15 Proudly, Hamer asserted, Singing is one of the main things that can keep us going. When you’re in a brick cell, locked up, and haven’t done anything to anybody but still you’re locked up there and sometimes words just begin to come to you and you begin to sing. Like one of my favorite songs, “This Little Light of Mine, I’m Going to Let It Shine.” This same song goes back to the fifth chapter of Matthew, which is the Beatitudes of the Bible, when [Jesus] says a city that sets on a hill cannot be hid. Let your light so shine that men would see your good works and glorify the father which is in heaven. I think singing is very important. It brings out the soul.16 Understanding the significance of singing scripture, and not just reciting the text, Hamer experienced and valued the power of biblical passages within one’s being to be enfleshed into songs of resistance and freedom. “When she

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Phyl Garland, “Builders of a New South: Negro Heroines of Dixie Play Major Role in Challenging Racist Traditions,” Ebony Magazine 21, no. 10 (August 1966): 27. https:// books.google.com/books?id=ys2MeNoI4NIC&pg=PA27&lpg=PA27&dq=Phyl+Garland, +builders+of+a+new+south&source=bl&ots=9rxOwUgpLY&sig=QP5_adHoMtxKHHqPu a8v0U-R3PE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj4wYKfvP7bAhWh4IMKHfToBUgQ6AEILDA A#v=onepage&q=Phyl%20Garland%2C%20builders%20of%20a%20new%20south&f= true. Accessed on July 2, 2018. Hamer, “‘We’re On Our Way,’” 53. Harding, “The Anointed Ones,” 543. Hamer, “Fannie Lou Hamer Speaks Out,” Essence Magazine (October 1971): 75. Hamer cited in Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 21.

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[Hamer] sang,” notes actor and vocal artist Harry Belafonte, “it transcended all other considerations at the moment. And when she evoked singing at times, I always felt that she felt it was needed in order to break a mood or something that was happening at the moment.”17 Belafonte further exclaims regarding the significance of Hamer’s singing, “the struggle of all black America … I thought that when she sang, there was indeed a voice raised that was without compromise the voice of all of us.”18 1.3 Tradition Hamer’s insistence on the significance of the spirituals and singing in nurturing black people in faith and life is found in the creative work of Yolanda Y. Smith, a womanist practical theologian and Christian educator. In Reclaiming the Spirituals: New Possibilities for African American Christian Education, Smith articulates a curriculum model that enables black congregations to build a bridge between their triple heritage as African, African American, and Christian through the spirituals. As Hamer declared, Smith, too, laments that “unfortunately, many contemporary African American churches have adopted models of Christian education that have served to distance their congregations and ministries from the spirituals and other components of their tripleheritage.”19 The spirituals serve as a possibility for being a restorative bridge on many levels for Smith. On one level, according to Smith, spirituals “… can be shaped and reshaped to accommodate a particular situation or event.”20 The rhythms, sounds, thoughts, lyrics, and performances of spirituals are not rigid or fixed in time. Rather they can be appropriated again and again throughout time and space that allows for the continuity of the past into the present while being free to create anew. For example, Smith speaks of how Hamer and Bernice Johnson Reagon, freedom singers and fighters, took the melody from the spiritual song “Don’ Let Nobody Turn You Around” and created new lyrics for the new moment so that it became “Don’ let segregation turn you around.”21 Like the spirituals, Smith imagines a Christian education model in which “the content, practice, and participants are shaped and reshaped throughout the educational process.”22

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Belafonte cited in Mills, Ibid., 20. Belafonte cited in Mills, Ibid., 21. Yolanda Y. Smith, Reclaiming the Spirituals: New Possibilities for African American Christian Education (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2004), 5. Ibid., 18. Ibid. Ibid.

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Preacher and religious educator, Ella P. Mitchell acknowledges and affirms a Christian education process for black churches that takes seriously Africanisms in African American Christianity.23 Through personal experience, storytelling, and retelling of teaching-and-learning modalities among West Africans and the United States enslaved and free Africans, Mitchell recounts the significance of the oral tradition.24 Reminiscent of Hamer and her household, Mitchell recalls “When I was a child in South Carolina, our household included two grandmothers who had been born in slavery and were barely literate. But they were capable of magnificent comments on the Bible, and they could quote it seemingly for days.”25 Mitchell attributes the effective, impressive pedagogy of her great grandparents to West African oral and linguistic communication and instructional practices that was practiced in the invisible black church during slavery.26 As a distinct cultural and communicative experience from Euro-Americans and missionaries, enslaved Africans learned through aural-oral teaching methods, hearing-speaking in community, in lived experience despite attempts to suppress Africanisms and inculcate docility by many Euro-American missionaries. In their limited English speaking and reading skills, Mitchell’s grandparents, nonetheless, had access to the biblical text and the rich, substrate of West African communicative rhythms in teachingand-learning of the Christian tradition and life. With the African approach, Mitchell argues, “… succeeding African generations gained a total involvement in the tradition, avoiding the erosion of faith/culture suffered by such groups as the Puritans in New England.”27 23

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Although Ella P. Mitchell is highlighted in this section on understanding Africanisms in black Christianity in the United States, other African American Christian/religious educators such as Olivia Pearl Stokes and Grant S. Shockley also made contributions in bridging Africa to the United States black religious experience, and black theology with Christian education to combat the white Christian models that were being appropriated and practiced in black congregations. For example, See Olivia Pearl Stokes, “Black Theology: A Challenge to Religious Education,” in Religious Education and Theology, ed. Norma H. Thompson (Birmingham, AL: Religious Education Press, 1982), 71–99, and “Education in the Black Church,” Religious Education 69 (July–August 1974): 433–45; Grant Shockley, “Christian Education and the Black Church: A Contextual Approach,” Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 2, no. 2 (1975): 75–88 and “Black Theology and Religious Education,” in Theologies of Religious Education, ed. Randolph Crump Miller (Birmingham, AL: Religious Education Press, 1995), 314–35. Ella P. Mitchell, “Oral Tradition: Legacy of Faith for the Black Church,” Religious Education 81, no. 1 (Winter 1986), 93. Ibid. Ibid., 94. See also Albert J. Raboteau’s Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1978). Ibid., 97.

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Hamer’s embodiment of biblical texts, and what womanist practical theologian and Christian educator Y. Smith calls the triple-heritage, through the spirituals, demonstrates how the Bible and various traditions—African, African American, and Christianity—can be formative and formidable resources in response to systems of racial injustice and violence. Furthermore, certain womanist biblical scholars position Hamer as a protowomanist who employed sass or talk back when confronting systems and practices of white male domination.28 Hamer’s strength, will, and wisdom to know and exercise one’s humanity as a public witness against oppression as well as for the well-being of herself and broader community constitute a transcendence of both life and death. Issues of mere individual survival and quality of life aspirations were never a temptation or seduction for Hamer. In many ways, Hamer embodied what womanist New Testament scholar Mitzi J. Smith asserts, A womanist’s commitment is manifest in her audacious, vocal, and vociferous pursuit of freedom and justice from dis-ease and oppression. Silence in the face of oppression and injustice can be complicit in those forces and systems that diminish life and wholeness while giving the illusion of survival. A womanist understands her survival and freedom to be interconnected with the well-being of the community. Sassy women who talk back to systemic injustice and oppression know these truths.29 Although, here, M. Smith is speaking of womanists in the academic community, Hamer’s commitment to these values, principles, and practices have been demonstrated as one who was of, from, and for the grassroots community.30 Both Hamer and Y. Smith acknowledge the significance of African and African American heritages (tradition) in shaping the Christian experience of African Americans. As mentioned in chapter 5, Hamer’s visit to Africa 28

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Mitzi J. Smith, “Race, Gender, and the Politics of ‘Sass’: Reading Mark 7:24–30 through a Womanist Lens of Intersectionality and Inter(con)textuality,” in Womanist Interpretations of the Bible: Expanding the Discourse, eds. Gay L. Byron and Vanessa Lovelace (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2016), 96, 109. M. Smith, “Race, Gender, and the Politics of ‘Sass,’” 96. It will be presented and argued later in this chapter that the academy is not necessarily the origin or gatekeeper of womanism or the womanist idea. This does not mean to suggest that womanism in its multiple and current forms in the academy is to be dismissed or denigrated. Rather, the attempt is to broaden the meaning and practice of a womanist beyond the academy.

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opened her eyes to the continuities and discontinuities between black people in Guinea and those in the United States. In relation to her family in southern Mississippi Hamer stated, I felt a closeness in Africa. I couldn’t speak the French language and a lot of them couldn’t speak English, but the comparison between my family and them was unbelievable. Two peoples that far apart and have so many things the same way.31 Hamer experienced the intimacy of returning to one’s roots—people, place, and space—and beholding kin and cultural mores that had endured the crossing of the Atlantic ocean as cargo in chains, the objectification of black bodies, the drudgery of slavery and plantation life, the English relexification of the native African tongue, and the disenfranchised, caste status. These things, and more, did not separate Hamer from experiencing the closeness and connection of her darker-skin roots. The black self-respect and love that nurtured Hamer, and in turn she nurtured, can be seen as an “endarkened”32 Christianity. It was an expression of the faith that came primarily from below while exegeting lived experience, histories, contexts, and a variety of texts including the Bible. With this endarkened articulation of Christianity, Hamer understood the atrocities perpetrated against black people in the United States were crimes against humanity. Contrary to the white imagination, Hamer inserted and repositioned black people in the human family which was a move that simultaneously questioned the humanity of European white people in the United States. This was yet another source of tradition that informed her revolutionary practical theology. Hamer deemed white crimes against black people as violations of the right to life against human beings. She told her predominantly white Madison audience,

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Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges,” 329. Hamer explicitly identified how wearing a head wrap, as it is commonly known today, was something she and her mother practiced like the women Hamer observed in Guinea. Furthermore, she also referenced how the women in her family and in Guinea with grace and poise carry things on their head while holding something in their hands too. The term “endarkened” is coined by black feminist ‘endarkened’ pedagogue and scholar, Cynthia B. Dillard. Dillard calls for a move away from such disconnected, disembodied terms such as “minority,” and “theory” and “enlighten” and substitute them for “majority,” “motherwit” and “endarken.” See Dillard, Learning to Remember the Things We’ve Learned to Forget: Endarkened Feminisms, Spirituality, and the Sacred Nature of Research & Teaching (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2012), 36.

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When I think about the crime that’s been committed against us, as human beings and as people, I can forgive easy for a lot of things, but when white America taken my name, that was a crime. I went sometime ago to Charleston, South Carolina, and I looked at the documents there and some of the documents there would say—would call the name of the person and said, ‘She doesn’t have any education, but she’s a good breeder: twenty-five dollars.’ I saw where my people had been sold as things …33 Black people in the United States and Africa were constitutive of the human race and divinely created, with languages, dialects, and cultures that preexisted prior to European arrival and enactment of the European slave trade. Moreover, through her grassroots research on her African enslaved foremothers, Hamer saw that the name that had been given to them did not define them as human, but as property, a commodity for sexual reproduction. She once recalled, My grandmother used to talk a lot about how they separated them when they were selling them. She was a slave and she used to tell us how she was first a Gober and then a Bramlett. I didn’t know what to make of it when I was a child, but since I’ve been grown I realized that it was the name that the white people give her. So I never will know what my name really was, because the white people took it from my grandmother when she came over from Africa.34 Hamer deconstructed the naming and renaming of her grandmother which led to the discovery of a pre-white, African name that was never to be recovered.35 Nonetheless, the fruit of her critical analysis enabled her to dismiss the names that had been given to her by white people and to assert her connection to Africa with pride. In the process, Hamer remembered what Cynthia B. Dillard, professor of teacher education, calls cultural artifacts or icons of significance towards the goal of seeing Africa’s people at home and in the diaspora by viewing the renaming of black people as a crime against humanity.36 33 34 35

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Hamer, “‘Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either,’” 124. The italics are Hamer’s according to the editors. Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges,” 328. During Hamer’s time, it was nearly impossible for her to discover the origin of her African name. However, today, it is possible with various agencies and scholars who help people discover their racial, ethnic roots. Dillard, Learning to Remember the Things We’ve Learned to Forget, 3.

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Hamer, in an Essence magazine interview in 1971, acknowledged, affirmed and celebrated her African, African American, and Christian heritages. She claimed, Just a few years ago, if somebody would have said ‘You Black African’ we would have gotten mad. Now, people want to talk the African talk. I love my heritage and I am not ashamed that my ancestors came from Africa, but I was born here and I’m a part of this place and I want to help to make it right.37 During a time of what many scholars call the post-civil rights movement and the reemergence of another wave of the white women’s movement, Hamer was deepening and broadening her sense of be-longing that was simultaneously particular and “universalizing.” Repatriation or relocation to the continent of Africa was not necessary because she began to claim her birthright on the soil that was stolen from Indigenous people groups yet, also, was primarily cultivated on the exploited labor and wisdom of African Americans. Empowered by her faith and principled action, Hamer created space to dwell in the United States by fashioning new, redemptive socio-political relations, processes, and practical programs in education, politics, agriculture, community development, and economics. Moreover, in the process, she encouraged the young people to not give up on the church or God, because despite her critique of the preachers/ministers who she contended were being used by the white power structure, Hamer understood the powerful role the church played in the lives of black people. In the Essence magazine interview, she asserted, “if something is wrong with the Church, stand up and change it and make it be relevant to the community.”38 Apparently, on one hand, in Hamer’s mind, the church was never to be abandoned or rejected. Then, on another hand, she seemed to have placed responsibility on the people, the laity, to assist in making the changes with the end of ensuring that the church remains embedded in addressing the social, political, economic, spiritual, and religious needs of the community. When the church became distant from its community, the church had to be challenged and changed.39 37 38 39

Hamer, “Fannie Lou Hamer Speaks Out,” Essence (October, 1971): 75. Hamer, “Fannie Lou Hamer Speaks Out,” 75. Hamer’s uses capital-c “Church” in her reference to the church, and I use lower casec in my reference to the church. Possibly, it was an editorial move of the magazine to capitalize “church” in Hamer’s reference to the local religious body that she belonged to and not the universal church regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, or geopolitical location.

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The church, as one aspect of the African American Christian tradition/heritage, Hamer noted, was significant in the lives of the black community. She stated, I got a Christmas card saying ‘I went to the crib and he was gone. I searched Bethlehem and he wasn’t there and an angel said unto me, Go out to the trash heaps, to the tenements and to the lowly and you’ll find Him. I went there and I fell on my knees, for there lay my God.’ We have to keep the Church in the community. The most beautiful people I’ve ever met are people who come from a Church background. There’s nothing wrong with the Church, it’s a part of our history, it’s a part of our heritage, it’s a part of our strength.40 Put simply and succinctly, in Hamer’s ecclesial imagination, the church was an integral part of African American Christian faith, life, and culture that was empowered to be in spaces and places that were forgotten, rejected, and abandoned by earthly powers though not by the divine. Baby Jesus could not be found at the center of religious, political, social, and economic power, but at the margins. Displaced, enslaved, and politically disenfranchised African women, men, and children in the United States created and shaped a religious institution in spite of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy. This institution constituted more than just brick and mortar and church officials. In a reciprocal fashion, the church also participated in the shaping of displaced, enslaved, and politically disenfranchised darker-skinned women, children, and men into a people, a sense of identity and belonging by becoming another distinctive people within the nation. Although, by and large, clergy were considered problematic according to Hamer, the ordained and/or more literate officials of the religious institution were not synonymous with the church. Hamer’s interpretation of the church coincides with New Testament scholarship on the social, political, and religious dynamics of Jesus’ message and ministry, and first-century Christian communities.41 The poor, social, political, and religious outcasts, subjugated, and “different” were the primary audience and participants of Jesus’ ministry and movement. The more privileged classes and groups had the opportunity to learn from Jesus, the Rabbi of Galilee, and his unlettered disciples, as they chose to submit to the path of life and human-

40 41

Hamer, “Fannie Lou Hamer Speaks Out,” Ibid. See Warren Carter, The Roman Empire and the New Testament: An Essential Guide (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2006).

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ization within an alternative community in resistance to the Roman Empire. The indigenous, organic nature of participatory Christianity, or the church, gave strength, purpose, and identity to first-century adherents as it did to Hamer and many African American southern Christians in the latter part of the twentieth century. 1.4 Reason Hamer drew upon African, African American, and Christian heritages (tradition) as sources that informed her agency and revolutionary practical theology. Reason, the fourth source to be discussed, does not entail western, male-dominated epistemologies or constructions of the natural and Christian religious world. Hopefully, as has been demonstrated, Hamer challenged the systems, theoretical paradigms, and processes of white America in a way that deemed them either as bankrupt or lacking veracity as practiced. They had not proven themselves as trustworthy sources in Hamer’s experience and observations.. Her divine, spiritual, and redemptive forms of education afforded Hamer access into the physical, material, and natural world and ways of knowing that integrated her head, heart, and hands. Hence, Hamer’s source of reason is described and appropriated from Layli Maparyan’s, an Africana studies womanist, vision of the ‘womanist idea.’ Maparyan provides an orienting and grounding framework for the ‘womanist idea’ through the term luxocracy (rule by light). She defines it as “… the animating idea of womanism and a vision for the future of humanity. It is predicated upon acknowledgment of the innate divinity and sacredness of all humans and, indeed, all creation and the entire cosmos”42 Unequivocally, Hamer acknowledged the light that was within her as she sang one of her favorite freedom songs, “This Little Light of Mine,” and cited Matthew 5:14–16 to encourage her black Christian audience to let their light shine too. The lyrics below point to an awareness of the Source and purpose of the light as well as personal and social responsibility to exude the guiding force within. This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. (three times) Everywhere I go, Lord, I’m gonna let it shine. (three times) I’ve got the light of freedom, I’m gonna let it shine. (three times) Jesus gave it to me now, I’m gonna let it shine. (three times) Shine, shine, shine, shine, I’m gonna let it shine. (three times) All in the jailhouse, I’m gonna let it shine. (three times)

42

Maparyan, The Womanist Idea, vii.

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This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. (three times) Let it shine. Let it shine. Let it shine.43 The light, as experienced by Hamer, guided her in times of terror and torture and was trimmed and burned in her undying commitment to jubilee and black reparations. Joan Lester, a white woman recalled how Hamer spoke to the volunteers at a church in Atlantic City during the DNC of 1964 by showing the audience the bruises she endured from the Winona jailhouse beating. Lester recalls Hamer’s eyes filling with tears and then finding the strength to lead the people, as she clapped the beat, in her favorite hymn, “This Little Light of Mine.”44 Revealing her wounds and hopes, Hamer discovered ways to let her light shine even through the physical pain and socio-political suffering. Through Hamer’s wholistic care and leadership for people, place, and space, she also exhibited reverence for all of creation. As was presented in chapter 3, an African cosmology of caring for the environment is not done in isolation from the people in community. Maparyan’s vision and enactment of luxocracy is understood as a liberating energy, life force, “Higher Self, Inner Light, Soul, Innate Divinity, or the God Within,”45 that is shaping and reshaping social organization beyond individual, tribal identity towards a global, cosmic identity.46 The emerging reality that Maparyan speaks of, Hamer in some fashion experienced it in Freedom Summer 1964 when she stated, “… the 1964 Summer Project was the beginning of a New Kingdom right here on earth.”47 Unknowingly, Hamer reflected the sentiments and experiences of early, first-century Christian faith communities who participated in ushering in a new reign of values, principles, ethic of care, and manner of worship that was directly juxtaposed against the existing oppressive empire and its respective emperor. Carter focuses on the ways in which early Christian communities navigated and negotiated the Roman Empire. He posits,

43

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45 46 47

Fannie Lou Hamer, Fannie Lou Hamer: Songs My Mother Taught Me. African American Legacy Series (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, 2015). https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=xhiV6DB_h_8. Accessed on June 11, 2018. Joan Lester, “In Church with Fannie Lou Hamer: August 24–27, 1967, Atlantic City,” August 15, 2007, CommonDreams.Org. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2007/08/ 15/church-fannie-lou-hamer-august-24-27-1964-atlantic-city. Accessed on June 14, 2018. Maparyan, The Womanist Idea, 3. The capitals are Maparyan’s. Maparyan, The Womanist Idea, 3–4. Hamer, “Foreword,” vii.

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They [the early Christian communities] offer followers of Jesus an understanding of themselves as claimed by God’s love and as agents of God’s life-giving purposes. They challenge and invite and shape Christian communities to become places that embody an alternative way of being human in the midst of empire.48 Hamer, and the various organic Christian, interfaith, and cross-cultural communities in which she infused and inhabited, too, offers contemporary Christians and faith communities innovative ways of being human, of being in righteous relation, and of bearing witness to not only light, but also life and love. The “New Kingdom” that Hamer and so many other poor black Christian Mississippians had been praying for had arrived, and they realized that their labor was not in vain. As demonstrated throughout this text, Hamer’s vision and enactment of the new kingdom was not one of black domination, but one that overcame, transcended, and transformed the death-dealing effects of the United States and Mississippi Empires. Hamer was participating in a new empire that could be likened to Carter’s assertion about first-century Christian communities which “… oppose, even while they imitate, imperial visions and practices in implementing God’s materially transforming reign or empire.”49 In short, Hamer, as did first century Christian communities, sought to care for both the material and spiritual needs of the masses, on a grand scale, to manifest the in-breaking of something salvific and life-giving. Hamer’s exhibition of and submission to the light as a guiding and grounding source that oriented her revolutionary practical theology emerged in her daily struggle for jubilee and black reparations at the grassroots level. Significantly, Maparyan asserts, … academic women did not create or invent womanism and academia cannot contain womanism. Womanism—the womanist idea—circulates “out there” in the “real world” and is a means by which “everyday” women, whether they work inside or outside the academy, transform “everyday” settings and the political consciousness of “everyday” people in line with a particular vision of human well-being, social justice, and commonweal.50

48 49

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Carter, The Roman Empire and the New Testament, 137–8. Warren Carter, “Jesus’ Healing Stories: Imperial Critique and Eschatological Anticipations in Matthew’s Gospel,” Currents in Theology and Mission 37, no. 6 (December 2010): 496. Maparyan, The Womanist Idea (New York, NY and London, UK: Routledge, 2012), 32. The quotes are Maparyan’s.

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Maparyan’s womanist vision and practice includes “everyday” black women like Hamer, and not just Alice Walker, Chikwenye Ogunyemi, and Clenora Hudson-Weems, who are considered as the founding academic mothers of womanist thought and practice.51 Within Maparyan’s broader operational definition of the “womanist idea,” Hamer’s Christian thought and practice are included. Furthermore, Maparyan’s “womanist idea” privileges outcomes over research method and context, be it academic, communal, religious, political, educational, economic in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, or the Americas. Wherever a person exists who is working to reconstruct the existing oppressive interlocking system comprised of race, gender, class, sexuality, and more, the “womanist idea” is present. Hence, scholars who are interested in advancing, recording, reporting, and presenting “the womanist idea” do not have to be limited to traditional forms of modern research but can be open to employing a wide array of methods and sources to excavate and illuminate “the womanist idea” that exists among us. For example, the segment of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement founded by Opal Tometi, Patrisse Cullors, and Alicia Garza demonstrates the manifestation of “the womanist idea.” Then, there is the Say Her Name aspect of the BLM movement that also reflects Maparyan’s everyday women in collaboration with sisters from the academy who are challenging systems and structures for transformation and healing. In light of Maparyan’s broader working definition of womanism, Hamer could be considered as a protowomanist in the academic sense, on the one hand. However, on the other hand, Hamer is a womanist in her own right and context both prior to and beyond the academic coining of the reality that had already existed.52 51

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Maparyan, Ibid. Also, see Monica Coleman, “Introduction: Ain’t I a Womanist Too?: Third Wave Womanist Religious Thought,” in Ain’t I a Womanist Too?: Third Wave Womanist Religious Thought, ed. Monica Coleman (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013), 2–5. Some may be wondering if Maparyan asserts that the “womanist idea” is out there only among women of African descent. The answer to this inquiry is no in my reading of her. Potentially, any human, regardless of religion, race, gender, class, nationality, or sexuality, can embody the “womanist idea” as I understand Maparyan. My main point in raising this issue is just to demonstrate how Hamer, as a self-identified Christian black poor woman, is included in the “womanist idea” in a way that does not essentialize any of the signifiers. While I am not arguing for or against the “womanist idea” being more than an identity, I do share with Maparyan the concern of being limited by ontological signifiers of “black” and “female.” In my previous scholarship on race, religion, and activism, I draw from both Du Bois and Thurman to articulate a way to move beyond ontological blackness while still addressing the social reality of racism and other isms. See Karen Crozier, “Appropriating the Prophetic Visions of Du Bois and Thurman: Considerations for the Academy,” in Nurturing the Prophetic Imagination, eds. Jamie Gates and Mark H. Mann (San Diego, CA: Point Loma Press, 2012), 79–90 and “The Luminous Darkness of Du Bois’ Double Consciousness: Through the Lens of Contemporary Christian Women,” Pastoral Psychology 5, nos.1/2 (September 2008): 77–88.

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Hamer as a Protowomanist

Bridget Green, in the field of New Testament and early Christianity positions Hamer’s speech presented to the founding meeting of the National Women’s Political Caucus as protowomanist and then Green uses Hamer’s sociopolitical hermeneutic on gender and class to provide a redemptive interpretation of Luke 18:15–17, the story about children being blessed by Jesus.53 Hamer, as noted in chapter 5, was a black female voice and co-founder of the predominantly white female middle-class organization who stood alongside other black female notables such as Shirley Chisholm (congresswoman and presidential candidate), Myrlie Evers (activist and the widow of Medgar Evers), and Dorothy Height (president of the National Council of Negro Women) to address the question “Would a Congress with adequate representation of women and other groups allow this country to rank 14th in infant mortality among the developed nations of the world?”54 From the analysis of Hamer’s speech on gender, class, and race, Green concludes that Hamer employs a liberationist hermeneutic for the well-being of children while simultaneously advocating racial and class differences and similarities between black and white women. Just like Hamer’s context, children, women, and rural dwellers are undervalued populations in the text, according to Green. The people who bring the children to Jesus are vulnerable populations based on gender and class who become shunned by Jesus’ male disciples. Jesus’ response was disruptive of the status quo, Green argues. More specifically, she states, Overall, Jesus is not impressed with his disciples. He reverses the impact of their unjust and oppressive behavior by declaring, ‘Let the children come to me and do not stop them because the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly, I tell you whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as [one receives] a child will never enter it.’ Jesus’s words and deeds upend the disciples’ expectations of who get access to him and therefore, the kingdom of God.55 Like Hamer’s liberationist hermeneutic, Green views Jesus as announcing three liberationist imperatives in his words and deeds which point to affirming

53 54 55

Green, “‘Nobody’s Free until Everybody’s Free’: Exploring Gender and Class Injustice in a Story About Children (Luke 18:15–17),” 291–2. Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 275. Green, “‘Nobody’s Free until Everybody’s Free,’” 305.

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the women, welcoming the children, and holding the social political privileged accountable in making sure everyone has access into the kingdom of God.56 While Green’s biblical hermeneutic and appropriation of Hamer is creative and provocative, there is one minor point of contention that is raised that can be helpful in generating new language in and for liberation for everybody. In her third liberationist imperative of Jesus, Green states, “the work of the disciples, and those in power, is to open the gates of power to include those such as the women and children.”57 However, in the text and Green’s analysis, the disciples seem to assume the role of gatekeepers instead of being granted the authority to do so. The disciples took power that did not belong to them, and immediately, Jesus exercised his authority to get them out of the way to provide access for the children and their caretakers to come to him. Hence, we can learn that a deeper liberationist imperative is for those who have stolen and assumed power as the gatekeeper to Jesus and the kingdom of God is to get out of the way; they do not belong there. Granted, Jesus was there to remind the disciples of their rightful place and fortunately, for the women and children, they consented. Today, when self-assumed gatekeepers of Jesus and the kingdom of God refuse to listen to the teachings and life of Jesus, and the SPIRIT that reigns, then they should be engaged as people who are unjustly and illegally hindering access to self-determination and human freedom instead of as people who have the authority to open access to Jesus and the kingdom of God.58 Green’s identification of Hamer as a protowomanist should be understood from an academic perspective. She creatively draws from Hamer’s lived experience and thought to capture the womanist praxis before it was coined in the academy. Yet, Maparyan’s womanist framework challenges Green to see Hamer as a womanist regardless of Hamer’s non-academic context. New insights on

56 57 58

Ibid., 306–7. Ibid., 307. In this critique of one of Green’s points, I realize that I am implying two things that will not be further developed around the concept of gatekeeper. First, I am assuming that no human being is a gatekeeper to Jesus and the kingdom of God unless the divine appoints them. Second, when one is appointed, I am assuming that the gatekeeper would not function to keep out vulnerable populations. They would not be consistent with the practices of Empire of any age. The gatekeeper, in accordance with the life and teachings of Jesus, would seek to save, deliver, support, affirm, and protect social, political, religious, and spiritual outcasts and rejects while modeling for those who receive more crumbs and benefits from the Empire to do the same. Hamer did not see white people as gatekeepers to Jesus and the kingdom of God, and she ceased seeing them as the standard of humanity.

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lived theology and biblical interpretation could emerge if black women in their respective contexts and roles were seen as contributing to ‘the womanist idea.’ Regardless of one’s context, role, or socio-economic status, black women would be supporting one another in their empowering, liberating, and revolutionizing work. The religious thought and leadership of Hamer could become relevant for a broader audience within and beyond the academy. In the meantime, the final section addresses Hamer’s relevance for the field of academic practical theology.

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The Relevance of Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology

Maparyan’s broader conception of the “womanist idea” allows for more creativity in describing and importing Hamer’s Christian faith in action for several reasons. First, Maparyan allows room for the “womanist idea” to include, yet to move beyond, identity when she claims it to be “… something bigger than identity. It is a way of understanding the world that is predicated on taking action which harmonizes the elements—people, spirits, and nature that make up the world.”59 Second, the academy is only one place in which the “womanist idea” dwells. There are many other places, people, and spaces in which one can encounter, enact, and experience the “womanist idea.” Third, and finally, Maparyan places emphasis on relational being and responsible action, wherever one abides, in redeeming and synchronizing the disjointed, fragmented, and alienated elements that constitute the cosmos. In short, the “womanist idea,” an interpretative view of the world that one assumes, and nurtures, by acting in and on the world, exists at the grassroots, in the academy, in families and communities, and social, political, religious, educational, and economic institutions.60 Maparyan gives credence to a phenomenon that is now studied by scholars primarily of African descent but that pre-existed prior to the academic naming of it. The move of placing the “Idea” as a non-academic invention or 59 60

Maparyan, The Womanist Idea, 29. Maparyan’s project demonstrates how women of diverse national, racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds and vocational settings constitute embodying and enacting the “womanist idea.” Her move from a deep description of the “Idea” to analysis and application through narratives and case studies, of various women’s lives, connect 1) thought and practice, 2) people, place, and space, 3) criticism and activism, and 4) material and spiritual worlds in a fluid, integrative way. Although Maparyan does not identify people of other genders or of white identity in her text, Coleman’s Ain’t I A Womanist Too?: Third Wave Womanist Religious Thought does.

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creation allows for a broader examination and exploration of its manifestation throughout time and space, and the need of creative research methods, scholarship, and curriculum to apprehend and convey it for audiences within and beyond the academy. As Hamer understood the church [of black Mississippi] had to live for something bigger than itself, so too, does the academy in light of Maparyan’s construction of the “womanist idea.” Beyond recovering and further examining Hamer’s revolutionary practical theology, black practical theology can learn how Hamer can serve as a model and source to address theological rifts and tensions that exist between various entities such as academic black theology and black churches. Black practical theologian Dale P. Andrews argues that the Black Theology Project that emerged in the early 1970s disparaged black churches because they were viewed as being spiritually removed, disconnected, and otherworldly. Put differently, black churches were perceived as not being responsive to the people in ghettos, slums, and those who were announcing “Black Power” as a rallying cry to address the persistent onslaught of white domination and oppression.61 However, on the other hand, according to Andrews, black churches (male cleric) did not find the black theology movement too appealing. More specifically, Andrews states, “The majority of black churches criticized the movement for its inherent reductionism and divisiveness. Black churches contested that black theology advanced black power in a neglect of the gospel message of universal Christian love.”62 Black cleric churchmen perceived the emphasis placed on black power by the black theology of James Cone as anti-white rhetoric and void of Christian love. As noted in prior chapters, Hamer’s Christian praxis speaks to this rift as described by Andrews on multiple levels. More specifically, Hamer participated in the civil rights, human rights, black power, and women’s rights movements while professing to be unapologetically black, female, and Christian. The love she received from her mother, black family and church became a bulwark against self-hatred and white hatred. Her practice of love became refined throughout time until the spiritual and material forces and powers that had attempted to define and confine her to a perpetual status of invisibility and irrelevance were engaged and exposed, and at times, existentially transcended and transformed. Hamer, in her raced body towards emancipatory ends in the numerous, diverse spaces and places in which she occupied, can be seen as an exemplar of 61 62

Dale P. Andrews, Practical Theology for Black Churches: Bridging Black Theology and African American Folk Religion (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 2–7. Andrews, Ibid., 4.

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Christ-likeness. She was despised and rejected, a black woman of sorrow who was acquainted with grief. She was bruised and battered because of white people’s transgressions against humanity and the divine. Hamer found power in the life and ministry of Jesus to work to create life, and not just a self-served living, for financially poor black Christian Mississippians. Thus, in Hamer, there was no division between the concerns of black theology and black churches. Care for the people and the broader socio-political landscape were brilliantly integrated by Hamer. Another way in which Hamer is instructive regarding the rift is that she, too, was disappointed in many black preachers/ministers as was the academic Black Theology Project. However, she did not necessarily equate black clergy with being synonymous with black churches as apparently did many black theologians and even black church men.63 If the academic black theologians had been sensitive to the women who were on the front lines, they would have seen another aspect of the church responding to the moment of the assertion of Black Power with more clarity and faith than the pastors. Historian Linda Reed asserts, “Fannie Lou Hamer’s life is best framed in a religious and political context. Any discussion of the institutional history of black women would be seriously flawed without examining women’s involvement in the black church and black religion. This is particularly true for Hamer.”64 Hamer’s Christian life and thought pushes black theologians in particular and the theological academy in general to historically identify, see, and assess congregations and the institutional church beyond just the male clerics. As discussed earlier, her image of the church can be seen as one that was able to hold in tension the emergence of Black Power and the more radical elements of black religion. Moreover, Reed argues that Hamer’s signature and favorite song, “This Little Light of Mine,” can be viewed as radical; “It’s fundamental message is that the fight of African American people against injustice will not be stopped. The light (of hope, of justice, of courage, of individuality, of religious inspiration) will never be put out.”65 As a product of the segregated and oppressed black church in Mississippi, Hamer was not ensconced in the doctrine of individual salvation as Andrews claims true of black churches during the emergence of Black Power in the late 1960s into the 1970s.66 Hamer was focused on black 63 64

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See Andrews, Practical Theology for Black Churches, 3–5. Linda Reed, “Fannie Lou Hamer: A New Voice in American Democracy,” in Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, eds. Martha H. Swain, Elizabeth Anne Payne, and Marjorie Julian Spruill, assoc. ed. Susan Ditto (Athens, GA and London, UK: The University of Georgia Press, 2003), 254. Reed, Ibid., 255. Andrews, Practical Theology for Black Churches, 5.

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collective self-determination and freedom for all. In this way, she stood outside of and against the black church and white Christianity’s notion of individual salvation that did not reach the masses nor change current conditions. Hamer’s revolutionary practical theology not only addresses the rift between black theology and black churches but, can be instructive, also, in addressing a rift between black churches and communities and black youth Hip Hop Culture (HHC). Womanist practical theologian and Christian educator Evelyn L. Parker contends, “The problem of contemporary generational divides between young people and elders in black churches and communities is primarily one of diverging worldviews. Black youth have a different worldview than do black adults.”67 Parker discusses the different values and worldviews of those who were youth, young adults, and college students in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s to those who are part of the early HHC who were in urban communities struggling to find a living wage job. According to Parker, the HHC values individual financial success while those who came of age in the civil rights movement value communal uplift and collaboration.68 Although Parker raises a critical issue/rift that must not be taken lightly and provides a meaningful practice of mutual listening and a process to increase both generations’ capacities to heal the divide, she seems to overlook the ways in which certain aspects of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was intergenerational. Hamer as a middle-aged rural woman worked closely with students, black and white, in SNCC and it was both children and adults who participated in the Freedom Schools of 1964. The organization that Ella Baker designed and led from behind-the-scenes was intergenerational, interracial, and intercultural in which there was space for children to bring their parents into the movement, and vice-versa. In Mississippi through SNCC, Baker’s model of leadership spoke to and valued multiple generations and Hamer not only thrived in it, she embodied it.69 Thus, Hamer, I believe, would disagree with Parker’s claim that “The older generation at times failed to pass along the intellectual, passionate, and personal calling to freedom, equality, and justice 67

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Evelyn L. Parker, “Bridging Civil Rights and Hip Hop Generations,” in Black Practical Theology, eds. Dale P. Andrews and Robert London Smith, Jr. (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2015), 20. Ibid., 21. While the characterization of SNCC is true, it does not account for the tensions and conflicts that did exist within the organization. In addition, Hamer, after the 1964 DNC, became ostracized from SNCC’s new ideology and leadership that moved away from listening to and learning from the people to a focus on black empowerment and liberation that no longer wanted to work with white people or the formally uneducated and miseducated of Mississippi like Hamer. See Lee, For Freedom’s Sake, 137–9.

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for African-descended people.”70 If Hamer were alive today, she would invite both sides to remember and appropriate the ways that intergenerational collaboration was practiced and valued by many though not all in the 1960s. She could instruct both adults and young people on the necessary posture to learn from one another and to support one another that spoke to both individual and communal economic well-being. I could see Hamer affirming and encouraging the HHC generation in their creative expression in song, poetry, and critical cultural analysis while also challenging them to be aware of the negative, destructive elements. Hamer, in her day, aligned with the young people more so than her peers, and she could be accessed as a role model for today’s adults in black churches and communities who want to dismiss the presence and contribution of the HHC generation. For many scholars and Hamer, as has been discussed throughout this text, the black church has played a significant role in the lives of black people and religion.71 However, as has also been demonstrated, while scholars critique the black church, most of Hamer’s criticisms were leveled at the black ministers and middle-class, and not the church in and of itself. Hamer encouraged and admonished the black Christian masses to join the movement, and to do so was not a contradiction to their faith. As Hamer publicly denounced many black ministers, she was inviting the black flock to attune their ears and loyalties to a Gospel message that focused on freedom in the here-and-now. Hamer was hoping, in her critique of the black ministers, that the Christian black masses of Mississippi would find different preachers/pastors/ministers. In a more explicit and emphatic way than both Andrews’ practical theology for black churches and black academic theologians, Hamer’s revolutionary practical theology was sensitive to and foregrounded the financially poor, exploited, underemployed, unemployed, and miseducated, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, or national origin. Furthermore, it was critical of the black middle-class for reasons stated above that also became expressed in her reference to the NAACP. Hamer described the “C” in the NAACP as “Certain” in70 71

Parker, “Bridging Civil Rights and Hip Hop Generations,” 25. To date, Hamer in her writings, speeches, and oral history interviews never mentions the “black church” although she is clear on the role the “church” played in the lives of black people and should have played in the struggle for freedom in the 1960s. At this point, it is unclear on why Hamer never mentioned or used the nomenclature “black church” as do scholars in black theology (womanist, systematic, practical, ethics) and religion. It is possible that theological and religious scholars created an ecclesial category that is foreign to people like Hamer although the term, “black church,” has been extremely helpful in recovering, constructing, documenting, and conveying the religious experience particularly of black Protestant Christianity.

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stead of “Colored” because she believed that the black middle-class organization that focused predominantly on legislating in the courts was the National Association for the Advancement of Certain People, and not all Colored People.72 While being critical of the black middle-class, Hamer was nonetheless open to working with them even while many of the “black bourgeois,”73 as she would often call them, disparaged her because of the way she spoke, dressed, and conducted herself that did not reflect the black middle-class ideals of respectability politics. Hamer’s revolutionary practice and framework of Christianity were birthed from the soil, the roots of her native land and linguistic expression. Unlike the development of academic black theology (systematic, womanist, and practical), Hamer developed a “ground up” or “on-the-ground” theology in real time that was intimately immersed in and familiar with the dynamics of faith identity of black Christianity in rural Mississippi as well as black people in northern urban cities and neighborhoods. Hamer was more akin to academic womanist theology, than black liberation (male) theology, in many aspects of her Christian thought as has been demonstrated throughout the book. Liberation was not a guarantee in anyone’s lifetime even though she never assumed a nihilistic view of her condition or the nation. She had experienced the presence of the divine to empower, sustain, and deliver her while existing in the United States “wilderness” which gave her strength to persevere. Survival and quality of life were constants in Hamer’s champion of jubilee and black reparations. She found ways to keep moving in the direction of freedom in comprehensive, concerted ways. Furthermore, Hamer also understood the divine as a judge who would one day call the United States to account or the nation would continue in its divisive state until it crumbled. She frequently stated, “a nation divided against itself cannot stand.” A telos, or end, would occur but which one was open in Hamer’s Christian thought.74 While the hope was for jubilee and black reparations, Hamer knew the annihilation of people, space, and place was another viable possibility in light of the depth and breadth of the nation’s malaise. Division based on race and class was not sustainable for the nation at large or the masses who unjustly suffered under a vicious system, according to Hamer. Thus, Hamer, in

72 73 74

Garland, “Builders of a New South,” 36. Garland, Ibid. Frederick L. Ware argues, in Black Methodologies, that the black hermeneutical school holds a closed, determined view of the future and human history. In short, liberation is a goal or definitive end of human history. See pages 38–9. This view differs from my understanding of Hamer because liberation was one end among other competing ends and realities.

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her revolutionary Christian praxis, navigated and negotiated conditions that could immediately implode and/or experience divine judgment even though she continued to sow seeds of hope and externalized new ideals, practices, and paradigms of change.75

4

Summary

Hamer’s creative interpretation of Jesus in sacred, bodily, and material texts was powerful as she made meaning of her lived experienced and faith. The rich African, African American, and Christian heritages/traditions were other critical sources from which Hamer drew from in living her revolutionary practical theology. Although Hamer was not a professionally trained academic practical theologian, Maparyan reminds us that the academy did not create and cannot contain the ‘womanist idea,’ a logical framework that Hamer manifested. The sources and relevance of Hamer’s revolutionary practical theology must be taken seriously in preparing the church to participate in the revolutionary work of Jesus in the church, academy, and society. 75

With this open-ended aspect of her revolutionary practical theology, it can be argued that Hamer’s Christian praxis gives credence to James M. Gustafson’s paradigm of a theocentric focused ethics in public life. Gustafson, a white male moral and theological ethicist, espouses a view that a political, utilitarian ethical focus of religion and religious ethics does not accurately reflect the God of Christianity and attention should be placed on service to, honor of, and gratitude to God, the divine, regardless. Once Hamer was evicted from her home and fired from her job, she announced in her augural speech in 1962 that she was working for Christ. As she navigated conditions of death and destruction, terror and disease, poverty, violence, and vulnerability, Hamer never shied away from bearing witness to her Christian faith. In her service to and love of Christ in the public square, she left us an exemplary model of embodied universal love that shattered the divisive walls of hate, segregation, subjugation, fear, and deception. In my mind, Hamer clearly answers Gustafson’s question in the affirmative that there are grounds other than utilitarian in which Christian piety and discipline operate in the public sphere. See James M. Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective: Volume One: Theology and Ethics (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1981).

Chapter 7

Hamer’s Revolutionary Practical Theology in and for the Twenty-First Century As stated in the introductory chapter, Hamer has been invoked in the modernday Black Lives Matter movement which is ran not by black male clergy, but by young black millennials of various genders and sexualities who follow the leadership paradigm of Ella Baker, group-centered leadership.1 In this final chapter, Hamer’s Christian thought and practice is placed in dialogue with the modern-day BLM movement, and then concludes with Hamer’s international influence and impact.

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Hamer and Black Lives Matter

1.1 General Description and Assessment Today’s leaders for black civil and human rights are in many ways like SNCC, and not King’s SCLC. In one point of distinction, the young black leaders today refuse to acquiesce to the politics of respectability in which the clergy and protestors were in their Sunday’s best in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, the young black, gifted activists are often adorned in jeans with t-shirts that project a message of individuation while advancing a more revolutionary, disruptive agenda. For example, while being arrested in Ferguson, Missouri in protest of the officer who was not charged with the killing of Michael Brown in 2015, Rahiel Tesfamariam,2 a public theologian, activist, writer, and speaker sported

1 For a more in-depth examination of Baker’s leadership style see the following: Fannie Lou Hamer and Anne Romaine, “Anne Romaine Interviews, 1966–1967” (Archives Main Stacks, SC 1069, Folder 1), 42. http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15932coll2/ id/14003. Accessed on July 10, 2018; Lea E. Williams, Servants of the People: The 1960s Legacy of African American Leadership, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 163–81. 2 Rahiel Tesfamariam is cited frequently and employed as a representative of the modern-day CRM because when I did a Google search on “Christian Theology of Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement,” she appeared as a representative of the modern-day movement, but no other black woman was mentioned or generated in that search of the CRM of the 1950s and 1960s. The links and articles that did appear spoke about scholarship on African American religion and the CRM, black theology, womanist theology, and Latin American liberation theology. I was looking for scholarship on the Christian theological thought and practice of

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004438071_009

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a Hands Up United t-shirt which read “This Ain’t Yo’ Mama’s Civil Rights Movement.” She wrote an article, as then columnist of The Washington Post, and notes, “The phrase has resonated with many young activists who reject the identity politics, conservative rules and traditional tactics of the church-led movement of the 1960s.”3 Not concerned with being perceived as acceptable to white people or the power structure, nor black conservatives or middleclass who are often more complicit with sustaining the status quo, the new twenty-first century leadership for black lives and justice will not be limited by a male, cis-gendered dominated, hierarchical style of leadership that excluded many people and issues. Tesfamariam asserts, The movement’s decentralized structure has ensured that the concerns of subgroups are not sidelined. After women in the movement pointed out that it had become exclusively focused on police brutality against black men, targeted hashtags such as #SayHerName emerged. Those efforts kept national attention on causes of women and girls, including Sandra Bland and Rekia Boyd. And last month, movement organizers held rallies across the country to bring awareness to the high rate of murder of black transgender women.4 In the spirit of Ella Baker and her leadership in SNCC, the young people of today are looking to themselves and each other, and not a cult leader, in their local, contextual organizing for healing, hope, and justice. Tesfamariam does include religion even as she indicts Christian fundamentalism and the harm of certain theologies and church practices inflicted on black women of the CRM. Womanist religious ethicist and scholar, Rosetta E. Ross’s Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003) was not listed even though she focuses on the religious and moral ethics of black women in the Movement. Although Ross does not engage Christian theological categories or doctrine, she is discussed more extensively below. Ross offers a religious, moral framework of black women activists that exposes practical theologians to the diverse, evolving dynamics of Christian practices within and beyond local congregations. Overall, although the search did not yield the desired results, the search was not in vain because I discovered Rahiel. Her journalism, blog publications, and activism proved helpful in providing me with one who is a woman of Christian faith, of the young black millennial generation, and appears to be heavily engaged on the ground in the movement for black lives. 3 Rahiel Tesfamariam, “Why the Modern Day Civil Rights Movement Keeps Religious Leaders at Arm’s Length.” Rahiel Tesfamariam (October 7, 2015). http://www.rahiel.com/2015/10/why -the-modern-civil-rights-movement-keeps-religious-leaders-at-arms-length/. Accessed on July 10, 2018. 4 Tesfamariam, Ibid.

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women and LGBTQ in leading for social change. More specifically, she lifts up how Bree Newsome, an activist and filmmaker cited Psalm 27:1, “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear,” as Newsome scaled the flag pole in South Carolina to remove the Confederate battle flag. And, as Andrews advances a bridge between a theology of liberation and a social practice of liberation among black churches, Tesfamariam, too, looks to reclaim the liberationist role of the black church and religion at the intersection of Jesus and justice while providing a roll call of local churches who have consistently engaged in the struggle such as First Corinthian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York and City of Refuge United Church of Christ in Oakland, California. Freedom from both sin and social oppression go hand-in-hand in the liberationist theology of Tesfamariam and congregations who see Jesus, as Hamer did, a revolutionary. Although Tesfamariam does not explicitly mention Hamer nor SNCC in her blog article, nonetheless, it is my contention that she as a twenty-first century intentional faith leader for black lives is standing on the shoulders of her foremothers such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker in more ways than one. First, as was previously mentioned, both Hamer and Tesfamariam view Jesus as a freedom fighter who was concerned about the people as well as the staunch critique of black male ministers/preachers who do not model or proclaim a revolutionary Christ. Contemporary black religious leaders who stand in the tradition of King’s SCLC—hierarchical, more conservative tactics, and male-dominated—are not looked to as symbols of inspiration or wells of wisdom but are kept at arms-length according to Tesfamariam. Hamer went even farther in her mistrust of ministers by publicly announcing she wanted to leave them at the river. She wanted them completely removed from interfering in the freedom struggle because the black ministers, like the white politicians, were not representing and caring for the needs of the black masses. The collusion between the black male ministers and white male politicians became obvious to Hamer and she wanted the hazard to be eliminated. Second, Hamer’s tactics, before, during, and after SNCC, of resistance, rebellion, protests, and pronouncements became a way of life that were rooted in her Christian faith and blazed a trail for contemporary black activists to understand the limits and possibilities of electoral politics. She is remembered by many as one who infused morality, the notion of what constitutes right and wrong behavior and practices, into a United States legal, political machine and system that did not function with a moral sensibility. Moreover, in Ruleville, Mississippi while there were no malls or a major airport to shut down, the direct, confrontational approach of Hamer and SNCC is not to be belittled. Hamer was invited to speak at various educational institutions in

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the United States including Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in 1976 for her provocative, liberative Christian thought and practice. The theological academic and ministry community acknowledged Hamer as a leading model for young black women seminarians as she was charged to make an address on the topic: “Action Oriented Ministry: Confronting the Power Structure.”5 Thus, as Hamer stood with and for the young people of her day who were angry, tired of the lies, and disruptive, I think she would be encouraging today’s young black leaders in the same spirit. She was a ministry model not only for young black women, but for the masses who cared to listen. Third, group-centered leadership and room for the voices of subgroups constituted the architectural design of SNCC engineered by Ella Baker. Leadership scholar, Lea E. Williams explains the leadership style of Baker in the following way: In egalitarian, no-holds-barred forums, Baker rejected the foolhardy notion that a leader had to have all the answers. This was both burdensome and unrelenting. Instead of imparting knowledge, she preferred troubling the waters and seeing what erupted. In these facilitated dialogues, Ella Baker listened intently while others did the talking. She interrupted to pose a question when the conversations stalled or when conventional orthodoxies and quickly formed conclusions threatened to overshadow the penetrating and critical dissection of issues.6 This leadership design in theory and practice provided a platform for Hamer, who was not educated at Stanford and Yale Divinity School as is Tesfamariam, to practice everyday democracy and to participate in ushering the kingdom of God on Earth in Mississippi as Hamer noted. Within SNCC, various groups within black life such as women, the miseducated, the limited educated, the economically exploited and impoverished, and rural folks participated in dreaming and enacting a new, just society. The educated student populace and young professionals of SNCC entered Mississippi in a humble, open posture which is reflected in the following statement: The people are our teachers. People who have struggled to support themselves and large families, people who have survived in Georgia and

5 Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir An Army, 222, Kindle. 6 Lea E. Williams, “Making A Life, Not Making A Living: The Servant Leadership of Ella Josephine Baker,” 167.

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Alabama and Mississippi, have learned some things we need to know. There is a fantastic poetry in the lives of the people who have survived with strength and nobility. I am convinced of how desperately America needs the blood transfusion that comes from the Delta of Mississippi.7 Hamer spoke consistently about how SNCC saw the black Mississippians as human beings and how these humanizing encounters were an answer to prayer. SNCC, as a group-centered, non-centralized organizational model, worked with, and learned from, those who were the most affected by the racial, sexual, and class-based violence and discrimination by creating a structure and process for their voices to be amplified, organized, and mobilized. This model is now being resurrected in the twenty-first century struggle for black lives with emphasis on non-centralized leadership. As the young people lead and organize in towns, cities, states, and nations to address and affirm the significance of all black lives, they are standing in the tradition of Baker, Hamer, and SNCC. Fourth, while Hamer viewed the church in Mississippi as autonomous and the only entity that was driven by black lives, she did not claim it to be liberative or part of a liberating tradition as does Tesfamariam and black liberation theologians (systematic, womanist, and practical). In Hamer’s organizing for black lives, and other people’s lives too, the black Christians were challenged to put their faith in action for freedom’s sake. Furthermore, Hamer’s speaking, preaching, singing, and teaching to her black religious audience invited clergy and laity to see the gospel message of Jesus as revolutionary without ever invoking a time when the church existed or functioned likewise. In short, Hamer appeared to be ignorant of, or she disagreed with, the claim by many black scholars of religion and theology that the black church during the antebellum period was radical with an intentional focus on liberation. 1.2 The Church Hamer appeared to hold the church and non-church groups or sites in tension with the revolutionary Jesus as the standard and synthesis. For example, Hamer claimed, These young people were so Christlike! James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner gave their lives that one day we would be free. If Christ were here today, He would be just like these young people who the

7 Prathia Hall cited in Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir An Army, 11.

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southerners called radicals and beatniks. Christ was called a Beelzebub, called so many names. But He was Christ.8 Hamer’s statement that she would choose the young people of SNCC over the church was provocative. The people of SNCC participated in the humanizing of black people and ushering in the new kingdom in Mississippi. Unfortunately, the church, especially many of the black clergy and white congregations, was not engaged in bearing witness to a new reality. While Hamer never vacated the church, she seemed to have learned how to work with its limitations and possibilities during her day. In doing the work of Christ, she was neither confined by the church nor giving up on it as a source in the freedom struggle. Significantly, the black laity of Mississippi was Hamer’s listening audience, and some became her co-workers in the Civil Rights Movement. She encouraged and admonished them to have faith in a revolutionary Jesus and to work to experience the freedom that he enacted. In her preaching, teaching, speaking, and praying, Hamer did not encourage them to agitate their ministers or congregations to action. Instead, she invested her energy in articulating a faith that demonstrated the relevance of Jesus and Christianity for the black masses and the redemption of a nation. Unlike many black theologians, of the past and present, who engage either the black male cleric or both women and men clergy as representatives of the church, Hamer engaged those from the pew while publicly denouncing many who occupied the pulpit. Then, for both Tesfamariam and Hamer, faith leaders of the church are/were not heavily relied on although the church is/was not forgotten. Like today’s movement for black lives, Hamer accessed various venues, organizations, institutions, contexts, tools, and partners that were serious about advancing the ideology of black empowerment, protection, and revolution. Hamer contended that the church had to be connected to or intimately involved in the lives of communities who may or may not be part of the church. Implicitly, Hamer suggested that people who are not members of the church should find the organized body of Christ near to them instead of having to travel physically, emotionally, or spiritually to get to it. The people, places, and spaces that the elite of empire deem to be lifeless, worthless, and lawless are the very sites in which the baby and adult Jesus can be found,9 according to 8 Hamer, “Foreword,” viii. 9 The reference to Jesus as both a baby and an adult is my humble attempt of honoring Hamer’s Christmas card that affirmed the birth of Jesus among the people, and not in the institutional church. In addition, I seek to emphasize that Jesus became an adult and he remained in community with the poor and outcast.

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Hamer. In this ecclesial view, the church does not have exclusive rights or access to Jesus, and neither is the community deemed as secular, a place or space to be “saved,” “conquered,” or “colonized.” On the contrary, the church is to be a ministry of presence so that those who would choose to belong would participate in increasing the body’s capacity to respond to caring for itself and the community in which the church abides through faith in the divine and trust in one another. The affirmative role the church played in Hamer’s early life and the broader black community is monumental and possibly, a motivation, for her assertion that she is not against the church. Proudly, Hamer claimed, “The reason that we Negroes in Mississippi are not bitter is because most of us were brought up in church from an early age. A child has to be taught to hate. We were taught to love and to have faith.”10 How are black theologians teaching the church, theological academy, and society to love as did Hamer’s church? How are white practical theologians teaching the church, theological academy, and society to love as did Hamer’s church? 1.3 Religious Institutions, Black Women, and Social Movements Regarding the church, Hamer neither elevates nor minimizes its role in the struggle for freedom. In the process, she offers a new way of viewing black women of the civil rights era’s relationship to the church that differs from the way religious and theological scholarship on, and popular perceptions of, the black church is typically characterized as a liberating force. Womanist religious ethicist, Rosetta E. Ross’s examination of seven black women civil rights activists, including Hamer along with five other Protestants and one Muslim of the Nation of Islam, moves attention away from black religious institutions and their respective male clergy to capture the roles and contributions of religious women within and beyond their respective religious institutions. Ross cites one of her religious ethical exemplars, Septima P. Clark, who worked with both Baker and Hamer, saying, “In stories about the civil rights movement you hear mostly about the black ministers. But if you talk to the women who were there, you’ll hear another story. I think the civil rights movement would never have taken off if some women hadn’t started to speak up.”11 By “talking to the women,” Ross constructs a gendered, non-cleric organic view of the CRM in which the black women’s religious consciousness and values reflected their “internal concern for the Black community’s survival and flourishing and a

10 11

Hamer, “Foreword,” viii. Septima Poinsette Clark cited in Ross, Witnessing & Testifying, 1.

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related external concern to address society’s formal and conventional sources of inequality.”12 Put differently, according to Ross, racial uplift and social responsibility were the two pillars that informed their religious, ethical duty though each woman expressed it differently. These black women saw racial uplift, regardless of class, color, gender, or creed, as a necessity to experiencing abundant life on Earth. All black lives mattered, and all lives were invited to participate in working with, and learning from, the socially, politically, and economically vulnerable black masses towards jubilee and black reparations. Each exemplar’s religious values were nurtured within a religious sect. However, as they matured and practiced exercising their humanity and rights, their religious thought, and praxis, reflected something much deeper, broader, nuanced, and richer than the doctrinal claims that they had initially heard in their respective religious institutions. In particular, Ross describes Hamer’s moral vision as “… an egalitarian moral perspective, valuing human personality above racial identity.”13 As has been demonstrated, Hamer had a strong, unwavering commitment to black liberation, power, self-respect, and self-determination. Yet, she was not against white people who were persons, too, created from the same divine parent as all people. She reminded the staunch segregationists, white liberals, and black middle-class of the interconnectedness of humanity in language that was appropriate for each audience. As she proclaimed and lived a religious ethic of love, and not hate, hope and not despair, Hamer bore witness to and testified about a profound “integration” of people from diverse racial, ethnic, linguistic, gender, educational, religious, age, and regional backgrounds that congregations and male religious leaders of then and today are yet to know. The divine was experienced as intervening on behalf of Hamer and others who had prayed for a change. Hamer’s experience of the divine interruption of the Jim Crow status quo did not occur within the confines of a preaching and worship service, camp meeting, pulpit swap between male clergy, or denominational conference. The broad-based sociopolitical and public manifestation of the movement of the divine could be likened to a grand invitation to all interested parties to sit down at the divine banquet table of freedom, love, healing, reparations, and justice because there was plenty of good room. Hamer exhibited and articulated a new way of life, a new way of being in which her black racial identity was never used to trump, or further alienate her from, any oppressed person. Instead, she humbly yet confidently claimed,

12 13

Ross, Ibid., xiii. Ibid., 115.

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I have never, maybe I’m just foolish, but I could never treat nobody like we been treated …, if I know today if Mississippi would be taken over by all the black folk, nothing but Negroes, I’d fight that just as hard as I’m fighting this all white power. I’m concerned about people running the government but let it be people that we elect instead of pigs. I am sick of these handpicked folk.14 Racism, to Hamer, was an unnecessary evil. Hence, any race or group of people that hindered the freedom that Christ enacted was going to be opposed by Hamer. Ross presents the black women activists as adherents of African American liturgical practices of witnessing and testifying. These practices originated in United States slavery, and the latter, testifying, is a public honest and empowering speech given by one who has witnessed God’s intervention in the everyday lived experience and shares it within the faith community for edification.15 The former, witnessing, comprised of those who were there to hear the person testify and could attest to the legitimacy of the action of the divine in the individual person’s life because the witness either had a similar or general knowledge of the movement of the divine.16 Ross asserts these practices were translated into the public life for her female religious ethical exemplars by “… the extent that Black religious women activists affirm and talk with others about divine interaction with their racial uplift and social responsibility activities, including the assertion that God requires or enables their activism…”17 As Hamer went into the halls of congress, universities, colleges, churches, community centers, political caucuses, rallies, and more, she testified of the divine activity in her sociopolitical campaign for jubilee and black reparations. Regardless of the audience, the divine was acknowledged as her source of strength and power. Again, and again, Hamer testified of how God was understood to have delivered her from jail torture like the divine delivered the three Hebrew young men from the lion’s den in the biblical book of Daniel.

14

15

16 17

Fannie Lou Hamer and Anne Romaine, “Anne Romaine Interviews, 1966–1967” (Archives Main Stacks, SC 1069, Folder 1), 151. http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cdm/ref/ collection/p15932coll2/id/14003. Accessed on July 10, 2018. Ross, Ibid., 13–14. Ross gives a brief historical overview and evolution of testifying. Initially, enslaved and formerly enslaved Africans in the United States testified about their conversion experience to Christianity. Then, it evolved to everyday, mundane encounters of the divine. Ibid., 14–15. Ibid., 15.

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She testified in a way that did not conform to the politics of respectability in dress or communicative style. Hamer employed her mother tongue, and although she was not as competent or fluent in the Queen’s English, she flowed within her African-based linguistic system that captured the hearts and heads of many from the church and broader society.18 As Hamer would say, “I’m here to tell it like it is.” In her testifying, Hamer challenged others to become witnesses to her material and divine reality for jubilee and black reparations.

2

Hamer’s International Influence

Hamer’s testifying and bearing witnessing to a new society have influenced Amitis Motevalli, a queer feminist Iranian artist and activist who migrated, with her family, to the United States in 1977 at the age of eight.19 Motevalli, commissioned the first-known Persian translation of Hamer’s testimony at the 1964 DNC in Atlantic City, New Jersey, that was then used in Motevalli’s art exhibit entitled Here/There, Then/Now.20 According to Manijeh Nasbaradi, the creative, innovative art exhibit of Motevalli draws parallels between the pro-democracy Iranian uprising in 2009 with the yet to be fulfilled black freedom struggle in the United States.21 By employing images of SNCC’s activism and protest along with Hamer’s speech as the framing point in the 1960s, Motevalli’s different interpretative lens of the Iranian uprising in the twenty18

19

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Hamer biographer Brooks does a nice job of discussing Hamer’s speech within the context of African American Vernacular English and draws from Geneva Smitherman, a sound communication scholar who has written extensively on the origins and development of black communication and speech. However, there are scholars in linguistics, communication, psychology, and education who view black speech as an Africanbased system and not an English-based system. See Robert L. Williams, Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks (St. Louis, MO: Institute of Black Studies, 1975); Ernie Smith and Karen Crozier, “Ebonics Is Not Black English,” Western Journal of Black Studies 22, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 109–16; Karen Crozier, “Instructional Programs Designed to Teach Standard English to African American Elementary Students,” Unpublished MA Thesis, California State University, Fresno, 1996; J. David Ramirez, Terrence G. Wiley, Gerda de Klerk, and Enid Lee, eds. Ebonics in the Urban Education Debate (Long Beach, CA: Center for Language Minority Education and Research, 2000); Garret A. Duncan, “The Play of Voices: Black Adolescents Constituting the Self and Morality,” in Race-ing Moral Formation: African American Perspectives on Care and Justice, eds. Vanessa Siddle Walker and John R. Snarey (New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 2004), 38–54. Manijeh Nasrabadi, “Reading Fannie Lou Hamer in Tehran: Amitis Motevalli’s Queer Art of Afro-Asian Solidarity,” The Scholar & Feminist Online 14, no. 3 (2018): 2. Interestingly, Motevalli arrived in the United States in the same year that Hamer died. Ibid., 1. Ibid.

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first century creates “strange affinities.”22 More specifically, the relations “… trouble essentializing categories of identification and comparison, and allow affects and emotions to flow in new directions, toward new sites of empathy.”23 Through Motevalli’s political, transnational art, audiences were exposed to the fallacy of the United States being “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” a land of opportunity and mobility, a land that championed and modeled fair and equal processes and participation in local and national decision-making. Hence, on display was the potential to see and experience common ground between the insurgency of black people in the southern part of the United States in the 1960s and Iranian protestors of anti-imperialism in the twenty-first century framed through the Persian translated testimony of Hamer. A black impoverished woman exposed multiple layers of United States oppression in her testimony while pushing state officials to make democracy a reality, then and there. Nasrabadi’s analysis of Motevalli’s art exhibit Here/There, Then/Now highlights specific ways in which Motevalli came to know and admire Hamer. First, Motevalli had studied SNCC and one of her mentors had served as a chair of SNCC in California.24 Furthermore, as an undergraduate at San Francisco State University, she worked with Angela Y. Davis who continues to be a leading voice in the black freedom struggle with strong leftist political ideologies while exposing multiple levels of oppression within a white male elite dominated nation.25 Second, Motevalli had curated a SNCC exhibit prior to her curation of Here/There, Then/Now which consisted of archives, art, and ephemera.26 Third, after returning to Iran in 2005 and during the elections of 2009, Motevalli saw up close and personal the ways the supposedly Islamic anti-imperial state was projecting an image of solidarity with black United States freedom fighters as the oppressed while simultaneously repressing the voices of the Iranian masses. Based on Motevalli’s observation of the Iranian crisis and academic study of art work on SNCC, she wanted to curate an exhibit that could help inspire the Iranian insurgents and expose the hypocrisy of the Iranian state.27 22 23 24 25 26 27

Ibid., 9. Ibid. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 3. Ibid. It must be noted that Nasrabadi uses Motevelli’s exhibit to advance a reclamation of Iranian ties to the black freedom struggle of the 1960s and the scholarship of Afro-Asian area studies. Hence, her aim aligns with Motevalli’s while also addressing the broader intellectual and scholarly concerns of “integrating Iran and the Iranian diaspora into scholarship on United States imperial engagements in Asia…” (Nasrabadi, 1).

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The Here/There, Then/Now exhibit opened in 2010 which was the one-year anniversary of the Iranian presidential elections uprising and the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of SNCC.28 Though Motevalli was aware of her inability to openly discuss the Iranian state oppression that emerged during the presidential elections, she used SNCC as a metaphor and foray to provoke reflection and dialogue on who are the oppressed in and across time, place, and space. Motevalli chose the SNCC images because, Iranians were in their own bubble and thought that perhaps they were the only ones who had seen this type of oppression. That bubble of not being in direct contact with the world outside of the simulacra of a world created by social media was making people feel hopeless, including my own family members. I wanted young Iranians to see that persistence and perseverance go hand in hand.29 Apparently, Hamer and SNCC represented an insurgency that young Iranians could learn from even though their histories and struggles were different. Fourth and finally, according to Nasrabadi, Motevalli learned of Hamer as a teenager and ever since had a deep love and admiration for her. Moreover, Motevalli crossed paths with several people who had worked alongside Hamer and they would talk about “how even in dire situations she [Hamer] would lift everyone up so they had the vitality to continue.”30 Motevalli chose to write Hamer’s testimony on a window in the Persian language of everyday life and not calligraphy, the more stylized and rarified written communicative style.31 She notes, “writing the speech on the window became a performative act … I loved watching people read it and I really hoped that it would inspire people in the way it moved and inspired me.”32 Motevalli’s exhibit can be viewed as a shrine of Hamer and SNCC that was more than just transnational and transpolitical in nature. Hamer’s testimony, as a member of the interracial, multicultural Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, demonstrated her belief in just, righteous political and social relations, and the people’s desire and ability to participate in everyday democracy that transcended identity politics. Hamer’s moral tenacity was being invoked to empower and encourage the Iranian resisters to remain steadfast, 28 29 30 31 32

Ibid., 3. Metavolli cited in Nasrabadi, 5. Ibid., 8. Ibid. Montevalli cited in Nasrabadi, Ibid.

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and not merely reactionary, in their commitment to and belief in democratic processes, practices, and outcomes. Her strength and resilience were needed to stand against Iranian state repression and to stand for the people’s choice to be upheld. As she and the MFDP called for restoration and the immediate correction of the injustice, the Iranians were being exposed to a revolutionary who was neither white nor male, nor rich or suburban. By channeling the moral and spiritual authority of Hamer, a Protestant Christian of African descent in the United States, the Iranians were learning they were not alone, or unique, in their nonwhite, anti-imperialist, revolutionary moment. Nasrabadi is both creative and provocative in the way she positions queer affinities between Hamer, a black, southern United States rural female activist, and Motevalli, an Iranian-born residing in the United States educated, working-class political artist. She notes, Motevalli’s choice of Hamer, rather than a higher-profile male civil rights leader, as a figure of inspiration for Iranians can be understood as an act of queer affiliation with a marginalized genealogy of the black liberation movement, with working-class black women’s victimization, struggle, and leadership. Hamer herself can be understood as a queer subject in relation to the mainstream civil rights narrative of progress and inclusion, where queerness signifies, in Gopinath’s words, ‘not so much a brave or heroic refusal of the normative … as much as it names the impossibility of normativity for racialized subjects who are marked by histories of violent dispossession.’33 Nasrabadi rightly notes that Hamer was on the margins of the mainstream civil rights narrative that was dominated by black men and the middle-class until SNCC came along. SNCC’s model of ‘Let the people decide’ created an alternative platform for those who were not black men, educated, and professionals like Hamer. The norms that were attempted to be prescribed by a group of black people who had not lived through the white terror in rural Mississippi were inconsistent with Hamer’s yearnings and intellectual, theopolitical analyses. Furthermore, the norms of recognition and acceptability to be equal with white standards of being human excluded people like Hamer. “Marked by histories of violent dispossession,” the vision Hamer proclaimed and enacted was a projected norm that neither the state nor mainstream civil rights organizations were able, or even yet, to receive.

33

Ibid., 10.

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The crux of Hamer’s testimony that was also integral to her revolutionary practical theology can be surmised as follows: All people, regardless of race, religion, national origin, color, class, gender/sexuality, education, or age should be treated as decent human beings without fear of reprisal or backlash for exercising their humanity and state privileges. In a creative environmentally sensitive and savvy, theo-political, loving, and nonviolent manner, Hamer contested and confronted anyone, or anything, that stood in the way of human flourishing and well-being.

Conclusion Hamer’s revolutionary practical theology, as was acknowledged, analyzed, and constructed, answers some crucial questions that academic practical theologians raise. In addition, it addresses issues that the field has yet to engage especially regarding black reparations and the integration of racial and environmental justice. Her Christian practical knowledge and wisdom on life-anddeath matters in the church and public square provide the church and theological educators with a new model of seeing the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, the emergence of “Black Power” in the late 1960s, and the women’s rights movement of the 1970s. Moreover, her attention to racial and environmental justice concerns were articulated because regardless of the places and spaces in which she occupied, Hamer tended to the soils of people’s hearts, the plantation, political decision-makers, and the promise of Christ’s freedom on Earth. How will the field of practical theology respond to an agrarian who learned how to think critically and read far beyond the six years of her limited formal public education? Will her light, life, and love capture the attention of academicians, the church, and activists of this generation? The clarity and profundity of Hamer’s revolutionary Christian thought and practice must continue to shine. She recovered and proclaimed a political Jesus whose public life and ministry was Hamer’s model and standard in the freedom struggle. With a proclivity focused on the life and teachings of Jesus in the public sphere, Hamer practiced and cultivated a radical Christianity that challenged, confronted, and changed people, places, and spaces. She articulated ideals, ideas, and insights that were critical yet constructive as well as piercing yet healing. Hamer functioned as a public prophetic-pastor who tended to the individual and communal, local and national, and institutional and social needs of her day with sound ethical principles and political perseverance. Her constructive critiques of faith and life, for faith and life, flowed from Hamer’s head, heart, mouth, and soul. The recipients of her revolutionary praxis were from diverse faith traditions and backgrounds who were invited to walk with her in the creation of a new society and humanity. In her own way, Hamer advanced, constructed, and reconstructed an existential narrative of love and interdependence that encompassed all of life from her African, African American, and Christian heritage. Today, Hamer’s faith and life continues to inspire many beyond the walls of the institutional church. Hopefully, and especially, the Christian academy and church will recover and retrieve Hamer’s life and teachings so that current and future confessional Christians can be informed, inspired, and instructed by the

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004438071_010

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black, rural woman who championed love, justice, liberation, education, and black reparations.

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Index Abel 87 Abortion 104n70, 188–189 Activism XII, 90n35, 92, 126, 154, 215n52, 233 See also Black Lives Matter; Hamer, Fannie Lou; SNCC; Womanist Acts 17:26 34, 81, 82, 150, 150n25, 176 African Americans Cultural heritage 57, 78, 84, 90, 167n75, 207, 210 and the Environment 78, 84, 90, 91, 92, 105, 142 Exclusion of 56, 148 and Human development literature 127–128 African descent 5, 48, 73, 88, 89, 135, 218, 237 African diaspora 5, 110, 185n127, 196 Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) 72 Andrews, Dale P. 10, 59, 141, 160, 219, 222, 227 Baker, Ella 6, 22, 34, 49, 70, 115, 221, 225, 226, 227, 228 Baker-Fletcher, Karen 109, 137 Beaudoin, Thomas 53, 54, 55, 71, 72, 73, 74 Bevel, James 24, 26 Bible 8, 26, 32, 58, 194, 202–205, 208 Black church(es) and Academic black theology 5, 10, 59, 66, 219–222, 223 Institutional 7, 8, 19–21, 38, 61–62, 75, 152n29, 220, 221, 222, 222n71, 231 Tradition 3, 6, 205–212 Black Economic Development Conference 185 Black family 20, 59–61, 76, 193, 198 Black infant mortality 55 Black Lives Matter Movement XII, 6, 10, 177n102, 196, 215, 225–229 Black Manifesto 185, 186 Black Panther Party 40 Black Power 41, 54, 57, 138, 162, 163, 166, 179–187, 197, 219–221, 239 Black preachers 20, 31, 38–39, 61, 71, 173, 174, 210, 220, 222, 227

Black religion 56, 61, 220 Academic guild and discipline 59, 65–66 Black reparations 9, 140, 140n1, 166, 184–187, 185n127, 191, 198, 213 Black self-determination XII, 47, 128, 133 See also Black Power Black theology as Academic discipline 10, 56, 59, 219–223 Scholarship 41, 59–61, 222n71 Blackwell, Unita 37, 119 Bramlett, Liza (Hamer’s grandmother) 193n161, 209 Brooks, Maegan Parker 2, 19, 24, 45, 162, 163 Cahalan, Kathleen A. 5n17, 51 Carmichael, Stokely 138, 163, 180 Carson, Clayborne 114n1 Carter, Hodding, III 138 Cary, Mary Ann Shad 22 Catholic Latina feminist theology 75 Practical theology 10, 50n2, 69 Religious institution 198 Religious practitioners 149, 155, 187 Theologians, Black 59 Worker Movement 69 Chaney, James 81, 155n37, 229 Child Development Group of Mississippi 174n95 Chisholm, Shirley 67, 216 Chosen people, the 36, 86 Christ 22, 27–41, 61–62, 65, 75, 88, 134, 166–172, 202, 230 Christian Education 147, 160, 196, 205–206, 206n23 Faith and life 5, 50, 62 Love 21, 57, 64, 114ff Practices 50–59, 66, 71, 71n67, 148–165 Christianity in Africa 196–197 Black 4, 60, 63, 143, 206n23, 208, 222n71, 223

257

Index as Colonizer’s religion 182 European 28, 60, 73, 141, 157, 196 Hamer’s definition of 30 Hamer’s model of 23 Hamer’s perspective of 154–156 and Oppressed Black people 41 Reimagined 66 as Religion 7, 52, 54, 64, 134 as Social movement 71–72 Western 157 Church as Institution 186 Peace 165 as Social movement 72 Citizen Education Program (CEP) 8, 26 Citizens’ Council, White 40, 46 Civil Rights Movement XI, 1, 14 Activists 31, 72, 221, 230, 231 Activities 155 and Christianity 154 as God’s reign 75, 155 Leaders 3, 6, 49, 231 and Love 114–119 and Nonviolence 123, 161–166, 163n62 Organizations 8, 24, 25, 43, 49, 72, 174n95, 175, 187–188 Supporters 70n65, 161 Clark, Septima 5, 26, 231 Collier, Jo-Etha 87 Colonialism 144, 182–183 Columbus, Christopher 26, 176 Communism 106, 186 Cone, James 33, 41, 57, 59, 80, 89–90, 200n2, 219 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) 24, 175 Conservation 92–93, 104–105 Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) 25 Cross, the 33, 87–88, 154–155, 166–168, 170–173 Cullors, Patrisse 215 Curriculum Christian education 205–212 Diversity and inclusion 143–144 Freedom School 25–26 Theological education 63 Davis, Angela Y.

192–193, 235

Delgado, Teresa 75, 75n81 Democratic National Convention (DNC) 2, 21n33, 63, 117 Democratic Party 64, 67, 192 Discrimination 159n48 Diversity and inclusion XII, 9, 104n70, 140ff Divine justice 35, 45 Dorothy Jean (Hamer) 51, 52 Dorsey, L. C. 119, 189n143 Douglass, Frederick 92, 98–99, 101 Du Bois, W. E. B. 92, 99–101, 128, 187, 215n52 Eastland, James O. 46, 130, 151, 151n26, 174n95, 203 Ecojustice 88–91 Economic justice 85, 90, 167n75 Education Civic 22–27 Head Start 174, 174n95, 188 Higher 175 Religious 147 Theological 51, 69–75 Ephesians 6:11–12 12, 45, 165 Evers, Medgar 87, 216 Evers, Myrlie 216 Fanon, Frantz 4, 107–108, 182–185 Fifteenth Amendment 124 Food insecurity 106–107 Forman, James 24, 185, 186 Fourteenth Amendment 124 Freedom Farms 2, 47, 48, 94–96, 182 Freedom Schools 8, 25–26, 188, 221 Freedom songs 2, 70, 203, 212 Freedom Summer 2, 25, 36, 37, 39, 66, 134, 135, 155, 213 Freire, Paulo 26, 69 Garza, Alicia 215 Genesis 16, 21 105 God Agents of 214 Anointed One of 32, 148 Breath of 190–191 Creator, the 52, 81, 110 Image of 150n25, 191 Kingdom of 7, 36–41, 155, 168–169, 172, 216–217, 228

258 God (cont.) Peaceable realm of 45, 151–152, 160, 166 Power of 32, 35 Good Samaritan, the 36, 39 Goodman, Andrew 81, 155n37, 229 Goto, Courtney T. 145–146, 194 Guinea 177, 178, 178n107, 196, 197, 208, 208n31 Hall, Prathia 229n7 Hamer, Fannie Lou Abortion, view on 104n70, 188–189 Activism 2, 6, 11, 53, 101, 104n70, 122, 154, 155n38, 174n95 as a form of ministry 62–69, 227–228 Adoption by 51–53 Bible, interpretation of 29, 33, 203, 204 Bible, use of 32, 194, 202–205, 203n7 Black Church, view of 7, 21, 38, 54n15, 58, 61–62, 220–221, 222, 222n71, 229–231 Buried remains of 189 Christian Praxis 1, 3, 190–198, 219–224, 224n75 and Creation care advocacy 93–113 Credential’s Committee Testimony 2, 124 Diversity Praxis 190–197 Education 8, 12–27, 198, 212 Education, views on 27, 30, 41, 174–180, 209, 210 Eviction 24, 106, 128 and God 8, 29, 31–36, 45, 167, 182, 188–189, 192, 192n154, 211 and Guinea, West Africa 177–179, 197, 208, 208n31 Honorary degrees 4n12 Intellect 10, 13, 96n52 Involuntary Sterilization 20, 51, 52, 52n9, 53, 61 and Jesus 27–31, 32, 53, 54, 87, 150, 154, 165–166, 171, 204, 211, 230–231, 240 Language 36–37, 54, 192n154, 208, 209, 234 Leadership, grassroot/indigenous 122, 133, 138, 140, 148–199, 221n69, 225–234 Mothering 51, 52, 61, 69 and National Women’s Political Caucus 58, 188–189, 216

Index Pastor(al) Leadership 152–156 and Practical knowledge 55–56, 56n22, 69–71 Protest(s) XI, 41–42, 64–65, 121–122 Theo-politics of love 114ff United States, view of 42, 105–106, 108, 118, 124–125, 136, 149–151, 164–165, 175, 186, 189, 208–209 and United States Constitution 24, 124 Winona jail beating 28, 42, 103, 119, 126 Hamer, Perry “Pap” 22, 79 Harding, Vincent 29, 115, 203, 204 Harris, Melanie L. 88–89, 92, 110 Healing and Black Manifesto, the 185–186 and Christian Higher Education 143–145 and Discipline of Practical Theology 136–137 and Fanon 183–185 and Narratives/Storytelling 151–152, 156–160 as Salvation 137 Height, Dorothy 2, 47, 187, 188, 216 Henry, Aaron 21n33 Highlander Folk School 26 Hip Hop Culture 221 Holiday, Billie 79–80 hooks, bell 57, 183n124 Horton, Myles 26 Hudson-Weems, Clenora 215 Human rights XI, XII, 23, 42, 72, 83, 86, 98, 126–127, 150, 225 Humphrey, Hubert 118, 123, 124 Indigenous Cosmologies 13n3, 109 Leadership 50, 72, 116, 125–126, 137, 202 People 3, 22, 28, 157, 159, 176, 210 Religion 60 Infant mortality 55, 94, 216 Integration Racial 44, 61, 188 and Hamer 82, 140, 148–151, 160, 232 Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO) 185 Jeremiah 31:15 Jesus

65

259

Index Christ, the 27–31, 65, 167, 202 and Community 25, 230–231, 230n9 and Church’s teachings 134 as Exemplar 29, 32, 107, 202 Life and teachings 32–33, 36, 47, 72, 130n51, 134, 171, 216–218, 229, 240 Religion of 82, 179, 201 as Revolutionary 65, 149, 227, 229–230 and Roman Empire, the 34, 38, 88, 134, 168–169 and Womanist Theology 171–172 John the Baptist 148 Jordan, Clarence 72 Jubilee 140, 140n1, 158n45, 159, 160, 163, 166–198 Justice and peace 41–45, 161 Kennedy, John 87 Kennedy, Robert 87 King, Martin Luther, Jr.

7, 72, 85, 87, 131

Labor

45–49, 67–68, 82–83, 94, 96, 99, 147, 193, 201, 202 Lament 64–65, 114 Land Use and Access 94–103 Latinx 102, 143n8 Lee, Jarena 22 Lewis, John 116 Lived experience(s) and African Americans 206 and Black Theology 50, 58n28, 200n2 and Hamer 26, 50, 76, 200n2, 201–202 and Practical Theology 50, 71n66, 76 and Raced bodies 195 and Womanist Theology 58, 58n28, 89, 233 Luke 4:16–20 133 Luke 4:18–20 27–28 Luke 4:18–22 62 Luke 18:15–17 1, 216 Lynching 13, 33, 54, 79–80, 109 Malcolm X 54, 87 Maparyan, Layli 200, 201n4, 212–215, 218, 218n60, 224 Mark 3:35 36 Marlow, W. D. 24, 46, 122, 193 Matthew 5:14–16 204, 212

Matthew 10:16 28 Matthew, Gospel of 107 McLaurin, Charles 31, 189 Mikoski, Gordon S. 5n17, 51n3 Miller-McLemore, Bonnie 4n13, 55–56, 56n22, 73n77, 153n32 Mississippi Delta 14, 30, 46 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFPD) 64–65, 67, 117, 155, 197, 236 Moore, Amzie 27 Moses, Bob 25, 31, 36 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 27, 116, 124, 222–223 National Council of Churches (NCC) 70n65, 161 National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) 2, 47, 187, 192, 192n154, 216 National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) 58, 188, 216 Nation of Islam 54, 189n146, 231 Negro/Black/African American Spirituals 2, 17, 203–205 Ogunyemi, Chikwenye

215

Parker, Evelyn 62–63, 221–222 Parker, Russ 156–160 Parks, Rosa 72n73, 103n68 Pastoral care 156 and counseling 160 Pastoral leader/office 4, 59, 135, 152n29, 153, 153n32, 154, 160 Pastoral theologian(s) 9n23, 56, 64, 73, 135, 136, 151, 156 Peace Church(es) 160–161 Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST) 127–128 Pig bank 47, 68, 182 Poll taxes 117 Practical theology as Academic discipline 3, 4, 4n13, 11, 145–146 as Activity of faith 4, 4n14 Black 5, 58–59, 141, 160, 196, 219–224 Catholic 10, 50n2

260 Practical theology (cont.) Characteristics of 50–51 Conception of 153n32 Latinx 143 Practices 53, 55–56, 136–137, 145 Research 50–51, 55, 72–73, 74, 75n81 Womanist 5, 62–63, 160, 194–195, 221–224 Preservation 84, 93, 99, 101, 104–107, 144 Psalm 27:1 227 Psalm 37 164 Pullum, Mr. 180, 180n114 Raced bodies 194–195, 197 Racialized 142, 145–146 Racism 43, 89, 91, 108, 120, 138, 141, 142, 162, 176, 197–198, 233 Reagon, Bernice Johnson 24–25, 33, 153–154, 205 Reddie, Anthony 196 Refugees 99 Reproduction 103–104 Reproductive Harms 201 Practices 193 Rights 103n68, 189 Reyes, Patrick 101–102, 143–144, 146 Roberts, J. Deotis 59–61 Ross, Rosetta E. 117–118, 119, 154, 226n2, 231–233 Ruleville, MS 17, 32, 119, 125, 130, 160, 170 Salvation 35, 68, 123, 137, 173, 220–221 Schwerner, Michael 81, 155n37, 229 Seale, Bobby 40 Sheppard, Phillis I. 194–195 Shockley, Grant S. 206n23 Shuttlesworth, Fred 72, 72n73 Simon of Cyrene 32–33, 75, 136 Smith, Mitzi J. 207 Smith, Yolanda 205 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) 8, 23, 24, 26, 116, 125, 138, 161, 225, 227 Spirit of the Lord, the 28, 61, 62, 203 Stewart, Maria 105 Stokes, Olivia P. 206n23 Story, J. D. 22

Index Storytelling 19, 140, 148–166, 206 Strange Fruit 80 Stranger’s Home Baptist Church 19 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) X, 7, 8, 22–27, 31, 34, 39, 43, 44, 61, 103, 106, 114n1, 116, 138, 153, 161, 162, 174n95, 178–181, 185, 188, 221, 221n69 and Black Lives Matter Movement 225–229 and International influence 234–237 as a Model of Christian community 27 Suffering 35, 46, 60, 67, 81, 136, 173, 195 of Christ 29–30, 33, 171–172 Tesfamariam, Rahiel 225–230 Testifying 233–234 Thirteenth Amendment 124 Thurman, Howard 34, 132, 134–136, 168–169, 179, 190 Tometi, Opal 215 Toure, Sekou 178–179 Townsend, James Lee 14, 18 Townsend, Lou Ella 14, 16–18, 165 Truth, Sojourner 22 Tubman, Harriet 187 Turpin, Katherine 72–73, 74 Urban renewal

44, 107, 192

Vietnam War 43, 45, 106, 164, 175 Voter Registration 24, 25 Voting Rights 2, 7, 104n69, 106n77 Walker, Alice 215 Washington, Booker T. 85, 92 Watts, Isaac 18 Wednesdays In Mississippi (WIMS) 2, 135, 140, 187–188 Wells, Ida B. 13, 79 Wesleyan Quadrilateral 54n15, 200, 200n2 Westfield, N. Lynne 203 White, Monica 94 White power 20, 55, 96, 148, 163, 174–175, 180, 233 White supremacy XII, 89, 96n52, 121, 141, 179 Wilderness 77ff Wilkins, Roy 124

261

Index William Chapel Missionary Baptist Church 22, 26, 138 Wilmore, Gayraud S. 29, 59, 60, 65, 66 Winona 28, 42, 103, 119, 126, 213 Womanist Activism 202n6, 218n60 Africana studies 212 Eco 110–111 Idea 200, 212–215, 218 Methodological approaches 5, 88, 110 Proto 1, 200, 207, 215, 216–217

Studies 160 Theology 223 Theoretical approaches 5, 6 Wolfteich, Claire E. 10, 50n2, 69 Work(er) of Christ 167–173 Community 67–69 Cultural 69, 83, 153–154 Sharecropper 14–16, 18, 93, 129 Young, Andrew

138