 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacoch tank peoples. I'm David Terry, archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation between author Kate Clifford Larson and civil rights leader Joyce Ladner about Larson's new biography of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs coming up later this month on our YouTube channel. On Wednesday, January 12th at 1 p.m., Warren Eugene Militair Jr. will be here to tell us about Beyond Slavery's Shadow, his new book about free people of color in the South from the colonial period through the Civil War. On Wednesday, January 19th at 1 p.m., Kevin Boyle will discuss his new book, The Shattering, America in the 1960s, which focuses on the period's fierce conflicts, the civil rights movement rising black nationalism, Nixon-era politics of busing in the Supreme Court, and the Vietnam War. The new biography Walk With Me opens with Fannie Lou Hamer giving her testimony before the credentials committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Hamer and more than 60 other members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party had come to the convention to challenge the all-white Democratic delegation and call for more realistic representation of the people of Mississippi. In moving words that were broadcast on national television, Hamer spoke of her own struggles and encounters with violence. The transcription of that powerful speech is in the records of the Democratic National Committee housed in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. FBI and Department of Justice files in the National Archives also assisted Kate Clifford Larson in telling Hamer's story. Larson's book Walk With Me has gathered praise from reviewers. Jill Watts, writing for The New York Times, declared, Walk With Me is a gripping and skillfully researched political biography that embeds Hamer's personal history within a compelling account of the post-World War II civil rights movement. And Christian Science Monitor's reviewer Dwight Weingarten wrote, Kate Clifford Larson's book brings Hamer's story in eventual emergence as a civil rights leader into view, providing a fresh look at the oft-repeated stories of the civil rights movement. Kate Clifford Larson is the author of Bound for the Promised Land, a biography of Harriet Tubman, Rosemary, the hidden Kennedy daughter, and the assassins accomplices Mary Surratt and the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln. She has consulted on feature film scripts, documentaries, museum exhibits, public history initiatives, and numerous publications and appeared on CBS Sunday morning to BBC, PBS, C-SPAN, and NPR. Larson is currently a Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center scholar and lives with her family outside Boston. Joyce Ladner grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi during the area of racial segregation. During her years of activism in the early 60s, she worked with civil rights martyrs Medgar Evers, Vernon Dahmer, and Clyde Conard. Even though she was in college, she failed the voter registration literacy test. It did not get registered until a federal court order was granted. While enrolled in Tougaloo College, she was arrested for trying to worship at the all-white Galloway Methodist Church and spent a week in jail. She received her PhD in Sociology at Washington University. She was the first woman president of Howard University, where she also served as Professor of Sociology. She was also a member of the United States Department of Justice's Advisory Council on Violence Against Women and the Council on Foreign Relations. She has authored, co-authored, and edited eight books. Now let's hear from Kate Clifford Larson and Joyce Ladner. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you very much for that great introduction. And I'm really excited to be here with Joyce, who has become a good friend over this time that I've been researching and writing about Fannie Lou Hamer. So I'm thrilled to share a few images about Hamer and to give an overview of her life story. And then Joyce will give some words and then we'll have a discussion about that civil rights movement that elevated Fannie Lou Hamer to leadership in the country. And I hope that you enjoy our presentation and discussion. So let me just share my screen here. There we are. So several years ago, I decided to write a biography of research and write a biography of Fannie Lou Hamer. And she had been on my mind for a really long time and actually since graduate school days back in the 1990s. And it always stuck in my mind how similar she was to my other American hero, Harriet Tubman. They were both women who came out of very difficult circumstances, lacked a lot of education, formal education, and they rose really out of very difficult circumstances to become leaders. And it just made me think more about what the qualities are that make someone a leader when their neighbors don't rise up to become leaders or other people in their families don't. And I think that there's so many special things about Hamer. And I hope that you all become interested in her and fascinated by her as I have over time. So Hamer was born in Choctaw County in Mississippi in 1917. She was the 20th child of Jim and Ella Townsend. And the tragic thing for Hamer's family, seven of those children had died before Fannie Lou was born. And the survival rate for black children in Mississippi at the time was grim. One out of four died before they reached the age of five years old. So Hamer was raised in an incredibly strict Baptist household with tremendous love. Her mother was a powerful figure in her life. They were sharecroppers on a cotton plantation. They moved when Hamer was very young, three or four years old. They moved from Choctaw to Sunflower County to outside of Ruleville where she spent the rest of her life. And as I said, they were sharecroppers and they struggled like many other black and white families who worked that system in Mississippi. She started picking cotton at the age of six to bring in a few pennies to help her family. Education for black children was spotty in that area. She eventually achieved a sixth grade education, but by the time she was 12 or 13, she had to leave school permanently to pick full time with her family. Her mother became blind during the Great Depression. And something had flown up in her eye while she was out in the field chopping up roots. And because of the lack of access to healthcare, she went blind. So by the end of the Depression in the 1930s, Ella was completely blind. And Hamer's father, Jim, died of a stroke. So Hamer, 22 years old, was left with the responsibility of taking care of her mother and trying to make her way in this world that was incredibly oppressive. The racism and discrimination, the violence that she and the community faced daily. Could have totally debilitated her. But she was a brilliant child and though she lacked a complete formal education, she was an avid reader and she was a great observer of behavior and things that were going on in the community. She had a beautiful singing voice. She was the pride of the community even as a child. Her singing voice would carry, you know, a church service. And out in the field, she would sing songs. And she grew up to be a bit of a leader. She was a little bit of a rebel and her mother was very protective. And a fierce woman and Hamer kind of took on some of those characteristics. She married a local man, Pap Hamer, in 1944. And they lived on the Marlowe plantation outside of Ruleville. And Hamer later in her life during the 1960s when she gave talks about the Civil Rights Movement, she always claimed that she had no knowledge that the Civil Rights Movement was going on in the country in the 1940s and 1950s, which seems incredulous to me. And it turns out it is because she was active in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s. In the Mississippi Delta, she participated in NAACP activities and attended meetings that were quite dangerous to attend. And she tried to encourage people to become, to do things to try to improve their situation. But she was hamstrung because the ability to vote for an African American person in Mississippi was very, very difficult. And nearly half the population was black, but only about 5% of African Americans were allowed to vote. The onerous literacy tests and poll taxes and other things that the white community used to prevent black people from voting really was quite effective and kept things from changing. So, but what is it that made Hamer become the leader to break out of the community in Ruleville and take on the world and bring messages to the rest of the country during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s? Well, I link it to this woman Ella Baker here on the left hand of the screen. She worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King. And she had this great idea that young people would be a tremendous source of activism. And she had seen what they were doing with trying to integrate lunch counters throughout the South and on integrate buses. And she could not believe the courage and the tenacity of some of these young people. So she organized the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee with young people, including Bob Moses here on the right. He was a young man who would come Harvard graduate had come from New York City where he was a math teacher and he was very attracted to what was going on in the South and he worked with Ella Baker. And she sent him to Mississippi in 1961 to start organizing people and helping them finding out what they needed what they wanted, and to find ways to make those things happen. And in the summer of 1962, Bob Moses and a group of young SNCC leaders arrived in Ruleville and held a meeting at Hamer's Church, William Chapel there in Ruleville. And they were there to convince the local residents to try to register to vote. And Hamer had reached a point in her life where she felt that something had to change more than what she was trying to do. She had experienced what I viewed as a crossroads in her life. For years, she and her husband Pap had tried to have children together. But she had fertility issues that are fibrous tumors that were preventing her from having a successful pregnancy. And in 1961, the plantation owner's wife suggested that she have surgery and remove the tumor so that she could get pregnant. So she went to this white doctor, Dr. Charles Dorro, and he said that he could take care of it. Well, what he did was sterilize her without her permission. And when she found out it devastated her, it sent her into a tremendous depression. But she pulled herself out of it and decided that she needed to change things. Something had to change. This couldn't happen again. And other black women in the community and actually around the country were receiving these four sterilizations or sterilizations without their permission. And she did not want to feel helpless anymore. So she went to this meeting and she later said about those young SNCC workers that they were like the new kingdom on Earth. But they had come to listen and to help and inspire them. And she was truly inspired by what they said that day in August of 1962. She decided to try to register to vote. And so she went with a group of 17 other Ruleville residents to the county seat in Indianola. And she tried to register to vote. She took the test, failed the test, as did all the other people that tried to register that day. And when she got home to the plantation that night, her landlord, W.D. Marlowe, evicted her. And he said that Mississippi wasn't ready for that. And it shook Hamer to her core that this was going to happen. But it also convinced her that she needed to stand up and fight. This is a picture of Theron Lint. He was a county clerk in another county, excuse me, in Mississippi, who was notorious, excuse me, for not letting people pass the test. And he defied court order after court order throughout the early to mid 1960s. The federal government forcing him to let people register to vote. He was a terrible, terrible person. But Hamer exhibited leadership skills that Bob Moses in particular noticed right away that she appeared to be a leader in the community. So Snick hired her to be a field worker. And she blossomed. And she became an amazing speaker on the stage. In fact, one of the civil rights veterans who was a very young man at the time when she started appearing on stages in Mississippi. Dr. Leslie Burr Macklemore said that he recalled that quote she was the star the person that all of them were wowed by no one equaled her storytelling. She testified preached. She led them in rousing freedom songs. She was the center of attraction, he said. Another civil rights veteran said she was a powerhouse, she would shine her light and people caught that spirit. So she really moved people and empowered young people and old people older people. And she had been through so much she was just going to keep fighting to get what she wanted the right to vote, and more equality justice. Snick sent her to take different classes in different places around the south. And in June of 1963, she traveled to Georgia and South Carolina for citizenship training classes and other classes in nonviolent protest techniques and how to help people take those literacy tests, etc. She went to the group of young Snick people including here June Johnson on the left who's holding the sign I wonder is white power dying. And on the right here is Annelle Ponder, a teacher from Atlanta, and they rode the bus to South Carolina and back and along the way they tested, whether the lunch counters and the restrooms at each bus station were integrated by federal law they were supposed to be and they had no problem until on their way back, they stopped in Winona, Mississippi, and the restaurant was segregated and so were the restrooms. And they made comments to the proprietor and the police arrived and arrested them and threw them in jail. And over four days, they were brutally, brutally beaten. And hainer hamer was sexually assaulted and she almost, you know, she almost died. And in the, in the jail, she asked her cellmates to sing walk with me, Jesus, the spiritual the song, it helped her survive those dark dark hours when no one was coming to help them. They survived, and they were released on June 12 1963, just hours after Medgar Evers had been assassinated in his front yard in Jackson, Mississippi. So it was a, it was a incredible moment for her to come out of that alive, and then to learn that this great leader in Mississippi had been assassinated. But she, in a sense, was reborn again and she was determined that she was going to keep fighting that they weren't going to keep her quiet. And as a matter of fact, she used to tell audiences, quote, if them crackers in Winona thought they discouraged 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. She was more determined than ever and the violence that was being perpetrated in Mississippi is just just stunning and against these young SNCC workers and local residents who supported them. So, more and more SNCC workers arrived. Oh, this is a picture of Fannie Lou Hamer's husband, Pap. It's a photograph taken by Maria Varela and he's cooking cracklings in a pot out in the yard. And he helped cook food for these young SNCC workers and he held down the household while Fannie Lou Hamer was off giving lectures and speeches and trying to help people register to vote. They did adopt two girls, Dorothy and Vergy, so he had the responsibility of raising them at home when she was gone. So these young SNCC workers worked to help people register to vote to encourage them to do that. In the summer of 1964 they held what was called Mississippi Freedom Summer along with other civil rights organizations and they brought 850 volunteers to Mississippi to start freedom schools and community centers and to help people register to vote. So it was a huge movement. The backlash was tremendous, however, and many people were injured. Hamer was threatened nearly daily. And some civil rights workers were murdered by white supremacists who didn't want change coming to Mississippi. Hamer also helped start the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which was a party to represent mostly African Americans who were not allowed to vote. And some of the arguments of white voters in Mississippi was that black people didn't want to vote, so it didn't, you know, what does it matter? And she and the rest of them helped prove that, of course, black Mississippians wanted to vote. So they had mock elections to prove that people were willing to come out and vote for the candidates of their choice. Eventually they decided to challenge the Mississippi All-White Democratic Party as it was getting ready to attend the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in August of 1964. They wanted to challenge the seating of the All-White Party as it did not represent all Mississippians and they wanted to be able to vote for the Democratic candidates for President and Vice President. So Hamer and a group of 68 Mississippians, part of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, presented their challenge to the Credentials Committee at the Democratic National Convention that August. And Hamer's impassioned speech wowed everybody. In fact, some people wept when they heard her speech. It was about seven or eight minutes long. She had much more powerful impact than Martin Luther King who spoke that day and other civil rights leaders who spoke. She spoke from the heart. She did not read notes and she told the audience and the world, because it was being filmed by NBC News, that the world had to know what was happening in Mississippi, the violence and the terror that was being rained down upon the black community. And she said, and President Johnson heard this, she said, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America the land of the free and the home of the brave where our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in America? President Johnson had interrupted the news coverage of her speech because he knew how powerful she was but he needed the white Democratic delegates to vote for him, to nominate him for the presidency. So he made a deal behind her back and agreed to seat the all white delegation. Hamer was devastated that this happened. But she went home to fight some more. And in 1968, she succeeded in having the reformulated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party called the Loyalists seated at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. And there she argued for more inclusion of women and African Americans. She wanted the Democratic platform to discuss universal health care, preschool education, poverty programs, etc., things that we're still actually arguing for today. But she had a huge impact. Her health suffered dramatically as a result of the beating in the Winona jail and it declined throughout the 1960s and especially into the 1970s. But she continued to fight for her community. She opened a freedom farm where people could grow their own food. She had a pig bank where people could get pigs to feed themselves. And she helped found the National Women's Political Caucus. She was against the Vietnam War. She just continued to campaign and fight for equal rights and civil rights and more. She died in 1977 complications from breast cancer. But her legacy lives on and boy it seems more important now today than ever as we continue to face the struggles of voting rights and more communities are trying to take those rights away. So I'm going to hand this over to Joyce and I will stop sharing this. There we go. Joyce. It's nice to see you. Nice to see you too Kate. And thank you so much for that overview of Mrs. Hamer's life. I met Mrs. Hamer when I was a sophomore in college in 1962. But my sister Dory was one of those SNCC workers who went to the Delta and a competent Mrs. Hamer and I guess about 20 or so other people when they went to the courthouse in Indian Nola to attempt to register to vote after the owner of Malo's plantation, he dictated her and had some of the workers on the plantation set her furniture alongside the road. My sister Dory and other SNCC workers helped to move that furniture to a safe place until Mrs. Hamer found a place to live. Mrs. Hamer never looked back as you said once she got involved in the movement. She joined SNCC. The NAACP and the SCLC had no doubt wanted her to work with them at some point I would assume. But she always told us and I was a member of SNCC. She said I prefer working with the young people because they're not afraid to take chances. And she told us that we didn't second guess ourselves and that we were ready to get out there on the front lines and really bring about substantial changes in Mississippi. I also attended Mrs. Hamer's funeral in 1977 and I remember Andrew Young, Reverend Andrew Young who was then US Ambassador to the United Nations eulogized her and he said that the hands that picked cotton also just picked a president and he was referring to President Carter. It was a sad ending for Mrs. Hamer because she never ever received the economic benefits that she fought for for other people. She was born, I mean she was born into poverty and she was still in poverty at her death. And I like to think that had we only known so many of us young people had gone on to start our lives and so on. But I wish that we had paid closer attention to her back in Mississippi perhaps we could have helped her more or helped her at all. Mrs. Hamer, I met Mrs. Hamer as I said when I was 17, 18 years old, sophomore in college, and she definitely commanded the room, the stage, and she had the most powerful singing voice. And she also, she was very, very charismatic. She was very, what shall I say? She didn't put on airs at all. She she never got lost to her homespun wisdom or her deep abiding faith in God that she often invoked. She always sang the song this little light of mine I'm going to let it shine. That was her signature song. She was on stage in New York City, or a back in her church, William Shappell. She remained the same person. She, she, as we said in the south did not put on airs. And all of the exposure she had to a very different world than that which she'd grown up in, including going with SNCC people to Conakry Guinea, after the Mississippi Freedom Summer. She never ever changed. She remained the same person. I think that's one of the traits of gifted leaders, that there's something about one's background that one finds strength in. Without a doubt, Mrs. Hamer's strength came from her, her, her background that where she grown up, and the soil of Rueville, Mississippi, that Delta soil remained with her, even though she had all of these other experiences. I remember going to Atlantic City to the Democratic National Convention in 1964. And I remember how crestfallen we all were, when the decision was made to seek a handful of people. And instead of to seek the entire all white delegation of Mississippians, and to reserve a handful of seats. How many was it? Okay, was it four? I think it was just two seats. And Mrs. Hamer quipped. I didn't come here. We didn't come here for no two seats. All of us is tired. And she found no difficulty whatsoever in rejecting this paltry compromise, because it didn't represent all that she and the other delegates of the MFDP had fought for. And, and I think that that that summed up who Mrs. Hamer was that that she always fought and fought and fought. And despite not receiving much in return, personal, I mean, she heard her gifts were intrinsic. Or the gifts she received rather were intrinsic. And she never fought for money for herself. But I remember to that that Mrs. Hamer adopted two daughters. And after she found out that she had been given a made sterile, given a hysterectomy, or actually her tubes were tied, I think, without her knowledge or consent. She didn't give up on having a family. She and Pap adopted two young girls that they raised and one of them died very early on, after she, I guess, when she had reached adulthood. And one, one rumor was that she had died because of complications of malnutrition. I'm not sure. Is that, would that be the case? No, she had anemia. And because of lack of access to good health care, she got pregnant. A second time had a baby and the anemia just, it just took over her body and she died. Yeah. Right. And her granddaughter came to Washington a couple of years ago for the March on Washington Film Festival, which we honored Mrs. Hamer, Victoria Grave, my cousin, and Mrs. Anna Divine, who all of whom ran for Congress in a mock election. And actually Mrs. I think Mrs. Hamer got more votes than Senator Eastland, was it? She didn't get more votes, but she got a significant number, but of course the white Mississippi folks wouldn't count those votes. Yeah. Right. They were not counted. But they, those three came on to Washington and she had a captive audience in the Congress when they came in and but at any rate, Mrs. Hamer was like so many of the other black women I had grown up around. She was like my aunts. She was like my mother. My mother was like Mrs. Hamer. They were all very, very strong people who rose to the occasion, who didn't expect a lot out of life because life had never dealt them a good hand. They all said that if you get an education, no one can take it from you. That was my mother's mantra to us as we were growing up. And I remember thinking that my mother and Mrs. Hamer and so many other these women had had their labor taken from them. They'd had every single thing that was material taken from them by the white power structure that they were paid very, very very, very paltry wages, maybe $2 a day for cleaning a house. And, or in the fields as Mrs. Hamer and her family never made enough money to come out in the clear or to make any profit rather at the end of the cotton picking season so that they were always in debt to the plantation owner. I guess what I'm saying is that they had a hope for us. I remember one time Mrs. Hamer said to me, so your daughter's sister is so good to meet you and you're getting an education. Nobody's going to take that from you. And I remember that resonated with what my mother and others grandmother had always told us that that education was that it was, shall I say, and it was almost an intrinsic acquisition that couldn't be destroyed. But at an end rate that's about what I have to say about Mrs. Hamer. I showed the picture of Theron Lynn, the who was in charge of the registrar of voting in my county had the recipient on that same day that that picture was taken. I had attempted to register to vote. And of the three times I tried. I never passed the test but that was that was freedom day in Hattiesburg. And Mrs. Hamer there's another photograph of Mrs. Hamer picketing in front of the courthouse that day. She was indeed an extraordinary person. One, like we've not seen since. She's amazing and speaking of that moment just so that the audience knows that these Theron Lynn and other registrars like him would pass white people who took the test who were illiterate they couldn't even write their names and they would be allowed to vote. So it was, it was a cruel, horrific system. And you're right, Hamer just would not stop. But she was so inspired by the young people they gave her that energy. And while she mentored them they gave her so much. And she talked about how she felt that there was more Christianity in the group of SNCC students than she ever saw in a church. And that made me laugh because she battled with some of those ministers in those churches who are too afraid to have meetings, because they, you know, they didn't want to confront the white power structure but she was, she was ballsy. She was an incredibly honest person and and her strength came from her fundamental beliefs, you know, those that were taught to her by her mother, Ella, those that were taught to her by her sometimes minister father. But her and her community is very important about her community that always supported her no matter what, but she, she had this just a fundamental beliefs that we don't see very often in anyone. And she, they gathered her rather than any the, that's why the fame never went to her head as we would say, she was unimpressed by speaking with people in her office or whatever. But Mrs. But that day when I registered tried to register vote. One of the questions on two questions one was essay questions and you know who writes an essay question for to try to register vote. But one was, what are the duties of a good citizen and I wrote knowing that they were not he was not going to pass me the duties of a good citizen or to obey just laws and to disobey unjust laws. And I was standing there at the counter, and he went and seeing distance you know back over to where secretary was. And they talked and he looked down at my application and then he look over at me and one do it again and then one point I waved at him. But he that registrar and others who sometimes will ask black people how many bubbles in a bar of soap, or how many grains of sand or in a court jar. But at the same time, there and land got on the phone and called white people and told them you register vote now come on down here and vote, you know, when it's time to vote. And, or a black person could be killed. In fact, one of my mentors Vernon damer, who was head of the Hattiesburg in WCP was in fact murdered in 1966, because he told. There was also a poll tax required and you had, you had to pay maybe a couple of dollars a year. And you had to keep all your receipts in order. Before you could, that was one of the other qualifications of a voting, and he had a store and he got on the radio and he told people to come black people to come to a store, and he would pay their poll tax for them. And he was murdered hours that I believe maybe the next night or so, the head of the NWC, I mean the Ku Klux Klan and nearby Laurel. The violence was is, you know, when I was doing the research for the book. It was stunning to me just stunning that the violence and there were no repercussions to these white supremacists who were doing it, and everybody knew who they were and, you know, it's just incredible incredible. The fortitude for people to stand up and fight it is remarkable looking back. And, you know, I link it to the emergence of the balance today that we're going into a second phase of post reconstruction but also a second phase of the 60s balance in a way. Because we on this to it is that today is January 6, and a year ago we saw this incredible balance, unleashed on the US capital. Yeah, and homegrown terrorists that were ignored for a long time and all of a sudden, you know, police are recognizing them, and they've grown, you know, just a leaf in bounds, right, because they've been allowed to. And a very very threatening, but that's the kind of same kind of balance but it was worse in Mississippi and other parts of deep south, because there was nothing was done about them and they hid behind the sheet of the Ku Klux Klan, or they bombed your house and torched it. And the dead of night when people were asleep. I remember Mr. Damer. When they shot into his home and torched our bum into at the same time simultaneously, he got his wife and two young children out. And then he went back into the house with a shotgun and started shooting at them. So his family could drive away. And that's when he got his sustained burns but also smoke inhalation and you died the next day. And that's when I lost my innocence there that and Atlantic City. Mrs. Hamer and others were not seated. Yeah, I, it's amazing how the more gains that were made during the 1960s, the more the backlash was from the white communities in in Mississippi and other southern states it was direct correlation to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1964 and then the passage of the Voting Rights Act 1965. And those SNCC workers doing voter registration, everything that changed, desegregation of, you know, bus terminals and everything, everything triggered this violent response on the part of the white supremacists. And a parallel today is that the Voting Rights Act is still up again for is under just the greatest challenge since the 1960s. Yeah, I agree. They dismantled parts of that 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2013 with Shelby v. Boulder and the Supreme Court. And now we're seeing what happens when, when you take those those securities away that certain states and certain, you know, citizens will try their best to deny others the right to vote. Absolutely. That's, I mean history repeating itself in the worst kind of way. But, but you chose just a fantastic subject because we all knew Mrs. Hamer's life story and her power and her courage and so on. But now the world can know it through your wonderful book. Thank you. Thank you. And you know what I hope that when people read the book not only did they learn about Hamer as a remarkable human being. But also that, you know, ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Exactly. It isn't all the Martin Luther Kings of the world. It's, you know, it's every day people in our communities across this country that can do have been doing will continue to do extraordinary things. I think that Hamer was supported. She someone identified her and supported her. I'm thinking about Moses and other SNCC activists and supported her and gave her a platform. All she needed was a platform and boy did she just take it. And there are people like that today that could do use our help use the support. We need to elevate those leaders. Absolutely. And there's this they're waiting to be, as you said, to be discovered. And also she her powerful. So she had a powerful sense of self and an anger over the injustices of the environment. But it was her life was really infused with, you know, her love for her family and her community and her profound faith. Because that faith fortified her during those really dark hours when other people would have shrunk away and hidden and just never stepped out in the light of day again. She found that strength in her faith that made her move forward. There were some very fundamental beliefs that she acquired growing up, you know, one was just a very powerful belief in God, and it helped her to cope. I mean, because she she just felt that there was a here after there, there was a power that she could rely on to keep her going, you know. And she never lost her faith, never, ever. And I think that as she got older, it became more important for her to rely on. And human beings disappointed her there were many people that disappointed her. And but her faith never never disappointed her she knew she could turn to that and she'd find that strength and stability. But there were human beings that she was deeply disappointed with because she saw the world very, very specifically in very black and white terms and it was not negotiable there was no negotiating. So other people would negotiate around her and, and that disappointed her tremendously. Exactly. I mean, I think that sometimes if you, you're better off if, if, if you don't have a lot of nuance in your life when, when difficult times hit you, because she, if you have that fundamental faith, you can go back to it but if you are questioning, certainly as I did in college, you know, when I was arrested. Well, am I agnostic or am I, or am I a believer or whatever. But for Mrs. Hamer, there was no such question, you know, she was a believer and she just held on to that that faith, the faith of her mothers and fathers, you know, and she knew there was a moral there was a moral compass there were, it was a moral fight that she was facing and that's, that's what drove her. She just would not compromise there was just now Dr Martin Luther King might compromise or some of the other big civil rights leaders. They understood politics in certain ways and they might compromise but she was, she just couldn't she wouldn't In fact, in Atlantic City, the Democratic National Convention in 1964, Martin Luther King was among those who urged her to accept the the two seats. And she said no, I mean, others said, Well, you can at least get a foot in the door. And she didn't want to a foot in the door she wanted to take everybody else with her. She wanted all of them to have to go through that door. One of the things I remember about Atlantic City was that the the some of the SNCC guys towed the car that Goodman Swarney and James Cheney were in when they're the three civil rights workers when they were murdered in in Meridian, not meridian, but the Shoba County, Mississippi, and it brought that car to the boardwalk. And everybody, you know, there are people, just thousands of people and they're all walking past that car and they want to know what is this burned out cars doing here on the boardwalk. And, you know, we had people who would stand there and explain to them. What happened. Why was that burned out car there. It was because three civil rights workers had gotten the call that a church had been burned. They went to check it out. And they were jailed. And when they were released from jail at night on midnight, the sheriff had had time to round up the Ku Klux Klan's type people to follow them and to murder them to shoot them. And then they were burned. I mean, where I was about to say in turn they already did but they were they were putting this big you know when you have a lot of sand and rocks and not rocks but a dam it was an earthen dam right and cover it over. And while the FBI was out looking for them for weeks. That's where they were. In fact, they had left Atlantic City, not Atlantic City, I'm sorry. Western University College in Ohio where the sneak training was going on for the for the students who were going to participate in Freedom Summer 1964. And when they got that call they jumped in the car and drove back to Mississippi. And they were lured back there, you know, right. Right. And met their fate. And Mrs. Hamer's faith never shrunk. Right. He rode, I think she rode back with Rita Schwerner, Nikki Schwerner's wife. You know, she knew in her gut that they were, they had been killed. She, you know, it was in jail somewhere they had been killed. She just knew it. And I knew two of the three civil rights workers, Mickey Schwerner, whose wife, Rita, you just referred to. And James Cheney, James Cheney was a local boy, guy and Mrs. and Mickey Schwerner and Rita Schwerner had come down to Mississippi earlier. You're proud to then 63 to work full time in the movement from, they came from Brooklyn. And, you know, I think about now about having known Medgar Evers, and I was a very young person. And known James Cheney, Mickey Schwerner, Vernon Damer, all these people were murdered. And I knew them. We kept the faith and we kept going. It is stunning that you all just kept fighting and moving and making change. It just is remarkable, despite that massive resistance. What else were you going to do is essentially, you know, nobody left the movement, they didn't leave because they were scared, because part of your security was in numbers. There are other people who felt as you did who believed and you do and they had your back. We have a question from the audience. So the Mississippi sovereignty commission, which was like Mississippi's own little FBI. And they did a lot of bad things and they monitored all the civil rights workers and they knew what was going on and what the white supremacists were doing. So the question is, were any of the officials identified in the Mississippi sovereignty archives charged with federal crimes? Absolutely not. Yeah, that's right. They were not. There were some documents but, you know, they say everything is there. I think there are a lot of documents that are missing, but I don't know. They were removed. A lot of the documents were in fact removed. And one, they asked. There were two people, both of whom were my professors, Ed King and who's the chaplain at Tougaloo College where I attended and John Salter. And they reviewed a lot of the documents and I think they removed some of them. I know Ed King was their defensive about why he removed them, but you know, I would rather have taken my chances on seeing all of all. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I remember the sovereignty commission there. I have a handful of files in the collection and one of them was when the sovereignty commission to two guys on the commission went to Mississippi, my hometown to look for dirt on us as they said. And just in case and I've always wanted just in case what are they going to be able to quickly litter the media with horrible things about a Dury and me, you know, I went to the home of someone who who had known my father, but hadn't known him for many years. I mean, it was just horrible. They went to my school principal. Yeah, I can't tell anything bad about them. You know, they were good girls and made good grades. Right. Yeah, they were always trying to dig up dirt on everybody and manufacturing stuff and they always wanted to label all the the activists as communists and socialists and whatever but I remember someone tried to told the governor of Mississippi that Hamer was a madam who ran a house of. Oh my God. And he even told President Johnson that and you know Johnson I could just see him shaking. He hated those those Southern delegates he was so irritated he knew that they were racist and but he needed their votes. Yeah, so the things in those records, they're stunning the stuff that they would do and how they would ignore the violence. They would report it maybe but they would just say, you know, these young people are stirring up trouble and their fault. Yeah, they're communists from New York. That was a favorite line. Right. Right. They were infiltrating the communities and and yeah it was dangerous, very dangerous. One of the people you mentioned in and photograph you showed was that of June Johnson, who was beaten at the Winona by the Winona Mississippi police, or Mrs. Hamer was beaten so severely. And June was 14 when she came into the movement so when she was beaten in Winona she couldn't have been more than 15. Yeah, right. And and I knew jump June so well. And always, I mean she died, maybe 10 years ago. So, and I just, that's one of the heartbreak when I think about her scars. Yeah, that they bore for the rest of their lives and Elponder, June. And it's just, it is tragic. We have a couple more questions. What about the voting rights reauthorization and amendments act of 2006. Well it was voted on but now Republicans won't vote to reauthorize so, you know, it's meaningless. I think that Fannie Lou Hamer's story is probably taught in some public schools but I don't know if it's part of a regular curriculum. I know in Mississippi, it has been part of the public school curriculum. Although there are efforts now to kind of tone down that that curriculum, but I don't know, do you know anything about that. But with the think about the context of the current times where some books are being banned such the books by Toni Morrison, by the way, the book that was banned is now me the sales have gone, gone through the roof I'm told that's the great thing that happens with these bannings. But this current environment of banning, I wouldn't be surprised if if some of these white parents would come forth and say that they didn't want their children reading about this because it would make them feel guilty or feel bad. Yeah, every American should know the story so that we don't repeat it, you know, we've got to do better. You know in the lessons from Mrs. Hamer's life are very, very important for young people to learn and that is that honesty and the strong belief system believing in something outside yourself with certain reduce a lot of the narcissism we see believing in some fundamental things in life. I mean what I'm always said, your belief can't be worth very much if you can't defend it, you know. That's right. Joyce, we're being asked to wrap it up. That's a perfect way to end this discussion. Thank you so much for doing this with me and thank you. I'm just so happy. I just told you earlier that I've taken on very new friends at this age of my life. I'm glad to count you as a new friend. Thank you, Joyce. And good luck with the sales of your book. Thank you very much. And I can't wait to see your memoir. Well, let's finish it. I'm going to finish it. I'm motivated now when I saw what you did with Mrs. Hamer's life. I just have to believe I've got to finish my name. That's right. Okay. Thank you. Okay, take care.