Fannie Lou Hamer's America

Fannie Lou Hamer's America is a portrait of a civil rights activist and the injustices in America that made her work essential. Through public speeches, personal interviews, and powerful songs of the fearless Mississippi sharecropper-turned-human-rights-activist, Fannie Lou Hamer's America explores and celebrates the lesser-known life of one of the Civil Rights Movement’s greatest leaders.

Fannie Lou Hamer's America is a portrait of a civil rights activist and the injustices in America that made her work essential. Through public speeches, personal interviews, and powerful songs of the fearless Mississippi sharecropper-turned-human-rights-activist, Fannie Lou Hamer's America explores and celebrates the lesser-known life of one of the Civil Rights Movement’s greatest leaders.

For the family of Fannie Lou Hamer, she was a woman of power and presence as a civil and human rights activist. But to Jacqueline Hamer Flakes, Monica Land, and Jimmy Lee Lacey, she was also so much more - a mother, a wife, and a friend who was loving and giving. The in-depth interview provides an intimacy to Mrs. Hamer's life, work and legacy that can only be told by those who knew her best.

In childhood, Fannie Lou Hamer, her parents and her nineteen siblings lived with hunger. Like many young Black children, she began picking pounds and pounds of cotton in the fields, dropping out of school at the age of twelve. It was a lesson about poverty and race that was not lost on her.

In August of 1962, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee traveled to Ruleville, Mississippi to talk to the residents about voting. In the audience was Fannie Lou Hamer. From that day forward, Mrs. Hamer became invested in voting rights for the Black people of Mississippi.

For Fannie Lou Hamer, registering to vote in Mississippi meant being a first-class citizen in the U.S. But in doing so, her life and livelihood were threatened. Intimidation and violence were not new to Mrs. Hamer, and they would continue to follow her as an activist and as a Black woman.

Fannie Lou Hamer describes the ill-fated day she, Annell Ponder and Euvester Simpson were arrested in Winona, Mississippi. The interrogation of Mrs. Hamer would forever change her work and life as the brutal police beating left her physically scarred, affecting her health in later years.

Why did Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Bob Moses and others organize a separate political party in Mississippi? For the inclusion of Black residents in state politics which was powered by white supremacy. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party would soon ruffle feathers all the way to Washington, D.C.

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Joseph L. Rauh, Jr. introduce Fannie Lou Hamer at the 1964 Democratic National Party. As a leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, she testifies about her terrifying experiences with voter registration as a Black woman and as a voting rights activist.