BY HARRY COVERSTON, GUEST WRITER TO THE TIMES
SANFORD – Last weekend I attended a dramatic presentation honoring one of my all-time heroines. Under the skilled acting and powerful voice of Mzuri Moyo Aimbaye, Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi civil rights icon, was brought to life.
“The Fannie Lou Hamer Story” was presented in the Theater West End in downtown Sanford. Aimbaye transformed herself into the outspoken firebrand from the Mississippi Delta, performing her soliloquy in front of a screen onto which historical images and film clips of the 1960s were projected. Newspaper headlines and black and white photographs provided the context for Hamer’s life beginning in the cotton fields of the Delta and continuing through her dramatic testimony before the credentials committee of the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
Hamer’s story is not for the faint of heart. She spoke of the children of the Delta whose abbreviated lives were spent fending off preventable diseases rooted in malnutrition and lack of medical care. She would never give birth to the biological children of her own that she so desired as a result of an involuntary sterilization performed without consent while under anesthesia during surgery for a uterine tumor, a common occurrence which came to be called a “Mississippi appendectomy.”
Hamer would be fired from her job as a cotton picker when she registered to vote. That would only inspire her to work harder for universal registration of African-Americans, a calling that would prove costly to Hamer. Enroute home from registration training in South Carolina, Hamer would be arrested with several other Black women in a “whites only” restaurant at a bus stop in Winona, MS. Thereafter she would be brutally beaten by fellow Black inmates in the local jail who were given the Hobbesian choice of beating Hamer with a rubber baton or being beaten themselves. Hamer sustained permanent injuries from that encounter including a blot clot in her eye and kidney damage.
The recitation of her testimony given to the DNC credentials committee was one of several intensely painful moments in the performance. Perhaps the most difficult was Aimbaye’s agonizing rendition of Billy Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” performed as a series of images of lynchings appeared on the screen behind her. Aimbaye, like Hamer, spared no detail. As the performer said, none of us get a pass because this makes us uncomfortable.
But that was only part of the performance.
The half-moon seating allowed the audience to sit in tiers around the stage creating a very intimate setting through which the performer repeatedly engaged those present to sing with her. As was Hamer’s custom, most of the songs were Black gospel hymns ranging from her favorite, “This Little Light of Mine” to the anthem of the civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome,” which a standing crowd echoed back resoundingly. While Hamer had some fairly critical commentary on institutional religions, it was clear that themes from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures always informed her engagement of the powers.
In the final part of the performance, Hamer evidenced her unwillingness to ever give up hope. She insisted that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of equality was still attainable if we choose to make it so. And in her final comments, she urged voters to take seriously the coming election, saying “I may have died, but with each new voter who registers, I rise.”
This day I give thanks for the witness of Fannie Lou Hamer and the creative artist who brought her to life. In a time when the right to vote is once again in jeopardy, America badly needs to hear these voices.
