Fannie Lou Hamer’s America

Told through the public speeches, personal interviews, and powerful songs of a fearless Mississippi sharecropper turned human rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer’s America (Joy Davenport, 2022, 60 min.) celebrates the life of one of the Civil Rights Movement’s greatest, but unheralded, leaders. A short two years after she first learned of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and its efforts to register Black voters in the south, Hamer became field secretary of SNCC, organized Freedom Summer, and founded the Freedom Democratic Party to protest the Mississippi Democratic Party’s refusal to admit Black delegates. One of the movement’s pre-eminent orators, Hamer used stories from her own life to call America to account for the racism that defined every aspect of her existence. Q&A with director Joy Davenport and Hamer’s daughter Jacqueline Hamer Flakes, moderated by Tracye Matthews, executive director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture.