Fannie Lou Hamer, born into a sharecropping family in 1917, grew up in Ruleville, MS and became a prominent Civil Rights activist in the 1960’s & 70’s. Hamer was a Herculean champion for African American voter rights and spoke out against White supremacist voter oppression tactics. Her voter right’s activism represented a segment of her radical vision of using cooperative Hamer, along with many other Black Mississippian’s, understood that individual land ownership and food sovereignty afforded one’s economic freedom in a sustainable manner. This exhibit offers a fuller story of food cooperative and land ownership traditions among Black Mississippians through the legacy Fannie Lou Hamer.

Photo credit:

Warren K. Leffler, photographer. Fannie Lou Hamer, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegate, at the Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey, August/ WKL. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

In the display case:

• Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement / Monica M. White

• Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop: Rethinking African American Foodways from Slavery to Obama / Edited by Jennifer Jensen Wallach

"White landowners often gave white tenants more control over the land. They established commissaries for black tenants rather than trusting them to cultivate food. For all these reasons, in the general course of business, black farmers had less food sovereignty or control over their sustenance than whites had." -- Angela J. Cooley, "Freedom's Farms: Activism and Food Sustenance in Rural Mississippi", in Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop: Rethinking African American Foodways from Slavery to Obama (2015).

• Preliminary Project Proposal form submitted to the American Freedom from Hunger Foundation for the Freedom Farm Corporation by Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer and Mr. Joseph Harris.

• Poem, "Fannie Lou Hamer" by Susan Kling

• Acme Newspictures, 1940 (New York, NY). Senator Ellison Smith with African-American sharecroppers and cotton. Felton M. Johnson Collection (MUM00245). Archives and Special Collections, University of Mississippi.

For more biographical information about Fannie Lou Hamer, see This little light of mine: the life of Fannie Lou Hamer / Kay Mills