Sara A. Lewis: Welcome to Points South. I’m your host Sara A. Lewis of the Oxford American. For this episode, we’re joining Brittany Brown as she explores the lasting legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer—her voice, her activism, and her lesser-known contributions to environmental justice in Mississippi. This is the story of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Freedom Farm.
Vickie Roberts Ratliff: I am a land steward of property that we've had in our family for four generations.
Brittany Brown: Meet Mrs. Vickie Roberts Ratliff. A seventh generation Mississippian, Roberts Ratliff is a Black landowner and tree farmer in Winona, Montgomery County, Mississippi.
VRR: Just trying to make sure I'm doing the right thing by my ancestors, trying to move the land forward. So that is probably the biggest thing that I do. I'm consumed with pretty much 24/7, just trying to make sure I'm being a good steward for the environment, for the family and just for Mississippi, too.
BB: With a population of 4,500 people, Winona sits in the central, northern part of the state in a region the locals call “the hills.” With Memphis, Tennessee, 120 miles north and Jackson, Mississippi, 90 miles south, the small town is locked into the rural landscape, only anchored by I-55. The interstate helps keep Winona viable. The workforce is dominated by production and construction jobs, keeping goods and services shipped in and out. And like the generations that came before her, Roberts Ratliff works on the land her great-grandparents purchased in the 1920s.
VRR: I really think that my dad, his role model was his grandfather, Eli Roberts Sr., who bought this property. So he had a fascination with land, being very independent, uh, with that. There are a lot of resources where that were not available to them, the USDA, you know, he did not have the option of going there to get loans when he purchased and built our home in, um, 1963, you know, he had to go to a local grocery store owner to borrow money and, um, to build our home.
BB: It’s no easy feat—being a farmer or being a Black landowner. It requires grit for a Black family to be able to retain land for more than a century in Mississippi, despite everything the state has done. And Roberts Ratliff knows this. She describes herself as the historian of her family. She keeps up with family records, old photos and, of course, the land. Growing lolly pines and hardwood trees is just one aspect of what Roberts Ratliff wants to cultivate on the 500 acres of family land. She also sees the land as an opportunity for a different type of growth: healing.
VRR: Ideally, one of my dreams is to use a parcel of the land for a commemorative space, for a healing space, for a learning space. Because I know when I walk on the land, not only am I walking on land that my ancestors walked on, I know that there's land that the Native Americans, their past, that are on the land. So giving back to the community, especially for what has happened here in Montgomery County and 'cause we don't have the best reputation when you think about some of the history that we have here.
BB: Roberts Ratliff is referring to what happened in the county jail in 1963.
[Fannie Lou Hamer archival audio] I was carried to the county jail and put in the booking room. After I was placed in the cell I began to hear sounds of licks and horrible screams, and I could hear somebody say, “Can you say, yes sir, nigger? Can you say yes, sir?” and they would say other horrible names. They beat her, I don’t know how long, and after a while she began to pray, and ask God to have mercy on those people.
BB: You might recognize the voice. That’s Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi-born-and-raised civil rights activist. She and several others were targeted for participating in a voter education workshop in South Carolina. On their way home to Mississippi, they were arrested in Winona.
[Fannie Lou Hamer archival audio] And it wasn’t too long before three white men came to my cell. One of these men was a State Highway Patrolman and he asked me where I was from, and I told him Ruleville. He said, “We are going to check this.” And they left my cell and it wasn’t too long before they came back. He said, “You are from Ruleville all right,” and he used a curse word, and he said, “We are going to make you wish you was dead.”
BB: White law enforcement officers ensued violence, and they forced Black jail detainees to take part in the brutal beating and sexual assault of Hamer. She survived and lived with an eye and kidney injury for the rest of her life. But the story of the tenacious Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer doesn’t start––or end––there. That’s why Roberts Ratliff is among a group of Winona residents organizing to keep Hamer’s memory alive now and for future generations.
VRR: Well, when I think about Mrs. Hamer, I put her in a category with my ancestors. One of our mottos for our family is “Remembering the past gives power to the present.” And you have to look at your history to see where you came from.
BB: Roberts Ratliff helped get a historical marker installed at the Winona jail site in June 2022. She’s also organizing to bring a Mississippi Freedom Trail marker to Winona in 2024 to honor Hamer’s activism. Roberts Ratliff’s project includes an ongoing oral history project and a play for the community to learn about Hamer’s life. So, who was Fannie Lou Hamer?
Kate Clifford Larson: She started picking cotton at age six, and by the time she was 12, 13 years old, she had to leave school, so she only had a sixth grade education, so that she could pick cotton full time to help support her aging and disabled parents.
BB: This is historian and author Dr. Kate Clifford Larson. A women’s studies and history professor at Brandeis University, Larson spent at least five years—2016 to 2021—studying Hamer’s life to publish Walk With Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer.
KCL: She knew how to talk to people. She knew how to read people. She grew up very fast, but she was smart and gifted and loved, deeply loved. And that gave her sustenance and so did her faith and the community around her.
BB: Born in Montgomery County on October 6th, 1917, and raised in Ruleville, Sunflower County, Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer was the youngest of 20 children by James and Ella Townsend. They were a family of sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta just a few generations removed from slavery. After emancipation, sharecropping became the new system in the South. There were wealthy landowners, and there were sharecroppers, like the Townsends. In exchange for working sunrise to sunset growing crops on the Marlowe plantation, the Townsends were paid poverty wages. But little Fannie Lou was the child of a nurturing mother and a preaching father, and they raised her to be a proud, Black Christian woman of the South.
KCL: There was a power about her. She was a powerful-looking woman. You know, she used her fist to make it a point. She knew how to fluctuate her voice. You know, her father was a minister. She learned on his knee those kind of preacher ways of reaching an audience. And she used her anger and her joy and her faith, and her call to action. It came through her voice.
[Fannie Lou Hamer archival audio] I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hook because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in America?
BB: Today, Hamer is remembered as a renowned activist, known for her work on voting rights, political freedom, education access, and economic justice. It was all rooted in family and community.
KCL: You couldn't take Fannie Lou out of Mississippi or the Mississippi out of Fannie Lou Hamer. She just exuded that. As a historian, I needed to go back and look at her life and what are the roots of her leadership qualities? I mean, she wasn’t born full grown. Early on, her leadership emerged and people in the community recognized it. Even when she was a child, there was something special. She was raised in a large family, in a community of people that tried to protect each other, support each other, educate each other, raise each other's children, so that's part of her ethic: community and, you know, they did for me, I did for them.
BB: And it was the importance of community that would see Hamer through from the beginning to the end of her life.
KCL: She was always very personal in her determination to make a difference. She wanted to see it in her community, not on the national level. She wanted to see it in Ruleville.
BB: Hamer is most notably known for her civil rights and voting rights activism—like co-founding the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and testifying at the Democratic National Convention in 1964.
[Fannie Lou Hamer archival audio] I was in jail when Medgar Evers was murdered. All of this is on account of we want to register to become first class citizens.
BB: And there’s another area of activism that Hamer was fiercely dedicated to during her lifetime: food sovereignty, land ownership and the cooperative movement. Growing up a sharecropper and working under this system into her adulthood, Hamer deeply understood the consequences of this type of intergenerational economic violence. And she was working toward a solution. In the late 1960s, Hamer started a Black farm cooperative and fed and housed people in her community. She provided housing with running water and electricity, then an untapped luxury for so many poor Black workers in the Mississippi Delta. She organized with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to distribute food shipped from the North to Mississippi during their Food for Freedom Campaign in the early 1960s. Hamer did all this and more. According to historian Dr. Teona Williams, Hamer’s track record shows she should also be considered one of the many mothers of the civil rights movement and the environmental justice movement.
Teona Williams: It's impossible to separate or silo her environmental work with her civil rights work. You know, I think there definitely was sort of like a point where people kind of felt like either or, like we’re either talking about the civil rights or we’re sort of talking about the Freedom Farm, but from my own understanding and learning from Hamer, you know, she was always deeply, intrinsically like linked to the land.
BB: Williams is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University New Brunswick. She’s working on a book about how rural Black feminists shaped the modern environmental justice movement. At the core of her research are Fannie Lou Hamer and the Freedom Farm Cooperative, which Hamer founded in the late 1960s. As a child, Hamer learned about land ownership and farming from her parents.
TW: There’s this sort of moment when she's 13 years old and her dad saves a lot of money, enough to buy their own small plot of land. Enough for some livestock, enough for like a little plot for a garden, you know, enough to sort of move them towards like away from the dependence of a sharecropping system into independence of like land ownership.
BB: The year is 1930, and by this time, the nation is plunged into the Great Depression. It hit Mississippi hard. The price of cotton plummeted from $1 per pound to less than five cents per pound. This was a devastating blow to an already poor state where nearly 3 out of 4 residents were tenant farmers or sharecroppers scratching out a living based on the price of cash crops.
TW: And so how Fannie Lou Hamer tells it is that her dad's farm is just doing really well. And so jealous white neighbors end up sneaking onto their farm in the middle of the night and poisoning all the livestock with a type of arsenic. And Fannie, 13, she comes in and the first thing she remembers is her beloved cow like swollen belly and sort of dead.
BB: In her autobiography, Hamer wrote, “That poisoning knocked us right back down flat. We never did get back up again. That white man did it just because we were getting somewhere.” But that wasn’t the last time Hamer would experience how white supremacists weaponized food and land against Black citizens. This type of violence is what Black Mississippi writer Kiese Laymon calls “the worst of white folks.” Hamer experienced their worst again decades later.
TW: Now she's sort of in her 30s, and there's this white man in Ruleville. You know, he is a little odd. Like he doesn't really belong there and he's only selling watermelons to African American people. And so finally like they're pushing, “Why are you only selling to the Black people in this community?” And he let it slip that he had poisoned the watermelons. He was trying to use food in that way to sort of kill off a subpopulation of Black people.
BB: Hamer reached her thirties. She married Perry “Pap” Hamer, and together they raised four adopted daughters. They did this in the midst of a violent Jim Crow Mississippi. White supremacists used this system as a way to maintain control of the segregated social order in the South. Even today, racial violence lives in the memory of Mississippians––like Vickie Roberts Ratliff.
VRR: When I think about Montgomery County and Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, I go back to the lynching that occurred in 1937 with Bootjack and Red.
BB: On April 13th, 1937, a white mob of 500 people watched, tortured, and killed 25-year-old Roosevelt “Red” Townes and 26-year-old Robert “Bootjack” McDaniels. They had been accused of robbing and killing a white store owner. But with no proof or trial, the white mob deemed their punishment to be chained to trees, burned alive and shot to death. The mob took photos of their mangled bodies, which were published in national magazines.
VRR: I definitely remember my mom telling me stories about how they could hear the cries of those two men that were torched in Duck Hill area.
BB: The Equal Justice Initiative reports 654 lynchings occurred in Mississippi between 1877 and 1950, among the highest rate of lynching out of any state in the U.S. This type of racist violence is what Fannie Lou Hamer, her family, her friends and the voters she was educating and organizing were up against in Mississippi. Hamer quickly learned that owning land meant independence––not only for herself, but also for her community. So, she organized, fundraised and established the Freedom Farm Cooperative. In 1967, with the support of the National Council of Negro Women, Hamer first started a revolving pig bank, a self-sustaining model for providing pigs to families and breeding them for food. Williams, in her research, counts this as the first iteration of the Freedom Farm. It wasn’t until one year later when the Hamers purchased land to begin the farm. At its height in the early 1970s, the farm had expanded to almost 700 acres.
TW: Because in her way it's just like, you know, if we can feed ourselves, if we have control over our own food systems, then you know, no one can turn us around, right? No one can poison us, you know, no one can take from us, no one can push us back into poverty.
BB: To give you an idea of just how much Hamer and her community harvested from the land: they farmed catfish; they cultivated cash crops like soybean and cotton; they grew a variety of fruits and vegetables like collard greens, snap peas, carrots, muscadines, watermelons, tomatoes; and they sustained the revolving pig bank.
TW: Every family gets a pig to sort of like raise, and once that pig has babies, the babies are what they sort of deposit back into the bank, right? And that is sort of supposed to spark this sustainable model. So that is just so wildly successful, but even thinking about the rapid growth of the Freedom Farm from, you know, disseminating a few hundred pigs to disseminating like 5,000 tons of like collard greens in one year, you know, sort of just shows her acumen as an organizer, as a fundraiser.
BB: Williams estimates Hamer helped over 10,000 families and grew over 20,000 tons of food during the farm’s 10-year lifespan. But Hamer’s Freedom Farm didn’t just stop at land and crops. In fact, that was just the starting point.
TW: She's also sort of thinking about like, how do you feed people? How do you clothe people? How do you educate our babies? How do we make sure that women have access to healthcare? So when she's sort of devising the Freedom Farm Cooperative, I like to think of it as this sort of holistic social services institution. So anyone can kind of come as they are, be fed. She housed over 200 families, giving them like running water and electricity for the first time, which continues to be a struggle across so many of these rural spaces. I feel like she was just really like anticipating what the environmental justice movement of the 1980s and 1990s and even now was sort of like going to be needing and even looking for.
BB: By the 1970s when the cooperative was fully operating, Hamer was living with several health issues, including high blood pressure, breast cancer, diabetes and the injuries she sustained from the jail beating. Between running the farm, coping with health issues and traveling the country, it was a lot to balance. But Hamer had her husband, Perry, and their daughters by her side.
TW: Fannie Lou Hamer said, she was just like, you know, they say that the Freedom Farm is not profitable, you know, but that's the point. It's not supposed to be profitable. It's supposed to feed people. Hamer was sort of telling us like all the time, we have to take care of each other. We have to show up for each other. You know, nobody's free until everyone's free, right? And to sort of like achieve that type of freedom, there is sort of like this level of like showing up, of mutual aid, of love. Love was such a big thing for her.
BB: Hamer died on March 14th, 1977, at the Taborian Hospital in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. She lived 59 years of life dedicated to making the state a safer, more equitable place for its Black residents. Both Larson and Williams agree, Hamer was committed to Mississippi, from life to death.
TW: She's just like, no, like, “I was born in Mississippi, I'm gonna die in Mississippi. And in between those two bookends, I'm gonna fight like crazy to make sure that this is a space where my children can grow up, where their children can grow up, where other people's children can grow up and have full access, full rights and be liberated.”
BB: Two years after Hamer’s death, the Freedom Farm sold the final plots of land in 1979. But her legacy didn’t stop there.
KCL: If Hamer was alive, she'd be telling everybody to keep fighting and not stop. You just have to keep at it 'cause if you stop, then you're gonna lose more. And that's her legacy. Do not stop fighting.
BB: Indeed, the fighting does continue. Like Hamer, Roberts Ratliff is dedicating her life to Mississippi.
VRR: In spite of how Mississippi has treated me, I have a reason to love this state. I'm seven generations in here, and I'm gonna probably go back to this same dirt that that kinda made me. And so nobody has an option to say that you're the only person that loves this state and this town. So, you know, I got a lot invested here. Blood, sweat, and tears.
[Fannie Lou Hamer archival audio] But I care. I care enough to fight to make that piece of paper that was written a long time ago which was the Constitution—I'm fighting to make it a reality. Not only for me but for you too. Because your freedom is tied very close to mine. Together we stand but divided we all fall.
SAL: This episode was produced by me, Brittany Brown, and Christian Leus, in collaboration with Dr. Kidada Williams. Thank you to Vickie Roberts Ratliff, Dr. Kate Clifford Larson, and Dr. Teona Williams. Post-production and score thanks to Curtis Fye and Trey Pollard of Spacebomb. Visit OxfordAmerican.org/PointsSouth to find more episodes, plus films, photographs, and more from the world of Points South. This episode is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Julia Child Foundation.