Fannie Lou Hamer Speech Analysis
Abby Lang
Dr. Sara Burrows
History 112
20 November 2015
Is This America? Due to the unthinkable amount of hardships African Americans have had to overcome in order to receive even semi-equality throughout the 1960’s and on, it is not difficult for one to imagine the adversities one woman of color faced in trying to fight for her right to not only vote, but also be treated as an active and equal citizen of the United States. Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, née Townsend, was born to loving, sharecropping parents in 1917. She had nineteen siblings and grew up in Missouri, where she picked cotton, cut corn, and was only able to attend school until she reached the sixth grade. She married Perry Hamer, also a sharecropper, and the couple worked on a cotton …show more content…
Hamer’s televised speech was carefully and meaningfully presented in an attempt to make progress for African American rights. It included chilling details about the night she tried to register to vote: the inhumane way she and seventeen other African Americans were treated after laws securing their rights as American citizens were passed. Hamer spoke of bullets being shot into homes that were intended for her. She talked about the time she and her friends were arrested and abused by a Chief of Police for doing nothing but using a restroom in Montgomery County on the way back from a workshop. She told the Convention of the white patrolmen who came to her cell and carried her into a new one, where two other African American men were forced to beat her at the command of the police: “We’re going to make you wish you were dead.” She was beaten so badly that she had permanent kidney damage. She spoke of her sexual assault while in jail and of the murder of a fellow friend, which occurred in the jail they both were staying
Dr. Sara Burrows
History 112
20 November 2015
Is This America? Due to the unthinkable amount of hardships African Americans have had to overcome in order to receive even semi-equality throughout the 1960’s and on, it is not difficult for one to imagine the adversities one woman of color faced in trying to fight for her right to not only vote, but also be treated as an active and equal citizen of the United States. Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, née Townsend, was born to loving, sharecropping parents in 1917. She had nineteen siblings and grew up in Missouri, where she picked cotton, cut corn, and was only able to attend school until she reached the sixth grade. She married Perry Hamer, also a sharecropper, and the couple worked on a cotton …show more content…
Hamer’s televised speech was carefully and meaningfully presented in an attempt to make progress for African American rights. It included chilling details about the night she tried to register to vote: the inhumane way she and seventeen other African Americans were treated after laws securing their rights as American citizens were passed. Hamer spoke of bullets being shot into homes that were intended for her. She talked about the time she and her friends were arrested and abused by a Chief of Police for doing nothing but using a restroom in Montgomery County on the way back from a workshop. She told the Convention of the white patrolmen who came to her cell and carried her into a new one, where two other African American men were forced to beat her at the command of the police: “We’re going to make you wish you were dead.” She was beaten so badly that she had permanent kidney damage. She spoke of her sexual assault while in jail and of the murder of a fellow friend, which occurred in the jail they both were staying