#sharecropper

Contract Between James Mitchell and Dick and Wife

Record Group 105: Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned LandsSeries: Contracts

Elizabeth Catlett - Sharecropper (1968) Source

someone in real life told me they read my substack and learned a lot, it was very special to me :)

Man eating on the porch. Clarksdale, Ms. - 1937

Bitter sharecroppers stand in a barren field, a hard winter ahead of them. But as they scream curses to the sky, the sky answers: an angel descends to speak with these mortals.

—

Today’s campaign:

Feras’ family, from Gaza Funds.

€4,877/€25,000 [20%]

Fannie Lou Hamer was the youngest of twenty children and was only six years old when she began working in cotton fields. Her efforts to register to vote in Mississippi in 1962 and 1963 led to full-time activism. As an adult, through an encounter with activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), she learned about the power of voting rights to effect change in the structural barriers that families like hers faced.

Because of her views about Black Americans’ constitutional rights, Hamer experienced several harrowing attacks, including a drive-by shooting at a friend’s home and a brutal beating at the hands of police officers in Winona, Mississippi. She was extorted, threatened, harassed, shot at, and assaulted by racists, including members of the police, while she was trying to register to vote.

One day in August 1964, Fannie found herself in the hallway outside of Martin Luther King Jr.’s hotel suite in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Several national civil rights leaders and political operatives were crammed in his suite, strategizing over Black representation at the Democratic National Convention. Prior to the convention, Hamer had helped to establish the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in order to challenge the Democrats’ all-white Mississippi delegation.

Even though Hamer’s home state was under the spotlight, there was apparently no room for her in the talks. When an associate told Hamer that she should “listen to the leaders,” she asked: “Who is the leader?” The men around her with money and degrees actively tried to sideline her. Yet, it was Fannie Lou Hamer, a former sharecropper with limited formal education and limited financial resources, who ended up stealing the show at the convention and captivating the nation with an electrifying speech about voter suppression and state-sanctioned violence against Black Americans.

Born Fannie Lou Townsend on October 6, 1917 in Montgomery County, Mississippi and died March 14, 1977 in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, at the age of 59.