Their appeals were ignored.
In the volume, Blain, an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and the president of the African American Intellectual History Society, revisits the life and achievements of Hamer, a Black sharecropper from Mississippi who became an exceptional grassroots organizer and a key voice in the midcentury civil rights movement.
But Blain’s book isn’t merely an appreciation. It’s an exploration of how Hamer’s political battles — from securing voting rights to ending police violence — live on in the present.
I spoke with Blain about the abiding relevance of Hamer’s approach to confronting not only racism but also sexism and classism.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Hamer observed, “America is divided against itself because they don’t want us (Black people) to have even the ballot here in Mississippi.” Do you detect echoes today of Hamer’s struggles against the widespread fear of Black political participation?
All of this took me back to Hamer’s story, particularly because she was one of the key figures who laid the groundwork for the passage of the Voting Rights Act. One of the things she pointed out in the ’60s — and it’s true today — was the fear that if Black people and other marginalized groups had full access to the voting process, they would be able to elect public officials who would advocate for their interests. They would want to dismantle systems of oppression.
And all of these things, I think, encapsulate the idea of the power of the vote, and are exactly why Hamer committed her life to advocating for Black political rights. I think that the resistance that Black people and other marginalized groups face today stems from the same motivations as the kind of resistance that Hamer endured in the ’60s and even in the ’70s, too. I’ll summarize it as: The White power structure can stay in place only if people are disenfranchised. If people of color are not heard through the act and the process of voting, certain laws and practices stay in place and exclude and marginalize certain people.
You write that “public testimony also provided a vehicle for Hamer to make her audiences ‘co-owners of trauma.’ ” I’m moved by this notion of being so transformed by someone’s testimony that you can’t go back to what you were before. Is this mode of advocacy — pushing people to be co-owners of trauma — something we see today?
I think that we see something similar today. The person who immediately comes to mind is Darnella Frazier, the young lady who recorded the video of George Floyd’s murder. What struck me about her was twofold. She recorded the video, which in itself was a powerful and dangerous thing to do. Her recording was perhaps the single most important piece of evidence that went to trial. And then she testified. She spoke about what she saw. And it was public because the whole world was watching. Everyone following the case knew who was testifying.
I suspect that many people may not know that Hamer did not self-identify as a feminist. She could have, because she was involved in the women’s liberation movement, but she intentionally did not embrace the label. She did not embrace it because she did not believe that the women’s liberation movement addressed the challenges that Black people, particularly Black women, were facing.
At the same time, what’s so remarkable about Hamer’s story is that she was deeply committed to women’s empowerment. She rejected the label, but her actions showed that she did not condone patriarchy. She believed that women should not be blocked from leadership opportunities. So, she contributed to the women’s liberation movement, and part of how she contributed was by emphasizing the importance of recognizing intersecting systems of oppression. She ended up advocating for what can be described as a form of intersectionality, a concept that didn’t get introduced until the ’80s through the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw.
With Megan Thee Stallion, I was trying to identify the best contemporary example that might demonstrate how a Black woman today can center Black women’s experiences and push for an intersectional analysis without ever necessarily using an image of being a feminist. That’s what I thought was so intriguing about Megan Thee Stallion. She wrote that powerful New York Times op-ed, and never once called herself a feminist. I’m not suggesting that she’s not a feminist. But it is clear that she was simply laying out the facts about the importance of talking about not just sexism and patriarchy, but also racism and classism. She presented the message of women’s empowerment in a way that resonated with the way Hamer presented the message to White liberal feminists in the late ’60s and in the ’70s.
Source : CNN
