The documentary ‘Fannie Lou Hamer’s America’ took more than 10 years to make. The activist’s words continue to inspire

CHICAGO — How much do you really know about civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer?

In these pandemic years, her story has been told on the Goodman Theatre stage and in Chicago parks by way of Chicago-born playwright Cheryl L. West and historian Keisha Blain, a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, who authored the book “Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America.”

Both writers share the story of Hamer, who died in 1977 and didn’t come to activism until her 40s, centering her voice on voting and women’s rights. The Mississippi sharecropper endured assaults, co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (or Freedom Democratic Party), and went to the 1964 Democratic National Convention to demand Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegates be seated in the convention, rather than the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party delegates. The move drew national attention to the plight of Blacks in the South. (Filmmaker Christine Swanson, Oscar-nominated actress Aunjanue Ellis, and DePaul University students filmed the short film “Fannie” at Cinespace Studios in October 2021. Ellis plays Hamer giving her testimony in front of the Democratic National Convention Credentials Committee Aug. 22, 1964.)

And on Feb. 22 and 24, respectively, another Hamer project will premiere on PBS and then WORLD Channel as part of “America Reframed’s” 10th season. Directed and edited by Edgewater resident Joy Davenport, “Fannie Lou Hamer’s America” is a documentary originated by Hamer’s grandniece Monica Land (a native Chicagoan) that tells Hamer’s story in her own words, with some never-before-seen photos and rare footage that family and film researchers uncovered.

“She (Hamer) deserves the kind of attention that the titans of the movement have gotten and she hasn’t for many reasons,” Davenport said. “I’m an activist, I am a radical. I want to see the same thing that she wanted to see and that Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee wanted to see, which was people stepping up, asserting their rights, claiming their rights — and in places where their rights are being attacked — defending and entrenching their rights.”

Davenport said she hopes when people see this film, one that took more than 10 years to make, people register to vote, join the civic conversation and not give up in cynicism, which is very easy to do.

“Fifty years ago she made some successes and she had some failures and when she passed on, in many ways that torch did not get passed on,” Davenport said. “We’re living in the kind of country where people don’t listen to people like Fannie Lou Hamer. Conservatives all have Martin Luther King on their lips, but only that one quote about the content of their character. They don’t know anything about anything, but they whitewash to the point that they feel like they can safely come out in public and say those words. You just can’t do that to her words. Fannie Lou Hamer is impossible to whitewash.”

Land wanted to do a documentary on her aunt as far back as 2005, one that showed Hamer’s personal side of her life, including her family. Davenport was working on her master’s thesis about the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the party co-founded by Hamer while on a Ph.D. track as a historian. It was while she was interviewing former members of the MFDP about their experiences that President Barack Obama was elected to his first term. Veteran SNCC and MFDP folks took the victory as a way to say “let’s keep moving the ball forward.” That’s when the late Lawrence Guyot, the first chairman of MFDP, made Davenport promise to make a movie about Hamer. Davenport said she made that promise in 2010 and Guyot passed away in 2012.

Land was connected to Davenport through mutual contacts. Davenport said it was all serendipitous. Monica would serve as executive producer, producer, researcher, photographer and writer who figured out funding, finding partners, getting the project a platform. “That was Monica’s boulder to roll up the hill,” Davenport said. “Mine was figuring out how to shoot and edit the film.” Davenport left academia to learn how to become a filmmaker for this project — learning how to use a camera by shooting weddings. The film took a while to create as the two took on the new learning curve. Help from those in the film industry (crew, etc.) would come intermittently, but Davenport and Land would be the constants on the film.

“Fannie Lou had this extremely powerful voice,” Land said. “It has been such a labor of love. I really wanted to do this for my aunt. She’s almost an oxymoron. It seems like so many people know her and then nobody knows her.”

Land is planning on changing that with “Fannie Lou Hamer’s America.” Through research, Land said she’s found countless schools, streets, parks, memorials throughout the country that pay homage to her aunt. But while the name is on a school, youth who attend these institutions don’t know about the history behind Hamer’s name. All the information that has been found during their research will live on a website that will be updated continually, Land said.

“It’s an educational tool for students,” Land said. “If Fannie Lou were president of the United States, this would be her presidential library. I don’t want students and kids to have to work as hard as we did to find information about her. She was a historical figure, a public figure. She did a lot of humanitarian work. She did a lot of activisms that may not be displayed in the film. We want this to be the one stop that people go to learn whatever they need to know about Fannie Lou Hamer … to get out who she was, how relevant she was, and how intensive her contributions were. I want people to go ‘I didn’t know that.’”

The film is primarily archival material — viewers see places where Hamer made history, hear her speeches, and hear Hamer’s singing. On the website there’s a driving tour to relive Hamer’s fight for civil rights, a K-12 curriculum about Hamer for teachers, even an annual filmmaker’s summer workshop that Sunflower County, Mississippi, high school students can participate in through a W.K. Kellogg Foundation grant to help them find their voices. Davenport is both founder and instructor for the workshop.

Stories that informed Hamer’s work are prominent on the website. Stories like Joe Pullum, a Black Mississippi sharecropper who killed four white men and wounded 15 others after a dispute with a local plantation owner over wages. According to local lore, after the argument Pullum fled to Wild Bill Bayou near Drew, Mississippi, hiding out in a hollowed-out cypress tree and taking down the mob of white men one by one. Davenport said Pullum’s story and Hamer’s forced hysterectomy were two things that made it to the website, but not the film. The details of both were surprising.

“Joe Pullum … was a really influential story to her, this man who resisted. She saw this as inspiration and she would tell the story about it as a way of like, ‘We can take what’s ours, we’ll do it the nice way or the other way,’” Davenport said.

“But there was another story that we couldn’t put in about the “Mississippi appendectomy” where she was given a forced hysterectomy without her knowledge or consent. She went in for one procedure, and she came out unable to have children. That is hard to even talk about. She didn’t really talk about it publicly, which is why we couldn’t put it in the film because we only used things that she talks about. That was utterly shocking that happened. That was so commonplace in the South, that there’s even a cutesy nickname for it.”

Looking back over the years of work, Davenport said getting to this point was through “real earnest folks who were ride or die for this project.” Land said she hopes the film will awaken interest and prompt more people to want to do more and to know more about Hamer’s legacy.

“Just look at Black Lives Matter protests … there is always someone with a sign that has one of Fannie Lou’s quotes on it — whether it’s ‘Nobody’s free until everybody’s free’ or ‘I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.’ A lot of these young people don’t know who she is, but they love the quote, they relate to it, they identify with it — that speaks to her relevance,” Land said.

“At the end of the film, Mrs. Hamer says Mississippi is not Mississippi’s problem. Mississippi is America’s problem. And that is the thesis statement of the film. It’s why it’s called ‘Fannie Lou Hamer’s America,’” Davenport said. “The thing that I want people to take away from this is this is America. This is the truth. And there’s a tendency right now in our country to want to look away from that and to say, ‘oh, it couldn’t have been so bad’ or ‘we don’t want to make people feel bad.’ Honestly, we should feel bad. It’s something we should look at, and admit, and then work toward doing better. I don’t know what’s so objectionable about that. If you’ve got a wound, you got to clean it. You got to take care of it before it’ll heal. We are a wounded nation. And the reason we’re getting worse is because we refuse to rip off that Band-Aid and really look at the wound.”

“Fannie Lou Hamer’s America” will premiere as a special presentation from PBS and WORLD Channel at 8 p.m. Tuesday on PBS stations nationwide. Viewers will have a second chance to see the film at 7 p.m. Thursday on WORLD Channel stations nationwide. The film is airing as part of the documentary series America ReFramed, presented by WORLD Channel and American Documentary Inc. “Fannie Lou Hamer’s America” will also be available for streaming starting Feb. 22. Audiences can stream the film on worldchannel.org, the WORLD YouTube Channel and all station-branded PBS platforms including PBS.org and the PBS Video app.