An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

working as a collective to achieve the radical transformation people like
King had fought for, for so long.
FANNIE LOU HAMER
Fannie Lou Hamer should be considered the Queen of Democracy in the
South. Working with Black and white organizers, she helped them
understand that “Power to the People” meant exactly that. She believed that
to organize a mass movement, the people—not the vanguard—should be
instrumental in their own change.
Fannie Lou Hamer was born on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery
County, Mississippi. Born to James Lee and Ella Townsend, sharecroppers
in Mississippi, she was the youngest of twenty children. She was the last
born, and because plantation owners at that time would compensate families
for providing a future field hand, her parents received fifty dollars after her
birth, which assisted the family in buying supplies for the winter. 29 Her
parents could not escape the racism and exploitation of sharecropping.
Hamer had to work hard as a child, and she remembered a particular song
that her mother would sing in search of better opportunities for her family:
I’m going to land on the shore.
I’m going to land on the shore.
“I’m going to land on the shore,
Where I’ll rest for evermore.
The preacher in the pulpit,
With the Bible in his hands—
He preaching to the sinners
But they just won’t understand.
I’m going to land on the shore.
I’m going to land on the shore.
I’m going to land on the shore,
Where I’ll rest for evermore.
I would not be a white man,