An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

egistered in Mississippi. She helped people understand that “power to the
people” meant just that—everyday people realizing that real democratic
change and power began and ended with them. She believed that in order to
organize a mass movement, the people—not the vanguard—should be
instrumental in their own change. Although not formally educated, she
understood the problems of racial capitalism, and served as a bridge leader
between the local people with whom she worked and the larger, maledominated
civil rights leadership. 31
In August 1964, she, as part of a mix of Black and white delegates that
made up the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, traveled to Atlantic
City, New Jersey, to unseat the staunch white supremacists who ran the
Democratic Party. They sought a seat at the table so that they would be able
to vote the racists out. In Atlantic City, Hamer gave a powerful speech,
highlighting the abuse she experienced for simply trying to register to vote.
About a month after returning from Atlantic City, Hamer gave a speech at
the Negro Baptist School in Indianola, Mississippi.
In that speech, titled “We’re on Our Way,” she begins by stating where
she was from, Ruleville, Mississippi. And she then recounts the time when,
in 1962, she and other activists tried to register to vote. By the time she got
back to Ruleville, she had already been fired. The white man for whom she
worked told her, “You will have to go down and withdraw or you will have
to leave.” “I didn’t register for you,” she responded. “I was trying to register
myself.” 32
That night, white people shot into three houses she knew of. After
recounting this violence, she asks, rhetorically, “Is this America, the land of
the free and the home of the brave? Where people are being murdered,
lynched, and killed, because we want to register to vote?” She also details
the problems associated with not earning a decent wage in Mississippi, her
mother working for “one measly dollar and a quarter a day.” She then says,
“I first wished I was white.” Her reason was that white people were “the
only people that wasn’t doing nothing, but still had money and clothes. We
was working year in and year out and wouldn’t get to go to school but four
months out of the year because we didn’t have nothing.” Hamer wanted to
acquire the class benefits of being white. She articulates what racial
capitalism tells us: that class distinctions are borne through race, and race is
reflected through class. As W. E. B. Du Bois argues in Black
Reconstruction in America (1935), whites received a public and