The word unwavering is defined as something that is firm, fixed, and unshakable. Wavering faith is not faith at all. True faith is firm and consistent. When I think of a woman with unwavering faith, I think of a fearless civil rights activist whose courage helped people gain the right to vote. Her name was Fannie Lou Hamer.
The Faith of Fannie Lou Hamer
Fannie Lou Hamer was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi, in 1917. She was the granddaughter of a slave and the youngest of twenty children. Her parents were poor sharecroppers and at age six, Fannie began helping them pick cotton. Fannie Lou met her husband, Perry Hamer, on the plantation where she worked. In 1962, she underwent surgery to remove a small uterine tumor. Without her knowledge
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She listened to the civil rights activists speak out against the racists who denied southern African-Americans their legal right to vote. Like other sharecroppers, Hamer never even knew that she had the right to vote. She was inspired, and became the first to volunteer as a SNCC organizer, helping local African-Americans register to vote.
At the time, African-American who dared register to vote in the South faced the threat of being lynched, physically beaten, or losing their job. After registering African-Americans to vote, she and other civil rights activists were threatened and arrested. Upon being released from jail, the plantation owner informed Fannie Lou Hamer that she had to leave his land. She left the plantation and a week later, the Ku Klux Klan shot up the home of the family she was living with.
Forced off the plantation and into poverty, Hamer began to challenge the racist system even more directly. She later said, “There was nothing they could do to me. They couldn’t fire me, because I didn’t have a job. They couldn’t put me out of my house, because I didn’t have one. There was nothing they could take from me any
Florence Joyner was born December 21, 1959, in Los Angeles, California. When she was a kid she loved competition, by age 7 she competing in track. Florence couldn’t afford college so she started working as a bank teller. Then, she later she was in UCLA in 1980, and won the NCAA 200-meter title.
Mrs. Bessie Vanburen was born in July 1816 to Mary and David Windburn. She grew up in the small town of Mcbee, South Carolina, where Bessie’s father was a poor dirt farmer, and her mother an underpaid seamstress. Bessie attended school in her small town, and as she approached her sixteenth birthday, a new teacher came to town.
against lynching and created an impact on slaves. People who did not agree with her were
Rights movement. She was willing to go the distance to get the equal rights she felt was owed to
The Jade Peony, is a beautiful short story about the relationship between Sek-Lung and his grandmother Poh-Poh. The story deals with many complicated social and emotional issues including change, death, and acceptance. I chose tradition because everything Poh-Poh did was based off her tradition. The things she did that were based off her tradition were she went through people’s trash to find items to use to make her wind chimes. She also kept her jade pendant in a tiny red silk envelope and in her pocket until her death. Plus she had made her wind chimes out of trash that looked decent for a wind chime.
One of the more striking developments of the Reconstruction Era (1863-1877) was the integration of emancipated black men and women into the labor forces of Southern States. This transition period proved to be difficult for the largely agricultural economies as elite whites had to adjust to a more independent lifestyle, working class whites became poorer and blacks remained poor despite their freed status and ability to earn wages for their work. In Thavolia Glymph’s ‘A Makeshift Kind of Life’: Free Women and Free Homes, she examines the working class black women and the conditions they found themselves in. Two of her most prominent arguments found between pages 177 and 185 is that black women were still made to accept less than ideal and that white women struggled to cope with both their worsening living standards and black women’s independence. This paper examines both of those arguments.
Bessie was born April 15, 1894 in Chattanooga, Tennessee to a part time Baptist preacher, William Smith, and his wife Laura. The family was large and poor. Soon after she was born her father died. Laura lived until Bessie was only nine years old. The remaining children had to learn to take care of themselves. Her sister Viola then raised her. But it was her oldest brother,
By the time Hamer was twelve, her parent had saved up enough money to rest some land and buy a tractor of their own. It was this difficult childhood, which lead Hamer to fight for the rights of the black people.
Freedom summer was a 1964 voters act that civil rights movements held a convention for blacks to be able to vote. During the process three young civil rights movement activist were taken and beaten to death. 6 weeks later they were found dead in neshoba county. The Klu Klux Klan was the ones who laid waste to them. “Testimony Before the Credentials Committee, Democratic National Convention” Fannie Lou Hamer was the first black women to run for office. she was forced to leave the plantation she was a sharecropper at. She was also beat in jail by negros for running for
African Americans had a rough life during the revolution. Mary Postill is a prime example of the hardships that an African American slave had to go through. After she fled to Charleston, the military gave her a certificate of freedom. At the time, the military was controlled by the British. A loyalist who claimed freed blacks wrongly then took control of Mary and her family and made them his slaves so they could no longer be free. Gray brought Mary to court when she attempted to flee. She swore that she was free, but Gray, being that he was an esteemed white man, won the case. He then sold Mary and her family down the river for a hundred bushels of potatoes. This was her punishment for trying to escape him. The owners of slaves usually made their workers do the most tedious and tiresome work such as helping with the rice production. They were not well fed and they were not given enough supplies to make their own clothing. The slaves were also physically and mentally abused. Carol Berkin states in chapter 8 of
There were some means that were legal at the time which were used to keep blacks from taking advantage of their new freedom. Laws were put in place making requirements for voting other than race, but it was clear these requirements were intended to stop blacks from voting. This was the time period during which lynchings increased. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia, the Red Shirts, and the White Line participated in lynchings and other forms of violence and intimidation. People outside these groups also lynched African Americans for a variety of reasons such as intimidating blacks into not using their rights or punishing them for real or alleged crimes. (Royster 8) The most likely people to be lynched were black males, although some whites and occasionally
Susan Brownell Anthony was a magnificent women who devoted most of her life to gain the right for women to vote. She traveled the United States by stage coach, wagon, and train giving many speeches, up to 75 to 100 a year, for 45 years. She went as far as writing a newspaper, the Revolution, and casting a ballot, despite it being illegal.
To be a woman meant that one had no say in regards to political affairs or in government making decisions. If being a woman had limitations, imagine what a black woman experienced, as they were considered less than human and mistreated more than any other female from any different background. In “A Plea for the Oppressed”, Lucy Stanton, one such black woman, tried to avail her people’s plight upon an audience of white women, to support the antislavery and reform cause.
The right to vote for African American became difficult during the time because the northern didn’t want to consider the blacks as equal to the society. As Frederick Douglass, has once stated “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.” African American fought their way to gain their right to vote is by coming together, free blacks and emancipated slaves, to create parades, petition drives to demand, and to organize their own “freedom ballots.” As a free African American, they except the same respect as the whites and nothing
Susan B. Anthony was the first U.S. woman to vote in an election. She was an American women’s rights activist who played a private role in the women’s suffrage movement. She collected anti- slavery petitions at the age of 17 and she also