When in 1964 a call came from a state civil rights leader urging Fannie Lou Hamer to run for Congress, she wasn't afraid to jump at the offer, Charles McLaurin, her former colleague in the movement, recalled Thursday.
"I told Fannie Lou what he said, and all she said was, 'When are we going?'"
After all, what did she have to fear? Already, the fiery Ruleville woman had registered hundreds of black voters, was beaten for her efforts and led the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to the national party's 1964 convention in Atlantic City.
McLaurin, then-Sunflower County coordinator for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was the scared one. He hesitated when Hamer asked him to be her campaign manager.
He tells it this way: "I said, 'Fannie Lou, I don't know anything about managing a campaign.' And she said, 'McLaurin, put your name on this paper.' She said, 'McLaurin, you know as much about managing a campaign as I know about running for Congress.'"
That story and others about the civil rights beacon - some of them humorous, some heartbreaking - came out Thursday during the Fannie Lou Hamer Conference at Mississippi Valley State University. The two-day event, hosted by MVSU's Delta Research and Culture Institute, continues at 9 a.m. today and will go on through the afternoon.
Hamer didn't win in 1964 - her name wasn't allowed on the ballot - but it was such blind faith and an indomitable spirit that made her a heroine of the grassroots push for voter registration during the civil rights movement, a group of former civil rights activists said Thursday.
"Fannie Lou Hamer created an atmosphere in which we could live - in which we could live, survive, grow and develop," said Hattiesburg native Victoria Gray Adams, who worked alongside Hamer to get blacks on the voter rolls.
But Adams and others at the conference Thursday said the basic liberties Hamer fought to secure are under siege now more than ever, and the younger generations must resume her struggle to protect them. Students from Valley, Ole Miss and Rust College attended the event.
Adams told them the Bush administration, under the guise of national security, is increasingly infringing upon liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. "We are living in the most dangerous time I know of because we have an administration that is committed, committed, committed to turning the clock back, and they're doing it on a daily basis."
Such warnings about the state of affairs on the second anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were mixed with nostalgia for Hamer.
Margaret Block, whose brother Sam Block registered black voters in Greenwood, shared some of the freedom songs Hamer used to belt out, including "Go Tell It on the Mountain" and "This Little Light of Mine."
"Freedom songs were our most effective organizing tool," Block said. "That's how Mrs. Hamer organized. They were the glue that held the Mississippi Delta together back then."
Block, who is from Ruleville, met Hamer in 1960.
"When we first became active in 1962, Mrs. Hamer and I had a running joke between us that we had come directly from picking cotton to the picket line," Block said. "She literally did come out of the cotton field and got in the picket line."
That year, Hamer quit her sharecropping job in Sunflower County to join the burgeoning movement to register black voters in the Delta. Fighting for that right, she was turned away at courthouses and brutally beaten by police officers. Her name hit the national scene when she and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which included Clarksdale's Aaron Henry, crashed the 1964 National Democratic Party's convention in Atlantic City.
Block was at the convention with Hamer. After Mississippi's official Democrats walked out, the national party was going to give Hamer's renegade group only one seat at the convention. But she threatened Henry, then-state director of the NAACP, with an umbrella if he didn't ask for two seats, Block recalled.
"Nobody threatened Aaron Henry," said Block. "Mrs. Hamer would have jacked him up with that umbrella, though."
But Hamer didn't have to hit someone over the head to make an impact. All she had to do was speak, said Sue Sojourner, a white woman from Duluth, Minn., who helped with voter registration in Holmes County for five years. In 1969, Sojourner's last year in Mississippi, she saw Hamer speak for the first time.
"I was deeply moved by her coming," Sojourner recalled. "And for the first time in the history of Holmes County, black people had called a meeting - and were running it - in the Holmes County Courthouse."
Before Sojourner knew it, she had snapped three rolls of film, mostly of Hamer, she said. Some of the photographs wound up in the Smithsonian collection in Washington, D.C.; others were part of a traveling exhibit that came to Holmes County in 1999.
McLaurin, who now lives in Indianola, said Hamer's energy was essential to the movement, bringing to the voter registration drive just what Rosa Parks brought to the Montgomery bus boycott.
"Fannie Lou Hamer came and energized the development of the civil rights movement," said McLaurin. "She brought a spirit and determination to get freedom for her people."
Now, it's up to the younger generations to make sure Hamer's struggle wasn't in vain, Adams said.
"I prayerfully hope you will make sure that the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer continues to move forward and in the right direction because we are living in a time when there's a lot of regression going on," she said.
