Forty years ago, Fannie Lou Hamer's influence was limited mostly to the Delta, but this week a conference in her name at Mississippi Valley State University is attracting widespread attention.
"We've gotten calls from Durham, N.C., and California, and someone even told me a man called from England," says Dr. L.C. Dorsey, assistant director of MVSU's Delta Research and Culture Institute.
On Thursday and Friday, the institute is hosting the Fannie Lou Hamer Conference at the William W. Sutton Administration Building. On-site registration will begin at 8 a.m. Thursday, with the first session starting at 9 a.m.. There is a $50 registration fee, which includes conference materials and lunch both days.
The Delta Research and Culture Institute is dedicated to the illumination and preservation of the cultural contributions people from the Mississippi Delta have made to the world, and Dorsey said Hamer is a perfect example of that contribution.
Beginning in 1962, she fought for civil rights and voter registration. She broke into the national scene in 1964 when she helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which took the place of the state's official Democratic party after it walked out of the national party convention.
The fame Hamer acquired then never changed her, says Dorsey, who worked with her during the 1960s to register black voters.
"If you came to her house, even after all the notoriety and publicity and exposure she got at the National Democratic Party convention, it was always 'Come on in honey' and 'Do you want anything to eat?' She just never lost that down-home Fannie Lou Hamer touch," Dorsey said.
The conference is part of an ongoing commemoration of those events and others that went on between 1963 and 1964, including he March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Dorsey said.
Thursday's sessions will look at the life and work of Hamer and the political and historical impact she had as well as the convergence of the church and the freedom struggle.
On Friday, speakers and panelists will discuss the unfinished agenda of the freedom movement.
Participants include civil rights activist Victoria Gray Adams, former Assistant Secretary of State Constance I. Slaughter, former Gov. William Winter and Dr. Leslie Burl McLemore, a political science professor at Jackson State University.
