When she was young, Monica Land was not aware of the significance of her aunt, Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the leading civil rights activists in the 1960s.
Now, however, Land understands it well — and a documentary she helped make will air on PBS in February.
Born in Montgomery County, Hamer lived a sharecropper’s life but was able to teach herself to read and write. She married Perry “Pap” Hamer, Land’s uncle, and underwent a forced hysterectomy — a practice so common in the state that it was known as a “Mississippi appendectomy,” according o the National Women’s History Museum — so that she could not have biological children.
Known for her fiery speeches, Hamer challenged the status quo of the Jim Crow South by attempting to register herself and other African Americans to vote in Mississippi. She endured assaults, including a brutal jailhouse beating, and vitriolic racism as a result.
In 1964, at the Democratic National Convention, Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the established Democratic Party and detailed her hardships and those of other African Americans in their attempts to register to vote.
Hamer also founded an agricultural cooperative in Sunflower County, the Freedom Farm Cooperative, as a counter to the sharecropping system by providing economic wealth to Black landowners.
Hamer died from breast cancer in Mound Bayou in 1977, when Land was around 9 or 10.
Land, who now lives in Kilmichael, was born and raised in Chicago. She and her family visited Hamer in Mississippi over the summers.
“This was the latter years of her life,” Land said. “At that time, I had no clue as to who she was, and I mean that professionally. I knew she was my Aunt Fannie Lou, but I didn’t know who she was until a teenager.”
As Land learned more about her aunt, she became sad to realize all Hamer had gone through. In addition, the relatives who could previously tell her about Hamer — aunts, uncles and grandparents — had died.
Years later, Land has been able to use her experience as an investigative reporter and interest in history to help make a film about her aunt, “Fannie Lou Hamer’s America.”
Set to air at 8 p.m. Feb. 22 on PBS as part of the 10th-season launch for the “America ReFramed” series, the documentary will then be available for streaming on the WORLD Channel.
In conjunction with the film is the website www.fannielouhamersamerica.com, which will serve as a go-to source of information regarding Hamer, as well as the Sunflower County Film Academy, a filmmakers workshop to teach Delta students how to document their families’ stories.
The idea for the Hamer documentary began in 2005, according to Land, who served as a producer for the film.
Land reached out to her cousin, Sulla Hamer, a feature-film producer, who connected Land with Keith Beauchamp, a film producer who has done work related to Emmett Till, the Chicago youth slain in 1955 after whistling at a white woman at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in Money.
Beauchamp then connected Land with Hamer historians, such as Davis Houck and Dr. Maegan Parker Brooks.
The first hour of the documentary is told through Hamer’s appearances in archival footage, speeches, interviews and songs. Mixed in is B-roll footage of scenery across the Delta.
“I wanted this documentary, the focus, to be like nothing that had been seen before,” Land said. “Because I knew Auntie Fannie Lou’s power was her voice. When she spoke, she commanded attention; she captured the audience, the room.”
The large amount of footage of Hamer — some of which had not been seen in more than 50 years, according to Land — meant that Hamer could detail her own life story.
Although the archival footage is important to the documentary, it was also the reason it took so long to produce it — and often why other historical documentaries never make the light of day, Land said.
Archival houses charge high fees for historical footage, and the costs soar higher for rarer footage, she explained.
Grants from various entities, such as the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Delta State University and the Mississippi Humanities Council, as well as donors, helped pay for the archival footage.
The documentary’s remaining 30 minutes consist of interviews with members of Hamer’s family, who show family photographs and read personal letters that Hamer had written.
Despite Hamer’s outward passion for the cause of civil rights, she dealt with various health problems and other difficulties, Land said.
“In these letters to her dear friend, she expressed that. She expressed a lot of sorrow, a lot of pain, anxiety.”
One of those featured in the documentary is Jacqueline Hamer Flakes, the last living adopted child of Hamer’s.
“My mom, she wholeheartedly gave her all when she came to speak in what she believed in and felt was right or wrong, what was happening in the Mississippi Delta,” Flakes said.
“There was hunger going on. There were families who had no clothing for their children. Women who wanted to work but couldn’t work. You had people living on the plantations who wanted to move but couldn’t. They had no future, basically. All they knew was living on the plantations.”
Flakes said she hopes that the film will impress on viewers the struggles her mother faced.
“I hope that they will remember how hard she worked, they will just see the things that she went through, the things that she fought for, remember the beating that she took. Remember that back in that time she was unable to have any children because she had a hysterectomy,” she said.
Most of all, however, Flakes said that viewers will realize that they also have the power to stand up and fight for their rights and help move their communities forward, just like what her mother did: “That’s what I’m hoping they will see.”
- Contact Gerard Edic at 662-581-7239 or gedic@gwcommonwealth.com.
