Chapter 4 Healing the People, Healing the Land: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Theo-Politics of Love

Hamer is widely remembered for her statement: “I’m sick and tired of be- ing sick and tired.”1 Hamer’s lament became a rallying cry that manifested in her activist narrative as well as her illness narrative, says cultural anthro- pologist, Dvera Saxton.2 Hamer held in tension the depth of the personal and social trauma with the hope of healing ills caused by race, gender, and class- based violence. From 1962–1977, Hamer publicly interrogated, transcended, and transformed United States racist ideologies, systems, structures, and prac- tices through what is coined as her theo-politics of love. Hamer’s theo-politics of love through her Christian faith and liberating use of sacred literature is presented in this chapter.3 It is argued that Hamer’s vi- sion and practice of healing the people and the land entails the political, so- cial, economic, ideological, and ecological decentering of whiteness. Hamer’s perception of the sickness of white landowning males who legally, or with impunity, terrorized, intimidated, segregated, lynched, mutilated, raped, ex- ploited, and politically misrepresented black poor and oppressed land work- ers and their families was inclusive of people, place, and space. In developing and constructing Hamer’s theo-politics of love, first, I provide a brief overview of love and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Second, socio-political anecdotes of Hamer’s private resistance and leadership-activism are discussed through the four stages of her theo-politics of love. Third, an analysis of some

1 Hamer, “‘I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired,’ Speech Delivered with Malcolm X at the Williams Institutional CME Church, Harlem, New York, December 20, 1964,” in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, 62. 2 Dvera Saxton, “Fannie Lou Hamer’s Reparative Justice Leadership Panel Respondent,” Liter- ature A/Cross Cultures Conference, Fresno Pacific University, Fresno, October 7, 2016. 3 Hamer’s theo-politics of love is constructed as a four-stage maturational process that oc- curred before, during, and after her involvement in SNCC. Clayborne Carson, a historian, King scholar, and participant in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, discusses the three- stage intellectual development and legacy of SNCC. This parallel is drawn between Hamer and SNCC to demonstrate the organic, creative, and dynamic contexts in which Hamer lived as well as her participation in an intellectually sophisticated grassroots organization. See Carson’s In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004438071_006 Healing the People, Healing the Land 115 outcomes of Hamer’s theo-politics of love is presented to contextualize love as more than a political strategy though necessary for socio-political engagement and change. Fourth, I recount accolades Hamer received in life, and death, to highlight her impact on healing the people and the land through her theo- politics of love.

1 Love and the Civil Rights Movement: A Snapshot

Hamer’s theo-politics of love, an aspect of her revolutionary practical theol- ogy, is constitutive of what Vincent Harding argues in There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. He states, “… the black struggle for free- dom is at the heart a profoundly human quest for transformation, a constantly evolving movement toward personal integrity and toward new social struc- tures filled with justice, equity, and compassion.”4 Hamer’s theo-politics joined the protracted black struggle for freedom that was simultaneously personal and political, private and public, individual and collective, and imminent and transcendent. Her God-inspired, and grounded, sense of love entails a telos of “a new, transformed humanity, a new humanized society (not ‘equal oppor- tunity’ in a dehumanized one).”5 As is detailed below, Hamer invited all to acknowledge and address the malaise because she claimed, “America is a sick place, and man is on the critical list.”6 Prior to Hamer’s participation in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, Ella Baker was the black woman architect and advocate of a grassroots move- ment comprised of ordinary people acting on their environment in an extraor- dinary manner.7 Love for self and neighbor by recognizing the dignity of every human was at the core of Baker’s religious moral ethic that was a major part of the Civil Rights Movement. In recalling a childhood memory with her ma- ternal grandfather, who was a Baptist pastor, Baker’s sense of compassion is highlighted when she notes,

We had a big garden, much too big for the size of the family. I’d pick a bushel or more [of green peas], and we didn’t need them, so you’d give

4 Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (San Diego, CA and New York, NY: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1981), xxiv. 5 Harding, There Is a River, xxv. 6 Hamer, “‘America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List,’” 104. 7 Rosetta E. Ross, Witnessing andTestifying: BlackWomen, Religion, and Civil Rights (Minneapo- lis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 89–90.