Fake News. 1964

 

Fannie Lou Hamer

Seems to me you have to cut LBJ some slack on this one. He didn't ask to be President. Didn't run for it. Came into to the Oval Office when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November of 1963, and he, Lyndon Baines Johnson, from Texas in fact, suddenly became President, leader of a grieving nation split like a ripe muskmelon over civil rights.

You've got to cut him some slack because if he's known for anything today it's for signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as expanding the reach of the New Deal by declaring a "War on Poverty." He was no punch-in-the-mouth conservative, even though by nature and upbringing he was. LBJ was a progressive in every sense, despite the fact that he was raised in rural Texas, where such progressive-ness was something of a curse. 

While all of that is true, the Fannie Lou Hamer story makes him look like a skunk, worse, a racist skunk. He wasn't. Hold on to that fact. 

To say that Fannie Lou Hamer came up through the ranks would be overstatement. Born dirt poor in Mississippi, her daddy a sharecropper, she was picking cotton when she was six years old, The baby of a family of 20 kids, she quit school when she was 12. Had to. Cotton needed picking.

She was no school girl when all of this went down. She was 45 years old in 1962, when she attended a voting rights workshop in rural Mississippi run by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee--or SNCC, whose purpose was to champion human rights for black folks like Fannie Lou Hamer. 

Most white folks--even up north, even my dad--thought SNCC was a wretched nest of communists. 

But that meeting changed Fannie's life, seriously. I know--that's the kind of line people use all the time--"it changed her life." But I'm not lying, and she told people as much forever after. What Fannie Lou Hamer discovered at that SNCC meeting was that, in Mississippi at least, people who couldn't vote weren't counted human. 

At the 1964 Democratic Convention, Fannie and her SNCC friends raised hell. They were determined to take a place at the convention with the Mississippi Democratic Committee, and they weren't subtle. They barged in and told the all-white state delegation that, damnation! they were people too. The Convention tried to broker some peace by arranging for them to speak. One of the speakers was a firebrand preacher named Martin Luther King; another was this sharecropper's daughter, Fannie Lou Hamer. 

Now Lyndon Baines Johnson was scared his Southern constituents would leave him like a dead deer in a ditch if the American people would hear Fannie's speech, specifically her story because it wasn't at all pretty. One night a year or so before, Fannie and her friends were dragged from a bus, arrested and jailed in a little Mississippi town, where they then got beat up badly by the cops who'd arrested them. They'd been assaulted because they were Black--and they wanted to vote. All of that hardened her steel: "I was sick and tired," she used to say, "of being sick and tired."

LBJ figured her telling her story before the nation would so embarass and infuriate his white Southern Democrats that he could lose 'em. He could not let Fannie speak. He had to keep her still.

This part is forever worth telling. The only way the President of the United States could keep American people from hearing Fannie Lou was to call a Presidential news conference. So the networks obligingly cut away from Fannie's appearance on the floor of the convention. He had no news--well, he had fake news--so he told America on all the networks that it was nine months since the death of President Kennedy, the nine-month anniversary of the assassination. That was the whole ball of wax. Even to day, it ranks as the most useless Presidential speech in American history, real fake news.

So Fannie Lou got no nation-wide audience, and the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson passed landmark legislation for justice and equality in the land. But LBJ pushed along a war he didn't start in Southeast Asia and declined to run for President in 1968, when the country was even more fractured.

And Fannie Lou? Once the networks discovered they'd been conned, they saw to it that Fannie Lou lit up the screens all over all week long. Later, her hard work for voting rights gained her an armful of honorary degrees, and when she died, in 1977, she was buried right there in Ruleville, Mississippi, her hometown.

What's inscribed on her gravestone is pure poetry: "I got sick and tired of being sick and tired."