by Susan Kling

Then came the summer of ’62, when the magic word “Freedom!” swept like a wild wind through the South. In late August, James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference came down to Ruleville, Mississippi, and together with James Forman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other Black and white activists in the boiling civil rights movement, called a mass meeting at a church there.

Fannie Lou attended this gathering — and her life suddenly changed. “I had never heard the freedom songs before!” she said in wonder. And of the people she listened to: “They really wanted to change the world I knew — they wanted Blacks to register to vote!” They wanted Blacks to be able to have some small say about their destiny.

Fannie Lou felt that she was called, that this was the chance she had waited for, it seemed, all of her life. She and seventeen others in the church signed up to go to Sunflower County Courthouse the next Friday, to register to vote. Without any vote or special arrangement, Fannie Lou became the leader of the group. On the following Friday, August 31, she and the seventeen other Blacks, fearful but determined, boarded a bus owned by a friendly Black man, and rode to the courthouse in Indianola.

Police and other whites began to mill around the bus when it stopped. But the eighteen, with Fannie Lou in front, marched bravely into the courthouse. There they were promptly told to go outside and come in two at a time.

Fannie Lou was asked twenty-one questions, including one that required her to copy and interpret a part of the constitution of Mississippi. “I could copy it, she said later, “but I sure couldn’t interpret it — because up to that time, I hadn’t even known Mississippi had a constitution.” She failed the registration test, as did all the others. But she made up her mind that she would come back, no matter how many times, until she did pass.

In the late afternoon, after all the others with her had gone through the same frustrating, threatening day, with rifle-carrying whites strolling in and out of the courthouse past them, they boarded the bus and started for home. They had gone only a few miles when they were stopped by a policeman and ordered to return to Indianola. There the driver was fined $100 for driving a bus “with the wrong color.”

The severe backlash against Fannie Lou began with that first effort to register to vote. But for her, that day was also the beginning of a new level of struggle against racism, which lasted for the rest of her life.

Here is the story of what happened when she tried to register, as taken from a hearing before the Select Panel on Mississippi and Civil Rights, held at the National Theater, Washington, D.C., on Monday, June 8,1964, and reprinted in the Congressional Record of June 16,1964:

“… I will begin from the first beginning, August 31, in 1962. I traveled twenty-six miles to the county courthouse to try to register to become a first class citizen. I was fired the 31st of August in 1962 from a plantation where I had worked as a timekeeper and a sharecropper for eighteen years. My husband had worked there thirty years.

“I was met by my children when I returned from the courthouse, and my girl (her eldest daughter) and my husband’s cousin told me that this man my husband worked for was raising a lot of Cain. I went on in the house, and it wasn’t long before my husband came and said this plantation owner said I would have to leave if I didn’t go down and withdraw.

“…(The plantation owner) said, ‘Fannie Lou, you have been to the courthouse to try and register,’ and he said, ‘We are not ready for this in Mississippi.’ I said, ‘I didn’t register for you, I tried to register for myself.’ He said, ‘We are not going to have this in Mississippi, and you will have to withdraw. I am looking for your answer yea or nay.’

“I just looked. He said, ‘I will give you until tomorrow morning.’

“So I just left the same night.”

She told the panel her husband was not allowed to leave the plantation until after harvest time, but in spite of this restriction, he took his wife to the home of a friend in Ruleville. She also said that the plantation owner had warned her husband, Pap, that if he decided to go with Fannie Lou their furniture would be confiscated and Pap would lose his job. Thus, because of the need for the family to have housing and some means of her husband earning a livelihood, Fannie Lou was forced to separate from her husband.

Her report to the panel continued, “On the 10th of September, they fired into the home of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Cuker sixteen times, for me. That same night, two girls were shot at Mr. Herman Sissel’s; also, they shot into Mr. Joe Maglon’s house. I was fired at that day, and haven’t had a job since ….”

Her husband was fired anyway and the furniture confiscated by the plantation owner, who took their car as well, saying they owed him $300 on it.

Fannie Lou became a virtual fugitive, staying here and there with friends or distant relatives. At last the family found a bare house into which they moved. But even here, they were not left in peace. Cars full of white men armed with rifles would ride up and back in front of the house, shouting obscenities and threatening to shoot.

If any of the family left the house, for whatever reason, cars followed, with white men leaning out of the windows, shouting, cursing and threatening. But these reprisals, as well as the abusive letters that she kept receiving, only stiffened her resolve and made her more determined to keep to the path on which she had set her feet. And her family, to their everlasting credit, stood solidly with her.

At last, word of what was happening to her reached the ears of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Robert Moses, a leader in the Mississippi grassroots civil rights movement, came down to Ruleville and invited Fannie Lou to attend a SNCC conference at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in the fall of 1962. That conference instilled in her an even more total commitment, and she went to work for SNCC, “even when they didn’t have any money.” This work provided her with a kind of security, for after that she never felt alone in the ideals she had laid out for herself.

She not only worked for SNCC as a Field Secretary, but was tireless in half a dozen other avenues as well. She circulated a petition to get food and clothing from the government for needy families. She helped in getting welfare programs started, she got clothes from people who didn’t need them to people who did, and she cooked for the many volunteer workers who continually came to help. In addition to all of this work, she was employed for a time at a Ruleville cotton gin, until she was fired for attempting to register Blacks to vote. She had to leave her house again.

When she returned to the Sunflower County Courthouse on December 4th to take the registration test a second time, as she explained later, “There was nothing they could do to me. They couldn’t fire me, because I didn’t have a job. They couldn’t put me out of my house, because I didn’t have one. There was nothing they could take from me any longer.” She told them, “You’ll see me every thirty days, until I pass.” And on January 10, 1963, she passed and became one of the first of Sunflower County’s 30,000 Blacks to register to vote.

But on June 3, 1963, she paid heavily for that right and for the work she was doing to get Blacks to register.

“I had gone to a voter education workshop in Charleston, South Carolina,” she told the Congressional Panel. “We left Mississippi June 3, 1963. We finished the workshop June 8th. We left on the 8th by Continental Trailways bus, returning back to Mississippi.

“We arrived in Winona, Mississippi, between 10:30 and 11 a.m., June 9th. Four of our group got off the bus to get food in the bus terminal. Two got off to use the washroom. I was still on the bus. I saw six people rush out, and I got off to see what was happening.

“Miss Ann Ponder told me the chief of police and a state highway patrolman had ordered them out. I said, ‘Well this is Mississippi for you.’ I went and got back on the bus.

“I looked out of the window and they were putting the Negroes in a car. I was holding Miss Ponder’s iron. I got off to ask her what to do with it. My friends shouted, ‘Get back on the bus!’

“A white officer said to me, ‘You are under arrest. Get in the car.’ As I went to get in, he kicked me. In the car, they would ask me questions. When I started to answer, they would curse and tell me to hush, and call me awful names.

“They carried me to the (Montgomery) County jail. Later I heard Miss Ponder’s voice and the sound of kicks. She was screaming awfully. “Then three white men came to my room. A state highway policeman (he had the marking on his sleeve) asked me where I was from. I said, ‘Ruleville.’ He said, ‘We’re goin’ to check that.’ They left out. They came back and he said, ‘You’re damn rightl!’

“They said they were going to make me wish I was dead. They had me lay down on my face, and they ordered two Negro prisoners to beat me with a blackjack. That was unbearable. It was leather, loaded with something.

“The first prisoner beat me until he was exhausted. Then the second Negro began to beat. I have a limp. I had polio when I was about six years old. I was holding my hands behind me to protect my weak side. I began to work (move) my feet. The state highway patrolman ordered the other Negro to sit on my feet.

“My dress pulled up and I tried to smooth it down. One of the policemen walked over and raised my dress as high as he could. They beat me until my body was hard, ‘til I couldn’t bend my fingers or get up when they told me to. That’s how I got this blood clot in my left eye — the sight’s nearly gone, now. And my kidney was injured from the blows they gave me in the back.”

She was left in the cell, bleeding and battered, listening to the screams of Ann Ponder, who was being beaten in another cell, and hearing the white men talk of “plotting to kill us, maybe to throw our bodies in the Big Black River, where nobody would ever find us.”

At last, word of the beatings and detention at Winona reached the ears of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who sent members of his staff to the jail, with the demand that Fannie Lou and the others be released at once. Andrew Young and James Bevel came to the jail, helped carry her out, half conscious, and took her to a doctor in Greenwood, Mississippi, where the blood was washed off her,and her wounds stitched and bandaged. Then they took her to Atlanta to some friends of the civil rights movement, where she remained for a month, convalescing. During this month, she refused to allow her husband to come to see how terrible she looked, until some of the scars were less livid and the swelling had gone down.

While she had been in the Winona jail, she told friends, “Medger Evers was killed, and they offered to let us go one night, but I knew it was just so they could kill us, and say we was trying to escape. I told ‘em they’d have to kill me in my cell.” (George Sewell, The Black Collegian, May/June, 1978).

The effects of the beatings plagued Fannie Lou for the rest of her life, until sometimes she would say caustically, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired! This brutal experience only served to make her more determined than ever to continue to get Blacks to register. As soon as she was able, even limping and almost nauseated with pain, she was out in the cotton fields at sun up, lining up prospective voters, and telling them how almighty powerful it would be to be able to vote. Evenings she spent going around to the many little churches in the countryside, talking about voter registration, and singing in that powerful voice that moved all who heard her sing the freedom songs she had learned. But her base was always Ruleville, where she had been born and raised. Neither the beating nor the constant hate letters and abusive telephone calls she received deterred her from her work, and she refused to move away.

“I ain’t goin’ no place,” she insisted. “I have a right to stay here. With all that my parents and grandparents gave to Mississippi, I have a right to stay here and fight for what they didn’t get.” And after her experience in the Winona jail,she added, “I don’t want equal rights no more. I don’t want to be equal to men that beat us. I want human rights!” (Drawing on an article by Phyl Garland, “Builders of a New South,” Ebony Magazine, August 1966.)