![]() ![]() Blacks shoulder a disproportionate burden of chronic and infectious diseases alike, with study after study documenting that Blacks in the South have some of the worst health profiles in the country. It's one of the reasons African Americans and other racial minority groups shoulder a disproportionate burden of disease, and why the South and the Deep South in particular have historically suffered disproportionately from poor health.įor example, the "stroke belt," which stretches across the South, has the highest incidence of and mortality from stroke in the nation, with Blacks between the ages of 45 and 54 dying of strokes at a rate three times greater than their white counterparts. Indeed, there is an inextricable link between the economic conditions of individuals and communities and their health. And that many other Blacks in the Delta and other areas of the Deep South would suffer from the same vicious cycle of poverty and illness is also unsurprising. That Hamer went on to develop hypertension and breast cancer and ultimately died of heart failure is not surprising, given the economic and social circumstances of her life. Of the 10 Southern states that have turned down Medicaid expansion, six have also implemented restrictive new election laws that will have a disproportionate impact on African-American voters. Hamer used the term "Mississippi appendectomy" to describe the forced sterilization of African Americans under Jim Crow, a political system that denied Black people not only voting rights but the basic human right to control their own bodies. In 1961, Hamer was admitted to the North Sunflower County Hospital in her hometown of Ruleville, Mississippi, to undergo an operation for a tumor, and the white doctor performed a complete hysterectomy without her consent. She worked long, arduous hours as a sharecropper only to earn, as she once said, just "three lousy dollars a day." Hamer grew up poor, the youngest in a family of 20 children, in the Mississippi Delta, a region that to this day remains one of the nation's most impoverished and is beset by high rates of chronic disease. Her untimely death shows how the denial of political power is literally a hazard to one's health. Hamer died of heart failure and complications from breast cancer in 1977, at age 59. As Hamer famously put it, she became a voting rights activist because she was "sick and tired of being sick and tired." Though she used these words to describe a life of constant struggle against injustice, they also capture the physical and mental toll years of systematic oppression have had on the health of Blacks living in the South. And just two months prior to Hamer's testimony before the DNC, voting rights activists Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia, Mississippi.īut white supremacist violence was not the only threat that Hamer and other Southern Blacks faced under Jim Crow. The same day the badly injured Hamer was released from custody, fellow Mississippi voting rights activist and NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated by a white supremacist in his front yard in Jackson. ![]() But with that realization came the understanding that registering would put her life at risk.Īnd in fact, in June of 1963 Hamer was almost fatally beaten by blackjack-wielding guards in a Mississippi jail after she was detained on false charges on her way home from a voter education training in South Carolina. Hamer spoke not as someone who was advocating on behalf of the oppressed, but as someone who was among the most oppressed - someone who could no longer wait for her citizenship rights.įannie Lou Hamer had lived her life so disenfranchised that it was not until 1962, at the age of 44, that she realized she had the constitutional right to register to vote. ![]() It is impossible to talk about the movement for African-American voting rights without mentioning Fannie Lou Hamer, who was born 99 years ago this week.Ī leader in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Hamer shook the nation with her testimony before the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in 1964, giving a vivid firsthand account of black disenfranchisement and white supremacist violence in the South. The reason I say 'exist' because we're excluded from everything in Mississippi but the tombs and the graves." - speaking at Williams Institutional CME Church, Harlem, New York, Dec. "My name is Fannie Lou Hamer and I exist at 626 East Lafayette Street in Ruleville, Mississippi. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |