This post is part of the Breathing is Brilliant reprise of the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus for Black History Month 2019.

“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free,” was one of Fannie Lou Hamer’s calls to accountability and interconnectivity, and she lived those words.

As the youngest child in a family of 20 children, Fannie Lou Hamer brought an intergenerational perspective to the time she lived in and her legacy will continue to reach far forward.  Hamer herself, a sharecropper who was denied educational access and worked in cotton fields from a young age learned about the legacy of slavery from the songs her mother and grandmother sang in the fields of Mississippi and also from her own archival investigation of the records of slave holders in the port city of Charleston.

In the image that is the basis of my collage, Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker are in the midst of what I believe is one of the most brilliant institutional interventions on record.  In order to protest the complete exclusion of Black citizens from the electorate in Mississippi (which defacto led to the disenfranchisement of the poor white citizens) Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker worked to create the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.  They reasoned that the world already knew what a racist democracy looked like, but they had never seen a egalitarian democratic process that represented those who were racially and economically excluded.  So they created delegations for the Freedom Democratic Party, the Democratic Party that should have existed but did not (it still doesn’t by the way, but that’s another essay).  Black and white poor people in Mississippi voted and chose their own delegates and that delegation traveled to the Democratic National Convention to disrupt an institution that refused to transform.  Instead of merely critiquing what existed, the Civil Rights organizers who created the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party built an alternative that brought their overdue and yet futuristic dream into the present.  That meant that when Fannie Lou Hamer testified at the DNC to the violence she suffered for merely attempting to register to vote in Mississippi and asked the question “Is this America?” her question had the power of a living breathing threatening alternative born of the community-building work that she and others had done in Mississippi.

Fannie Lou Hamer followed up this work to bring attention to the electoral disparities in the United States with an institution designed to confront economic injustice, alienation from the land and food insecurity in one of the most fertile regions of the planet.  I had the honor of holding the ledgers for the Freedom Farm that Fannie Lou Hamer founded in Mississippi with national support in my hands in the Amistad Research Center, where the Fannie Lou Hamer Papers reside.  Fannie Lou Hamer funded the Freedom Farm with the same form of support that sustains Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, small donations, some of which were recurring from within and beyond Mississippi.

I encourage anyone interested in deeply transforming existing institutions and building robust and loving alternatives to study the life of Fannie Lou Hamer (and Ella Baker…more on her soon!)  For me, Fannie Lou Hamer’s example proves the fact that love makes us brave.  Fannie Lou Hamer loved Black people more in one year of her life than the United States has in the cumulative centuries of its unjustified existence on this continent.

In the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer, may we ask ourselves what we can do today to actualize the vision she held that everyone could be free, and that everyone deserved the dignity of food, housing, safety and voice?   I suspect that my work to create alternative institutions of learning and a non-traditional approach to academic writing has done more to prove that other forms of intellectual life are possible than my critiques of existing institutions could ever have done on their own.  Do you have the opportunity to create (even on a small scale) a model that defies the limitations of dominant institutions?  Can you nurture and feed an alternative and say this is one example of what it could look like? That’s what we’re doing with most of our time (and the money our sustainers send) over here. (Click on that link if you want to sustain us!)

How can you make the alternatives you crave visible and tangible this year?

Towards the inclusive, strategic revolutionary institutional alternatives that your long for, we offer this guided chant and meditation inspired by Fannie Lou Hamer.   May her example continue to nourish generations.

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And here are links if you want to support the Black Feminist Bookmobile Project and the ongoing work of the Mobile Homecoming Trust Living Library and Archive.

Loving you with every breath (because breathing is brilliant,)

       Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs