OUR STORY

The Film.

Fannie Lou Hamer’s America is an original documentary film told through the public speeches, personal interviews, and powerful songs of the fearless Mississippi sharecropper-turned-human-rights-activist.

If you’ve ever heard of Fannie Lou Hamer, odds are you were introduced to her through the heart-wrenching testimony she delivered before the 1964 Democratic National Convention’s Credentials Committee. As significant as Hamer’s 1964 DNC speech was and is, her testimony is but one moment within the activist's career that spanned nearly 15 years and took place before audiences - in every region of the country. 

One of the movement’s pre-eminent orators, Hamer used stories from her own life to call America to account for the racism that defined every aspect of her existence—from the turn-of-the-century cotton plantations of the Mississippi Delta where she was reared, to her death in an all-black hospital in 1977. 

Building A Team.

The concept for the film began in 2005 when Hamer’s great niece, Monica Land wanted to see a documentary on Hamer featuring members of her family. Land had seen many docs on Hamer, but never with any of her family members talking about her life prior to her activism.

Land began trying to put together a film crew and started with her cousin, film producer, Sulla Hamer (The Usual Suspects, Love Field, The Accused, Unlawful Entry) who was working with TV One at the time. Sulla referred her to producer, Keith Beauchamp, who specialized in films from the civil rights era. Beauchamp was speaking abroad about his film, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, which was also released in 2005.

Beauchamp jumped at the chance to work on a film about Fannie Lou Hamer as it had been his goal to do so. Beauchamp introduced Land to Dr. Davis W. Houck a professor at Florida State University. Houck, like Beauchamp, was also an Emmett Till historian as well as a Fannie Lou Hamer historian and scholar. Houck was working on a book, To Tell It Like It Is: The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer (2010). Houck was delighted to join the project team and introduced Land to Dr. Maegan Parker Brooks, with whom he was working on the book about Hamer’s speeches.

Brooks was also a Fannie Lou Hamer historian and scholar and eventually penned two additional books about Hamer, A Voice That Could Stir An Army: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rhetoric of the Black Freedom Movement (2014) and America’s Freedom Fighting Woman: Fannie Lou Hamer (2020).

Houck, who became the Fannie Lou Hamer Professor of Rhetorical Studies at Florida State University in 2016 also introduced Land to Joy Davenport who was working on a film, M.F.D.P., detailing Hamer’s formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and filmmaker Pablo Correa. Finally having an amazing team of Fannie Lou Hamer scholars, the group set out to bring Hamer’s story to life using only her voice in the film. Robert “R.J.” Fitzpatrick joined our team once we started filming.

Through the research initiated by Brooks and Houck, who had been researching Hamer’s life for several years, the team uncovered archival audio and video footage, articles, photographs, and television appearances that had not been seen in more than 40 or 50 years! Houck also came across personal handwritten letters that Hamer wrote to her good friend and confident, Rose Fishman. Those letters, used in the film, paint a more vulnerable and personal side of the civil rights activist. Continuing on a treasure hunt of sorts, they spent countless hours looking for “lost” materials of Fannie Lou Hamer and then transcribing that material to be used in the film.

To get the film on the desired platform, PBS, Land reached out to activist Heather Booth, who was not only a donor to the film, but she also worked with Fannie Lou Hamer during Freedom Summer in 1964. Through a friend of Booth’s, Land was introduced to Selena Lauterer, a stations relations agent and founder of Artemis Independent in 2020. For the next two years, Lauterer used all of her skills, ingenuity and resources to ensure Fannie Lou Hamer’s America made it to PBS. Lauterer and Land connected with the incredible and immensely dedicated Chris Hastings, executive producer of America ReFramed at GBH and WORLD Channel, and the rest is history!

If ‘Our Story’ seems like everything fell right into place, it didn’t. It was a long and difficult journey. Among our many challenges was the search for footage of Fannie Lou Hamer that we knew existed, but couldn’t find because it had either been destroyed, lost, misfiled or not filed at all. One of the tragedies we discovered was that a lot of video and audio footage from that era is sitting in boxes deteriorating in attics, basements, or storage rooms, waiting for some compassionate and willing soul to organize it.

Another issue was determining who actually owned the footage and getting them to allow us to use it. Some did. Others did not.

Our quest to have this film focus on Fannie Lou Hamer’s family and life prior to her activism soon went off the rails as we failed to find enough archival footage of her speaking on those subjects. Determined to have her tell her own story in her own words – without the benefit of talking heads or narration - our original concept for the film shifted to highlight the footage we did have.

Another significant obstacle that persisted for well over a decade was funding the film. Archival footage, while invaluable and absolutely vital to preserve our history and tell our stories, is insanely expensive. We learned that many film projects like ours – worthy projects never see the light of day because they simply can’t afford the footage fees.

We encountered this issue over and over again. And without the help, the support and the continued direction and encouragement of Jed Oppenheim and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, this film would never have been produced. Jed was a true warrior for us, and he went way above and beyond the call of duty to see this production and our curriculum completed. We can never thank Jed and the Kellogg Foundation enough for the tremendous financial footing they gave us.

We had other amazing, willing, and continued benefactors, namely, the Mississippi Humanities Council (MHC) and the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area (MDNHA). Thank you Dr. Stuart Rockoff, Carol Anderson, Dr. Rolando Herts and your staffs for their wonderful and gracious support.

And thanks also to our many individual and corporate donors who from the very beginning, believed in this project and didn’t hesitate to support it. And they waited so patiently for years, to see the finished product. Thank you!