Two Historic Universities Host First Screenings of New Documentary, Fannie Lou Hamer’s America
February 10, 2020 – SALEM, OR
The first screenings of a new documentary, Fannie Lou Hamer’s America, were held at two universities of major historical significance, the University of Mississippi and Willamette University.
The University of Mississippi, in Oxford, which hosted the first screening on Nov. 20, 2019, is where James Meredith, an African American student, fought for and won the right to attend the whites-only campus in 1962. Meredith, an Air Force veteran, who organized the March Against Fear in June 1966 to encourage voter registration, was shot by a sniper shortly after he began walking. Meredith recovered and rejoined the march with other civil rights activists including Fannie Lou Hamer. In 1963, Cleveland McDowell became the second black student to attend the university, which Mississippi’s then governor fought to keep segregated.
The second screening was hosted by Willamette University in Salem, Oregon on Jan. 24, 2020. Founded in 1842, Willamette is the oldest university west of the Mississippi River. Civil rights and Fannie Lou Hamer historian and author, Dr. Maegan Parker Brooks, has been an assistant professor of Civic Communication and Media at Willamette since 2015.
"It was very special to share the film with the Willamette University community,” Brooks said. “Willamette has supported this project in a variety of ways over the last five years--from grant writing and tech support to research funding and feedback on earlier versions of the film. I was heartened to see a large, multigenerational crowd gathered for the screening and I was further encouraged by the thoughtful questions audience members posed during the question and answer session."
Brooks, who is the lead consultant and researcher on the film, Fannie Lou Hamer’s America, also developed the film’s K-12 curriculum, Find Your Voice: The Online Resource for Fannie Lou Hamer Studies, which is hosted by Willamette on their website (www.findyourvoice.willamette.edu). Brooks, who just completed her third book about Hamer, travels and lectures frequently about Hamer’s legacy and influence. Dr. Pablo Correa, a visiting assistant professor, also of Civic Communication and Media at Willamette since 2019, was a videographer on the film. He also designed and maintains the project’s website and is an instructor for the curriculum’s annual young filmmaker’s workshop.
Fannie Lou Hamer’s America is the first full-length documentary of its kind which allows Hamer, an important and often overlooked figure of the civil rights movement, to tell her own story in her own words by means of archival audio and video footage. The concept of just using Hamer’s voice for the film was developed by Hamer’s niece and award-winning journalist Monica Land. Land is also the producer and a researcher for the film.
The film’s director and editor, Joy Elaine Davenport, attended both screenings and the panel discussions with the audience that followed.
“It was an honor to share this early version of the film with audiences,” she said. “The audiences responded enthusiastically to Mrs. Hamer’s story and her voice, which resonates even more powerfully today.”
Davenport also held a screening at the University of Texas on Feb. 1. Additional screenings are planned for Nebraska and Mississippi in March. Funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Mississippi Humanities Council, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and others, the film is slated for a television release in 2020.
Born the youngest of 20 children, Fannie Lou Hamer was known for being “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” A poor Mississippi sharecropper, Hamer founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). She helped change laws and was very influential in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And though she is primarily known for her political advocacies during the 1960s, Hamer was also a humanitarian, providing clothing, housing, and education for the poor, taking in children whose families couldn’t afford to care for them and feeding thousands through her Freedom Farm Cooperative and pig farm. Hamer died at the age of 59 on March 14, 1977.