"There is no greater agony than bearing an
untold story inside you." Maya Angelou
Thank you all for having me. How many of you have heard of Fannie Lou Hamer? For this Women's History Month, she is the woman I am honoring and reflecting on throughout this month and so I am going to begin by sharing some her story, bringing her into this space with us. This is a speech she gave at the 1964 Democratic National Convention:
"Mr. Chairman, and to the Credentials Committee, my name is Mrs.
Fannie Lou Hamer, and I live at 626 East Lafayette Street, Ruleville,
Mississippi, Sunflower County, the home of Senator James O. Eastland, and
Senator Stennis.
It was the 31st of August in 1962 that eighteen of us traveled
twenty-six miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to
become first-class citizens.
We was met in Indianola by policemen, Highway Patrolmen, and they
only allowed two of us in to take the literacy test at the time. After we had
taken this test and started back to Ruleville, we was held up by the City
Police and the State Highway Patrolmen and carried back to Indianola where the
bus driver was charged that day with driving a bus the wrong color.
After we paid the fine among us, we continued on to Ruleville, and
Reverend Jeff Sunny carried me four miles in the rural area where I had worked
as a timekeeper and sharecropper for eighteen years. I was met there by my
children, who told me that the plantation owner was angry because I had gone
down to try to register.
After they told me, my husband came, and said the plantation owner
was raising Cain because I had tried to register. Before he quit talking the
plantation owner came and said, "Fannie Lou, do you know - did Pap tell
you what I said?"
And I said, "Yes, sir."
He said, "Well I mean that." He said, "If you don't
go down and withdraw your registration, you will have to leave." Said,
"Then if you go down and withdraw," said, "you still might have
to go because we are not ready for that in Mississippi."
And I addressed him and told him and said, "I didn't try to
register for you. I tried to register for myself."
I had to leave that same night.
On the 10th of September 1962, sixteen bullets was fired into the
home of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Tucker for me. That same night two girls were shot
in Ruleville, Mississippi. Also Mr. Joe McDonald's house was shot in.
And June the 9th, 1963, I had attended a voter registration
workshop; was returning back to Mississippi. Ten of us was traveling by the
Continental Trailway bus. When we got to Winona, Mississippi, which is
Montgomery County, four of the people got off to use the washroom, and two of
the people - to use the restaurant - two of the people wanted to use the
washroom.
The four people that had gone in to use the restaurant was ordered
out. During this time I was on the bus. But when I looked through the window
and saw they had rushed out I got off of the bus to see what had happened. And
one of the ladies said, "It was a State Highway Patrolman and a Chief of
Police ordered us out."
I got back on the bus and one of the persons had used the washroom
got back on the bus, too.
As soon as I was seated on the bus, I saw when they began to get
the five people in a highway patrolman's car. I stepped off of the bus to see
what was happening and somebody screamed from the car that the five workers was
in and said, "Get that one there." When I went to get in the car,
when the man told me I was under arrest, he kicked me.
I was carried to the county jail and put in the booking room. They
left some of the people in the booking room and began to place us in cells. I
was placed in a cell with a young woman called Miss Ivesta Simpson. After I was
placed in the cell I began to hear sounds of licks and screams, I could hear
the sounds of licks and horrible screams. And I could hear somebody say,
"Can you say, 'yes, sir,' nigger? Can you say 'yes, sir'?"
And they would say other horrible names.
She would say, "Yes, I can say 'yes, sir.'"
"So, well, say it."
She said, "I don't know you well enough."
They beat her, I don't know how long. And after a while she began
to pray, and asked God to have mercy on those people.
And it wasn't too long before three white men came to my cell. One
of these men was a State Highway Patrolman and he asked me where I was from. I
told him Ruleville and he said, "We are going to check this."
They left my cell and it wasn't too long before they came back. He
said, "You are from Ruleville all right," and he used a curse word.
And he said, "We are going to make you wish you was dead."
I was carried out of that cell into another cell where they had
two Negro prisoners. The State Highway Patrolmen ordered the first Negro to
take the blackjack.
The first Negro prisoner ordered me, by orders from the State
Highway Patrolman, for me to lay down on a bunk bed on my face.
I laid on my face and the first Negro began to beat. I was beat by
the first Negro until he was exhausted. I was holding my hands behind me at
that time on my left side, because I suffered from polio when I was six years
old.
After the first Negro had beat until he was exhausted, the State
Highway Patrolman ordered the second Negro to take the blackjack.
The second Negro began to beat and I began to work my feet, and
the State Highway Patrolman ordered the first Negro who had beat me to sit on
my feet - to keep me from working my feet. I began to scream and one white man
got up and began to beat me in my head and tell me to hush.
One white man - my dress had worked up high - he walked over and
pulled my dress - I pulled my dress down and he pulled my dress back up.
I was in jail when Medgar Evers was murdered.
All of this is on account of we want to register, to become
first-class citizens. And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I
question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the
brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our
lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in
America?
Thank you." - Fannie Lou Hamer, Testimony Before the Credentials Committee, DNC 1964
Me at West Chester University |
Now, my story is not Fannie Lou Hamer's, or Sandra Bland's but they are deeply related…the academic institutions I have been a part of that has caused me the most harm and has provided me the most space to share my voice. And maybe “provide isn’t the right word- maybe it was more like…I didn’t give them a choice but to hear me.
I will never say that any
one place “gave” me a voice nor taught me how to use it. That skill, I
developed on my own, but the institutions that have been forced upon me turned
my voice, my body, into protest.
I mean, is that not essentially what being a woman of color entails? Are we not
existing as protest to the attempt to destroy our mothers, their bodies, their
minds and now we watch that same attempt on our bodies and minds play out in
courtrooms, college judicial hearings, and presidential election debates. SO,
It is in that reality that we in fact have a RESPONSIBILITY to use our bodies in
dynamic ways to challenge systems of oppression and to destroy them before they
successfully destroy us.
In 2011, I started graduate school,
interning in the Office of Student Activities and Leadership Development with
two other first year grad students where I was the ONLY black woman in the
department of eight. I showed up, heels, skirts, nice blouses (as nice as I
could afford at 21 years old). I went to the gym consistently, I was newly
single...AND I was battling depression,
I was lonely, I was partying, I was drinking…
During this first year I was called
into my supervisors office, whom I should mention was a white woman, because it
matters in this story.She called me in, closed her door, sat me down, and told me that my
clothing was “distracting” to the director of our office, who happened to also
be white and as you may assume, a man. Looking back at it I know the issue
wasn’t my clothes, the issue was the clothes on MY body, the issue was my body
which was essentially an issue with my Blackness, my Latinidad, and the
hypersexualization of my being…an unasked view of me and my being tossed upon me by people
who were supposed to guide me, love me, protect me who instead violated me, shamed
me, made me feel uncomfortable every single time I shared space them and
especially in spaces with my director who not only had institutional power but
social power in his identities as a white man making 6 figures. I almost left
my program… now, yes, this place was paying me and giving me a free Masters
degree and I almost choose uncertainty, unemployment, and a complete change in
my future plans in order to maintain my sanity and my sense of self respect. I
questioned everything about myself, the person I was and wanted to be…the
person I NEEDED to be in order to survive amongst these well intentioned white
people in this institution that I felt didn’t give a shit about me. I didn’t
know where my resources were, I didn’t know where my allies were, if this was something I could report, if anyone would even listen to my story or if I would threaten my
entire career and so I sat almost two years in silence about that conversation
and my feelings around it. And when I say silence I don’t mean I shrunk or
became small, I was still enjoying my friends, successful in my work, and that
angst around that incident stayed with me until I was in the last weeks of my
program.
See, this lesson I carried with me
throughout my graduate studies and into my professional career – this lesson
that I share with my students, let me be more specific, my marginalized
students so black folk, women, queer people, trans people, low income first
generation, etc…. this lesson Ima share with ya’ll… institutions cannot love you. And
so it is with that reality that I carry with me the words of Audre Lorde
“survival, is NOT an academic skill” and yet we often learn survival as women
of color in these predominately white, patriarchal, academic spaces…it was in
my decision to stay in my program, to push forward unapologetically, to wait
until my internship exit interview to name ALL the ways in which my
experience nearly destroyed me, it was in that moment I had all the power, and
yet I still struggle when I return to that space, amongst those people. You see, I am a woman whose mind and spirit
holds the face of Sarah (Saartjie) Baartman (how many people in here know who sarah Baartman is?), who knows that women of color have historically had their bodies studied,
critiqued, violated for the benefit of modern science at the hands of white
institutions, for the pleasure of men, bearing the burden of unwanted children
and unnecessary violence. And it is because of that history that that moment
had the impact on me that it did.
What W.E.B Du Boise called a double
consciousness experienced by black people in America-that is understanding
blackness and black culture as well as whiteness and white culture, lacked a
specific analysis of the experience of black woman, having to know all of that
PLUS navigate a gendered world where our
bodies are constantly threatened. And yet here we are women, people of color
and depending on some of your other identities…what might be a double burden
turns into triple or quadruple that. We exist in these institutions and are asked to put
our pain, our struggle, our consciousness on display to awaken that which is
still sleep inside many of our peers, instructors, and administrators. And I
will share what my partner always says before going into this next section and
that is: “I don’t have to do shit but stay black and die” and so ya’ll don’t
have to do shit but hopefully this might inspire something already boiling in you…
You are living in duplicity in an
institution that was not built for you (I’m assuming-based on the time the institution
was founded because your history of women and of black/and brown people at this
institution is like non-existent online- its almost as if the institution don’t
want to talk about it- I mean I hear that’s a thing here, As it is at most
PWIs) we taut ‘diversity’ as some kind of magical accomplishment, FYI 19% students
of color is NOT enough; and so it is sometimes difficult to hold a mirror up to
ourselves and see the ways in which institutions have been failing those of us
most marginalized on campus. And for us women of color, if no one has told you
yet, you can tackle these systems, strategically and unapologetically. That
your body and mind alone hold experiences and knowledge that belong to NO ONE
ELSE and that no book could teach anyone, and it is up to you whether you use
that to change your institution, the way this place serves you, and claim what you need not JUST simply to survive here but to THRIVE here.
Now Audre Lorde also said,
“Women of today are still being called
upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our
existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to
keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that it is
the task of women of Color to educate white women -- in the face of tremendous resistance
-- as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint
survival.”
You, like me, might choose to be silent
until its time to leave. You may write, you may lay your body on the ground in
protest, you MUST vote if you can, you MUST cultivate community with each other
and as I said before, you can not do shit sometimes, and that okay too, but your
simply being here is ENOUGH.
Thank you
Thank you so much for posting this! I was just about to look for it!
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