The Women and Men of American Religion. Story 3: Fannie Lou Hamer

The Civil Rights Movement is important to America and it’s important to Americans at this point in our national history. The story itself and the reception of the story is complex, nuanced, messy, profound, compelling, sad, joyful, hopeful and despairing. The Civil Rights Movement story is inextricably linked to Black slavery, what some call one of America’s two original sins. A good way to better understand any event or movement in history, and what it importantly projects onto the present, is to focus on individual actors on history’s stage. The name Fannie Lou Hamer will most likely not be familiar with most of our listeners – she was one of these larger-than-life actors in the Civil Rights Movement. For the purposes of this podcast series, we want to know about her religious thought motivated and animated her fight for full civil rights for Black Americans.

To do this we have with us Maegan Parker Brooks, associate professor in the School of Civic Communication and Media at Willamette University, and author of several books and other media about the life and times of Fannie Lou Hamer, including Fannie Lou Hamer: America’s Freedom Fighting Woman and the children’s book Planting Seeds: The Life and Legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2009, and is a teacher-scholar working at the intersections of rhetoric, race and public memory.

Today’s episode will help us better understand what religion has done to America, and what America has done to religion, and we trust that as a result, listeners will see how indispensable the idea of religious freedom as a governing principle, is, to the United States and its ability to fulfill its purposes in the world.

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