Say her name: Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer. Born October 6, 1917, and died March 14, 1977.
Say her name: Mrs. Recy Taylor. Born Dec. 31, 1919, and died Dec. 28, 2017.
Say her name: Erica Garner. Born May 29, 1990, and died Dec. 30, 2017.
The Black women listed above experienced the plight of being denied justice while alive as Black women in Amerikkka. This is why we must lift them up as ancestors they deserved admiration and reverence in life, as well as, the after life.
Also, when most people envision a revolutionary person the image is of any one other than Black women. This is a narrative we must change as a society because as Black Revolutionary women we literally have to hold up the sky in order to be given any semblance of appreciation. So lets go! Heres to Three Revolutionary Black women.
Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer
Born Fannie Lou Townsend on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi. The daughter of sharecroppers, Hamer began working the fields at an early age. Her family struggled financially, and often went hungry.
Married to Perry “Pap” Hamer in 1944, Fannie Lou continued to work hard share cropping along with her husband just to never get by. Sharecropping was neo-slavery the couple had to request permission to leave the plantation from the owner B.D. Marlowe. Asking for permission did not mean every attempt to leave the plantation was successful sometimes their request were denied due to the repressive nature of Jim Crow.
Early in their marriage Hamer sought medical attention for a tumer on her reproductive organs. While in surgery she received forced sterilization when her Uterus was removed without her permission. Mississippi performed these forced sterilizations so much that a name was coined by the poor Black communities most traumatized by these experience as a ‘Mississippi Appendectomy’ .
In the summer of 1962 she made a life-changing decision to attend a protest meeting. She met civil rights activists there who were there to encourage African Americans to register to vote. She became a SNCC organizer and on August 31, 1962 led 17 volunteers to register to vote at the Indianola, Mississippi Courthouse.
Denied the right to vote due to an unfair literacy test, the group was harassed on their way home, police stopped their bus and fined them $100 for driving in a school bus was too yellow. That night, Marlow fired Hamer for her attempt to vote; her husband was forced (neo-slavery) stay until the harvest. Marlow confiscated their property. The Hamers moved to Ruleville, Mississippi in Sunflower County with very little after a failed assassination attempt on her husbands life in retaliation to the activism work Mrs. Hamer was involved in.
Hamer helped organize Freedom Summer in 1964, which brought hundreds of college students, black and white, to help with Black voter registration in the segregated South. In 1964, she announced her candidacy for the Mississippi House of Representatives but was barred from the ballot as a Democrat.
In 1965, Hamer, Victoria Gray, and Annie Devine became the first black women to stand in the US Congress when they unsuccessfully protested the Mississippi House election of 1964. She also traveled extensively, giving powerful speeches on behalf of civil rights. In 1971, Hamer helped to found the National Women’s Political Caucus.
Mrs. Recy Taylor
She was a revolutionary woman way before the #MeToo movement of today. During the jim crow period, on Sept. 3, 1944, in Alabama, Mrs. Taylor was kidnapped, blindfolded, raped and brutally beaten by six white boys, all the while pleading for her life.
A Dec. 20 Democracy Now interview with Nancy Buirski, director of the film, “The Rape of Recy Taylor,” noted that she was left on the side of the road, later to be found by her father.
Then Recy Taylor said “Enough!” and bravely named and identified her attackers. Eleven years before the bus boycott in Alabama, Rosa Parks interviewed Recy Taylor for the NAACP as its chief rape investigator at the time. An Alabama Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor was launched, marking the first national campaign against the white supremacist rape of a woman of color.
In a Dec. 28 tribute to Taylor in The Root, Monique Judge said: “The racially motivated rape of Black women by white men was as prominent during ‘Jim Crow’ as the lynching of Black men was, but it is a topic that is not as discussed. Sexual violence against Black women often goes overlooked.”
Even though Recy Taylor immediately spoke up and named her perpetrators, even though there was a confession from one of the perpetrators, a grand jury denied justice for her, twice.
Somehow, through all of this, Black women are still “to blame” and are asked questions filled with contempt, such as “Why did you take so long to tell?”
But Recy Taylor was only granted an apology by the Alabama Legislature in 2011, a full 67 years after her attack.
Sexual assault by white men against Black women is rooted in patriarchy, white male rage and white supremacy.
Erica Garner
She was the daughter of Eric Garner, who was killed by police in Staten Island, N.Y., on July 17, 2014. Eric Garner was murdered by NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo using an illegal chokehold. It was all caught on video, even Garner’s last words: “I can’t breath.” It is now three years and five months since Eric Garner was murdered, and there is still no justice.
Ms. Garner suffered an asthma attack, which triggered a heart attack, which led to brain damage. Erica Garner was pronounced brain dead five days after the heart attack, and two days later she succumbed to death.
But her death was also the slow death due to systematic racial disparities in the health and justice systems.
Living in a low-income neighborhood is genocide. Blacks and Latinxs make up the majority of people affected by pollution, and they also make up the majority of people in low-income neighborhoods. A 2014 study found that members of racial and ethnic minorities are exposed to levels of nitrogen dioxide, a common pollutant associated with asthma and heart disease, that is 38 percent higher than in the air most white people breath.
The racial divide in the U.S. is that elemental: Blacks and whites actually breathe different air!
Black people are continually denied justice, even when the evidence is blatant, such as the video that recorded Eric Garner being murdered. I refuse to watch the video of a Beautiful Black mans spirit leave this realm.
The death of Erica Garner’s father played a big factor in the death of Erica Garner herself. Living day by day, knowing that your father didn’t receive the justice that he deserved and walking the same streets with the pig who murdered your father are the slow deaths that Erica Garner went through.
Ms. Garner leaves behind two children: Alyssa and Eric. Her last wish was that you support foster children in some way, as she was in foster care during her life.
The system is stacked against us. Life is a race that we have yet to master because the system works exactly as it is intended to constantly changing and altering the path to the finish line with difficult and unbelievable obstacles. Mrs. Taylor spoke up and wasn’t heard. Ms. Garner spoke up for her father and was denied justice. Mrs. Hamer was not heard and was even brutally beaten and terrorized by the police of Mississippi with impunity. Is this justice?
Justice isn’t blind at all. The system sees you, but does not count you in because of your Blackness and poorness under the division that capitalism creates by pitting workers against each other.
However, this will not last forever because we are the revolution. The actions you take today to support Black women, who have been the truth-tellers for eons, will build a new foundation. A foundation that will be free of white supremacy, capitalism and the us constitution because with the demise of capitalism and the current systems of oppression will come evolution and a new system designed to empower those most marginalized today.
Protect Black women. Hear Black women. Honor Black women. Fight for Black women. Uplift Black women. Support Black women hit that donate button up top. Say their names.
