Fannie Lou Hamer
October 3, 1957 Lawrence Ferlinghetti , owner of City Lights Bookstore was acquitted of obscenity charges for publishing and selling Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl .” In June 1957 undercover inspectors bought copies of Howl and Other Poems from City Lights clerk Shigeyoshi Murao and arrested him, but later dropped those charges. Store owner Ferlinghetti, who was out of town when Murao was arrested turned himself in after the San Francisco Police Department’s Juvenile Bureau issued a warrant for his arrest. Ferlinghetti was charged with willfully and lewdly printing, publishing and selling obscene writings. His case, People v. Ferlinghetti, went to trial in late August. Judge Clayton W. Horn presided without a jury in San Francisco Municipal Court. His ACLU lawyers had to prove that Howl and Other Poems had literary merit as a whole and did not appeal to “prurient interest under the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Roth v. United States, which a few months earlier had established that the First Amendment protected literature, but not obscenity.
Ferlinghetti’s defense team called nine expert witnesses, including literature professors, editors and book reviewers from the San Francisco Examiner and The New York Times. They testified that Howl and Other Poems was a significant and enduring contribution to society and literature, calling it a “prophetic work” and “thoroughly honest.” Three witnesses took the stand for the prosecution: a San Francisco police officer, an English professor and a teacher who found the work had no literary merit. On Oct. 3, Horn found Ferlinghetti not guilty, ruling that Howl and Other Poems was not obscene but contained “redeeming social importance” and was therefore protected by the First Amendment. http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/%E2%80%98howl%E2%80%99-obscenity-prosecution-still-echoes-50-years-later
October 6, 1917, Fannie Lou Hamer, (née Townsend) voting and civil rights activist and leader known as “The lady who was sick and tired of being sick and tired," was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi. Fannie Lou Hamer was the granddaughter of a slave and the youngest of 20 children. Her parents were sharecroppers. By the time Townsend was twelve, she was forced to drop out of school and work full time to help support her family. In 1945, at the age of 27, Fannie Lou married Perry "Pap" Hamer. They had no children of their own. Fannie Lou went to the hospital to find out why she could not conceive and was told she had a tumor. She was not told that they performed a hysterectomy on her that day but was later told by the doctor that it was done out of kindness. Fannie Lou was outraged. As a result, the Hamers adopted 4 children from very poor families.
In 1962, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) volunteers held a voter registration meeting in Ruleville Mississippi. Hamer was surprised to learn that African-Americans actually had a constitutional right to vote. When the SNCC members asked for volunteers to go to the courthouse to register to vote, Hamer was the first to raise her hand. She later reflected, "The only thing they could do to me was to kill me, and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember." She was thrown off the plantation where her family sharecropped, received constant death threats and was shot at. Despite the danger, Hamer became a SNCC Field Secretary and traveled around the country speaking and registering people to vote.
Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). In 1964, the MDFP challenged the all-white Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention. Hamer was invited, along with the rest of the MFDP officers, to address the Convention’s Credentials Committee. Hamer described to the convention, and to the world, the horrific way she and other SNCC volunteers were treated after they left a voter registration workshop in Charleston, South Carolina in June 1963. She said that on the way home, they were hungry and wanted to stop at a Trailways bus terminal in Winona, Mississippi for foodand and to use the washrooms. They were not served and were arrested. Hamer was taken out of her jail cell and taken to another cell where, under the orders of a State Highway Patrol officer, she was battered by two Black prisoners with a police blackjack. The first prisoner beat her until he was exhausted. The law enforcement officer then ordered the second prisoner to beat her. It was three days before members of SNCC were allowed to take her to the hospital. Fannie Lou told the convention that as a result of this beating, she suffered permanent kidney damage, a blood clot in the artery of her left eye, and a limp when she walked. Although her riveting testimony was interrupted by a hastily called press conference by President Johnson, the national networks aired her testimony in its entirety, later in the evening. As a result of her speech, two delegates of the MFDP were given speaking rights at the convention and the other members were seated as honorable guests. The Democrats agreed that in the future no delegation would be seated from a state where anyone was illegally denied the vote. A year later, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. Fanny Lou Hamer died on March 14, 1977, at the age of 59. http://www.ibiblio.org/sncc/hamer.html , http://www.beejae.com/hamer.htm, https://www.howard.edu/library/reference/guides/hamer/default.htm To hear Hamer’s speech to the credentials committee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-RoVzAqhYk
