Public Employee Press

Theater Review
Civil rights hero Fannie Lou Hamer is reborn on stage

One of the most important victories of the civil rights movement was the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Fannie Lou Hamer was a hero in the battles that won this right, which helped increase the number of African American elected officials from fewer than 300 in 1965 to over 9,000 by 2001. Fannie Lou Hamer was a plain-spoken, courageous woman — a Mississippi sharecropper who organized for change because she was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” A new musical play, “The Fannie Lou Hamer Story,” written, acted and sung by mZuri, reintroduces this civil rights crusader to us in this election year.

In 1962, Hamer attended a voter registration meeting organized by the Rev. James Bevel, an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and an associate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. When she and others went to register, they were jailed and beaten by the police. She was then kicked off the plantation where she worked.

Not discouraged, she traveled around the country speaking and registering people to vote. She received constant death threats, was severely beaten by police and shot at. 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.”

Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the all-white Mississippi delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Her testimony at the convention’s Credentials Committee on how African Americans were prevented from voting through illegal tests, taxes and intimidation was nationally televised.

“The Fannie Lou Hamer Story” was performed by mZuri March 15 at DC 37 to an enthusiastic audience of over 100 at an event sponsored by the New York City Chapter of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists.

In her role as Hamer, mZuri has her coming back today, talking about the history she helped to create and many of today’s civil rights issues — including health care, AIDS, the minimum wage and poverty. mZuri intersperses her narrative with ­poetry and her beautiful renditions of songs from the civil rights era which Fannie Lou Hamer was known for singing.

mZuri is noted for her role as Lucy in the film “Sankofa.” Her stage presence is powerful and she has a strong and soulful voice that can carry a rocking melody, a sultry love song or a moving spiritual.

“The Fannie Lou Hamer Story” is available on DVD and the songs on CD at http://www.myspace.com/fannielouhamer and at the DC 37 Education Fund Library.

— Ken Nash
DC 37 Ed Fund Library, Room 211