e late-summer sun was broiling the already sunbaked floodplains of the
Mississippi Delta on August 31, 1962, when Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer and
seventeen other men and women boarded an old school bus in front of the
Williams Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in the little town of Ruleville.
e bus was normally used to haul day laborers to the cotton fields, but today
it was headed for the Sunflower County courthouse twenty-six miles away
in Indianola. e seat of Sunflower County, Indianola was also the birthplace
of the Citizens’ Council—the white-collar, white-supremacist organization of
prominent planters, businessmen, and politicians who professed to disdain
the hooded garb and violence of the Ku Klux Klan.
At the courthouse, Mrs. Hamer and the others intended to register to vote,
a radical and dangerous action for black people in Mississippi at the time,
especially in this river-washed fertile cotton plantation land of northwest Mississippi known as the Delta. Here, black people formed an overwhelming majority of the population. If they gained voting rights, there was a very real
possibility that black power could displace white power in local government.
Local whites had proven themselves willing to fight that possibility in every
way they could. In the 1950s and ’60s, white-supremacist terror besieged black
communities in Mississippi and across the South. Black leaders had been
assassinated or driven from the state; new laws were put in place both to
maintain black disenfranchisement and to surveil the black community. Ku
Klux Klan membership expanded and included policemen and civic leaders.
At the courthouse, the men and women from Ruleville crowded into the
circuit clerk’s office and announced their intention. Cecil Campbell, the startled

and decidedly hostile clerk, stated that only two of them were allowed in the
office at the same time. Everyone except Mrs. Hamer and an older man named
Leonard Davis went back outside to wait their turn. Sullen white men, some
carrying pistols, milled about outside the courthouse; the group waiting to register stood uneasily on the steps and under the portico. en, without giving
a reason, the circuit clerk suddenly closed his office.
Despite the danger Mrs. Hamer and her fellow would-be registrants were
facing, my coworkers and I were pleased that they had braved this hostile territory—and that no violence had taken place. I had boarded the bus with the
group, and though I had only been in Mississippi for a few weeks, I was
already well aware of the dangers of challenging white power in the state. e
previous summer, SNCC had begun an intensive voter-registration effort in
Southwest Mississippi, and white supremacists had unleashed murderous violence against it.
I was a freshman at Howard University in Washington, D.C., during the
campaign in that region of Mississippi and did not plan to become part of
the voter-registration effort in the Delta in the summer of 1962. Instead, I
intended to participate in a civil rights workshop for young people organized
by CORE in Houston, Texas, aer finishing my spring semester. CORE had
invited me and given me money for a bus ticket because at Howard I had
been part of the sit-in movement.
I boarded a Greyhound bus for Houston, but when I reached Jackson,
Mississippi—the state’s capital—I decided to try to meet students there who
were sitting in at segregated public facilities. I could have disembarked in any
southern city and met student protesters, but Mississippi was so notoriously
racist and violent—wholly associated in my mind, and in the minds of many
in my generation, with the brutal 1955 murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett
Till—that it was difficult for me to imagine students anywhere in the state
being brave enough to sit in. Yet I knew students were doing just that in Jackson. I thought they must have some kind of special courage gene to be protesting in Mississippi. As far as I was concerned, no place in the entire universe
was more oppressive and dangerous for a black person. Sit-in protests in the
segregated towns and cities of Maryland and Virginia were one thing; sit-in
protests in Mississippi were quite another, I thought. So I felt compelled to
meet them. I got off the bus and made my way to their headquarters.
20 Prologue

But when I told them I was on my way to a civil rights workshop in
Texas, Lawrence Guyot, a student at Tougaloo College, rose from his seat
and gave me a stern look. He was about to head up into the Delta and
become part of SNCC’s beginning efforts there. In 1964, he would become
chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). “Civil
rights workshop in Texas!” he scoffed. “What’s the point of doing that when
you’re standing right here in Mississippi?” Guyot (as we most often called
him) was a big, intense guy, and his tone was disdainful, almost bullying,
conveying without further words what was at once a challenge and a
demand: So you’re down here just to chatter about civil rights, are you?
That’s pretty useless. If you’re serious, stay and work with us. Jessie Harris,
another of the young Mississippi activists, chimed in: “You’re in the war
zone here.”
I got the message. e Greyhound le without me; I never completed my
journey to Texas and instead became a part of SNCC’s effort in the state.
When summer ended, I remained in Mississippi as a SNCC field secretary
instead of returning to school. I was nineteen years old.
Although it had happened almost a year before I arrived in Mississippi, I
was aware of the September 25, 1961, murder of Herbert Lee, a small farmer
and NAACP leader in Amite County. Lee had given strong support to SNCC’s
efforts in Southwest Mississippi, and his killing—which occurred in broad
daylight—was a frightening reminder that death could find you anywhere in
the state. It was a lesson I remembered at tense moments, like the one at the
Sunflower County courthouse in late August of 1962.
at day, I could feel the tension in the air outside the courthouse. Everywhere in the state, politicians and newspapers were whipping whites into a
frenzy over the possibility that in a few weeks James Meredith could become
the first black person to enroll in the University of Mississippi. Like school
desegregation, voting rights was an explosive issue—the armed white men
on the steps of the courthouse were a living testament to that fact.
On the way to Indianola, the fear on the bus had been palpable, but Fannie Lou Hamer had gone a long way toward easing it. She lived a quiet, simple
life as a sharecropper and timekeeper on a Sunflower County cotton plantation, and we had neither noticed nor anticipated her strength until she raised
her powerful voice in songs of faith and freedom on that bus. Soon her
Prologue 21

strength and boldness would make her a legendary figure in Mississippi’s Freedom Movement.
What happened to Mrs. Hamer aer this attempt at voter registration is
fairly well known. She returned to the plantation where she and her husband,
Perry “Pap” Hamer, had lived and worked for eighteen years. Word of her
attempt to register had gotten back to the plantation before she did, and
William David “W. D.” Marlow, the plantation’s angry owner, was waiting for