Go Tell It On The Mountain

This article originally appeared in the December 1982 issue of Sojourners. To subscribe, click here.

In a time of darkness on the Delta, of darkness covering the earth and gross darkness the people, the light yet shone. From the black bottom lands and the dark swamps to the hills and distant mountain tops, a voice was heard from a daughter of Zion living in the midst of suffering but able to rejoice greatly, a daughter of Jerusalem who could shout with faith, for she believed, "Behold, thy King cometh unto thee."

Fannie Lou Hamer is remembered most for her proclamation of the Word, especially through songs like "This Little Light," an old song of faith with new words but the same underlying biblical message. Its Scripture references were familiar to her original audiences of poor black people in the churches, fields, highways, and prisons of Mississippi:

This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine...
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!
Jesus gave it to me now, I'm gonna let it shine...
I've got the light of freedom, I'm gonna let it shine...
All over the Delta, I'm gonna let it shine...
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!

Hamer accepted the power of the gospel within and the joyful work of shouting and sharing and spreading the light.

Radical, in the deepest sense

This woman, Mississippi's most respected and loved freedom fighter, left the cotton fields in 1962 to take her message of faith and freedom to the world. For 15 years she preached in travels all across the United States and in one trip to West Africa. Her life was also full of physical illness and, after a long bout with cancer, she died in 1977. Her grave is in a Sunflower County cotton field, on black cooperatively owned farming land, just outside her town of Ruleville.

The leading woman in the black civil rights battle, Hamer had concerns that were broader than racism. She was one of the first critics of American action in Vietnam, a major inspiration and fighter for women's rights, and a leader in antipoverty and economic self-help efforts.

Hamer was a radical in the deepest sense of the word, seeking to understand, expose, and destroy the root causes of oppression. She questioned many things about the misuse of power in this land--things many of us are still afraid to understand. But hatred of her enemies, hatred of whites or any person, she resisted: "I feel sorry for anybody that could let hate wrap them up. Ain't no such thing as I can hate anybody and hope to see God's face."

The boardwalk of Atlantic City, outside the site of the 1964 Democratic convention, was the first major mountaintop from which Hamer proclaimed the word, "Let my people go!" When Hamer spoke, America paused to listen. She burst into national prominence as the chief voice of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's (MFDP) challenge to unseat and replace the fraudulently elected, all-white, regular delegation from that state.

A national leader

The appeals and hard work of Hamer and the delegates had won a guarantee that future Democratic conventions would be open to minorities, and the greater issue soon became who would name the minority spokespersons. To stop Hamer and the Freedom Democrats, an angered, surprised, and frightened President Lyndon Johnson said that she must never be allowed to speak again at a Democratic convention.

He called out the trustworthy troops, the "brightest and best," the old reliables and the ambitious newcomers, including Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, J. Edgar Hoover, and United Auto Workers (UAW) President Walter Reuther. Humphrey, the chief negotiator, had to prove his worthiness to become vice president by demonstrating his obedience and helping break liberal convention support for the MFDP.

Mondale, Humprey's protege, gained his first national distinction at this convention by defeating Hamer and the MFDP. Mondale was appointed chairperson of the special subcommittee that planned the infamous "two-seat" compromise and deceitfully told the convention that the MFDP had accepted it.

This scheme refused to replace the white Mississippians with MFDP delegates, allowing the entire MFDP to have just two "at-large" delegates, who were to be selected by the biggest white man of all, the president, in order to guarantee that the black delegates would not choose their own leaders and specifically to prevent the delegates from choosing Hamer. Hamer's response to the scheme was, "We didn't come all this way for no two seats!"

Mondale's committee did its work in secret, refusing to meet with Hamer and the MFDP. Even more secret was the assistance of Hoover, without whose help Mondale-Humphrey-Johnson could never have carried the day. Hoover was very proud of the FBI's White House-ordered surveillance and disruption tactics used against the MFDP.

Reuther was brought in as a last-minute reinforcement for the defeat of the MFDP. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Martin Luther King, Jr., needed UAW money. Reuther used their need to break their support of the MFDP and went on to pressure the liberal convention delegations.

Humphrey tried to convince Hamer of his liberalism and of the trustworthiness of the system. He explained that while he had helped work for civil rights as a senator, as vice president he could do much more good work, to promote civil rights, employment, and poverty programs, as well as working to end the expanding war in Vietnam. Hamer answered him directly:

Senator Humphrey, I know lots of people in Mississippi who have lost their jobs for trying to register to vote. I had to leave the plantation where I worked in Sunflower County. Now if you lose this job of vice president because you do what is right, because you help the MFDP, everything will be all right. God will take care of you. But if you take it [the vice-presidential nomination] this way, why, you will never be able to do any good for civil rights, for poor people, for peace or any of those things you talk about.

The politician talked of reasonableness in politics, of doing what was possible at the moment. Hamer talked of the danger of too much compromise, of not having enough goodness and strength left to do the good things even when the power did come. She ended this session of high-level, "smoke-filled back room" negotiations by quietly saying: "Senator Humphrey, I'm gonna pray to Jesus for you."

Some people call this speaking truth to power. Power's traditional answer to such honesty is to avoid or silence the truth. So Hamer was excluded from the final negotiating session. MFDP representatives Aaron Henry, Bob Moses, and I were tricked into attending a meeting that excluded Hamer but did include Humphrey, Reuther, Bayard Rustin, King, and Andrew Young.

America's sickness

The most painful desertion at the Atlantic City convention was that of King. He had come to the convention promising full support of the MFDP. The voice of Young of SCLC was a key factor in causing King to turn momentarily away from the movement. When King leaned toward supporting the MFDP rejection of the "two-seat" plan, or finding some modification that would at least allow the MFDP people to vote and name their own leaders, Young pleaded with King, pulling him one way, while I pleaded and tried to pull him the other.

Young succeeded in persuading King not to alienate the powers that be, the big unions and their money, the liberals and their money, the party, the president. But King agonized over his choice and later privately said Hamer had been right when the MFDP rejected the compromise. The MFDP was prevented from communicating to the convention openly, and was defeated. Afterwards, Hamer cried out: "I question America!"

Amid the tawdry decadence of the faded resort, Hamer and her allies discovered the emptiness of traditional American liberalism. Hamer quickly came to understand that the opposition to freedom of some in this country was a political expediency. The MFDP had to be destroyed, not just as a black people's movement, but as a symbol of rising grassroots democracy. The enemy was no longer the familiar Senator Eastland and the racists from Mississippi but the powers in high places (or those who wanted to be there).

In 1966 she wrote:

I used to say when I was working so hard in the [cotton] fields, if I could go to Washington--to the Justice Department--to the FBI--get close enough to let them know what was going on in Mississippi, I was sure that things would change in a week. Now that I have traveled across America, been to the Congress, to the Justice Department, to the FBI, I am faced with things I'm not too sure I wanted to find out. The sickness in Mississippi is not a Mississippi sickness. This is America's sickness.

But she was proud of her African and her American heritage, and accepted struggles and strengths as a legitimate inheritance. She once said: "There are some things I feel strong about... one is not to forget where I come from and the other is to praise the bridges that carried me over."

Two years later, after King had begun speaking out against the war in Vietnam and on behalf of oppressed people all over the world, he was killed. Hamer spoke of this at the MFDP rally in Mt. Beulah, Mississippi (headquarters of the Delta Ministry), that had been organized to start the mule trains to Washington in the Poor People's Campaign:

They tried to brand me as a communist, and I know as much about communism as a horse do about Christmas....They assassinated Dr. King, then passed a law telling us how good they is; in 1972 we can buy a home on their side of town--now how in hell can we do that when we can't pay the rent where we are now? But that law did have something in it for me; if I get three people together and tell them the truth, they'll put me in jail for conspiracy and inciting to riot.

Now there's Martin Luther King. They didn't get him as long as he was middle class, but when he said he would organize the poor folks, white and Indians as well as black, they said, "We gotta kill this nigger. "And it ain't Memphis. It's the same kind of conspiracy killed King that killed Kennedy and killed Malcolm X. Now they got the concentration camps ready and all I can say is, we better be ready, we better be ready!

Hamer tried to be always ready. Part of being ready is trying to understand the powers we resist and to recognize the power we have from each other and from our faith. She saw oppression of black people in Mississippi as the responsibility of all America, but she also saw the interrelationship of racial oppression to the world movements for justice, liberation, development, and self-determination. In 1967 she said:

What I really feel is necessary is that the black people in this country will have to upset this applecart. We can no longer ignore the fact that America is not the "land of the free and the home of the brave"....There is so much hypocrisy in America. The land of the free and the home of the brave is all on paper. It doesn't mean anything to us. The only way we can make this thing a reality in America is to do all we can to destroy this system and bring this thing out to the light that has been under the cover all these years. The Scriptures have said, "the things that have been done in the dark will be known on the house tops."

The woman from the Delta who said, "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired," was a woman of action as well as words. For several years in Mississippi she was employed as a field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Then after the Democratic convention in 1964 she ran in a counter-election for the U.S. Congress in the unsuccessful MFDP "Congressional Challenge" attempt to unseat the illegally elected white congressmen from Mississippi.

For a year the MFDP sent more than 1,000 people to Washington to lobby for this effort. The people's efforts were supported by lawyers such as Arthur Kinoy, Bill Kuntsler, Ben Smith, and Morton Stavis. Church support was coordinated by Robert Spike of the National Council of Churches. Finally, Hamer was joined by Annie Devine and Victoria Gray, and they became the first black women in America to be seated on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives as, for a brief few minutes, the regular white Mississippi congressmen had to step aside while Congress considered their challenged credentials. Almost immediately, however, Congress voted to reseat the white men. Thousands of freedom lovers were proud of those women and thousands shared the shame and discouragement expressed by Hamer: "The challenge was dismissed, and I saw another part of democracy go down the drain."

Such failures did not stop her from working the rest of her life in local and national elections, sometimes supporting new black candidates, sometimes progressive whites, sometimes "lesser evils," sometimes those in the regular party, sometimes independents. She warned of automatically equating black voting rights with real power, and often described the new political issue of the late '60s and '70s as not whether blacks would vote, but who would control that vote, the black people or the powers that be.

She questioned much about poverty programs and government aid as ways to control and manipulate poor people, especially black people. She knew that winning freedom was a constant struggle for any oppressed people. She worried about too much dependency being created by handouts, and wanted people to stand up for themselves:

The question for black people is not when is the white man going to give us our rights, or when is he going to give us good education for our children, or when is he going to give us jobs. If the white man gives you anything, just remember when he gets ready he will take it right back. We have to take it for ourselves.

Hamer made up her own mind. In the early debates over black power and separation she affirmed her belief in both black power and integration. As usual she saw the argument in a revealing way: "I don't believe in separatism--a house divided against itself cannot stand, and neither can a nation. This country produces separatists. America is sick, and man is on the critical list."

What God is about

Many resources sustained her: humor, modesty, courage, common sense, a heritage of biblical teaching applied to this world, an abiding sense of joy, deep spiritual wells of prayer, and, above all, her faith:

Christianity is being concerned about your fellow man, not building a million-dollar church while people are starving right around the corner. Christ was a revolutionary person, out there where it was happening. That's what God is all about, and that's where I get my strength.

And her optimism was an inspiration she gave to many people: "Out of the baddest of people there's some good quality there, and out of the best there's some bad. We have to look for the best."

Ilene Strelitz Melish, a university student who went South with other volunteers in the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign, spoke of Hamer's presence in their training sessions:

Fannie Lou Hamer seemed the emotional rock. Every general meeting started off... with Mrs. Hamer standing in the front of the room in a crisp cotton dress, feet firmly apart and head tilted upward, leading Freedom songs, her voice carrying easily above the several hundred others....I don't really know where Mrs. Hamer is standing, but she is standing there solidly, feet planted firmly apart...she can sing with us over the distance, and from her vantage point she can see us all.

Hamer, theologian and preacher, is revealed in a musical work she helped create. The song took the message of the Old Covenant, of the Exodus and Passover, and combined it with the incarnation message of the New Covenant, of Advent and Christmas and Epiphany and Easter.

She joined an old slave spiritual about deliverance from bondage after standing up to Pharoah and proclaiming, "Let my people go," to the Christmas spiritual, "Go Tell It On the Mountain." That Christmas spiritual-carol tells of waiting and seeking as well as proclaiming:

When I was a seeker, I sought both night and day.
I asked the Lord to help me, and he showed me the way.

He made me a watchman upon the city wall.
And if I am a Christian I am the least of all.

Go, tell it on the mountain, over the hills, and everywhere.
Go, tell it on the mountain, that Jesus Christ is born.

Hamer once read those verses and that powerful chorus line to a group of students and said: "We used to sing it that way. But now we changed this song. Now we sing:

Go, tell it on the mountain, over the hills, and everywhere.
Go, tell it on the mountain, to let my people go!

Then she led the song, with her verses from the Gospels, the Epistles, and Revelation:

Paul and Silas was bound in jail, let my people go.
Had no money for to go their bail, let my people go.

Paul and Silas began to shout, let my people go.
Jail doors open and they walked out, let my people go.

Who's that yonder dressed in red? Let my people go.
Must be the children that Moses led, let my people go.

Who's that yonder dressed in black? Let my people go.
Must be the hypocrites turning back, let my people go.

Who's that yonder dressed in blue? Let my people go.
Must be the children now passing through, let my people go.

I had a little book he gave to me, let my people go.
And every page spelled victory, let my people go.

Go, tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere.
Go, tell it on the mountain, to let my people go!

After the singing and the praying came the preaching and the message of what God would have the people do now for themselves. The following passage is the one Hamer used most often at freedom mass meetings:

And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Isaiah. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it is written, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.
(Luke 4:17-19)

Edwin King was a United Methodist minister in special appointment to the faculty of the University of Mississippi when this article appeared. He had previously been chaplain of Tougaloo College and a founding member of the MFDP and had worked closely with Fannie Lou Hamer in many campaigns.