Photo credit: Chicago Tribune - E. Faye Butler as Fannie Hamer
Goodman’s leading lady E. Faye Butler rocked our world with her powerful presence as Fannie Hamer, an uneducated but exuberant fighter for Black voting rights in the 60s. We remember President Johnson’s Great Society legislation, passed in 1964, that called for federal support for education, hospital care for the aged through an expanded Social Security program, and continued enforcement of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and “elimination of the barriers to the right to vote.” Southern Blacks were systematically kept from voting by local laws. These included poll taxes, literacy tests, and civics tests for unregistered voters.
But before Johnson’s legislation passed, Black civil rights leaders took up the local challenges on their own. Most were educated Black men like Martin Luther King Jr and Medgar Evers. In 1961, Fannie Hamer, then 44—a sharecropper with a sixth-grade education—attended a meeting at her church led by civil rights activists James Forman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She became an SNCC organizer and on August 31, 1962, led 17 volunteers to register to vote at the Indianola, Mississippi Courthouse. They were not successful.
The real Fannie singing at a rally.
The power of Fannie was her embodiment of the southern Black. She came from a family of 20 children; she sharecropped cotton from age six until middle age. She was fired from her plantation job because she tried to register to vote. She was beaten, permanently disabled—yet she took a leadership position for voting rights—as a Black and a woman. First, she became an organizer with SNCC—a mature, beaten-up Black woman working with white students. Then she co-founded the Freedom Democratic Party to unseat the all-white Democrat party in local Mississippi elections and at the national convention. The majority of the population in 60’s Mississippi was Black. President Johnson feared her power to enrage the southern Democrats and endanger his re-election. His legislative package was not popular with southern Democrats and depended on his uncanny ability to curry political favor. He managed to keep Fannie out of the limelight at the convention, but television news picked up the story and broadcast nationwide her riveting testimony before the Credentials Committee.
Fannie is a gem for smaller theaters to produce. It requires a female lead who can propel the audience for 70 minutes with Fannie’s words and her 14 spirituals that support the emotional arc. The Goodman had seven musicians, but a piano would do. There are no “sets”, just backdrops, placards, and flags. Playwriter Cheryl L. West has gifted the world with a seductively engaging history lesson shaped as a theatrical event.
On a personal note, I was at Maryville College in St. Louis from 1961 – 1965—a liberal Catholic environment. Clear as a button I remember the one classmate who was a member of the John Birch Society. Today I admire her tenacious disregard of our liberal arrogance. My classmates were going on busses with the nuns to march in Selma and to register voters with SNCC. I attended an SNCC organizing convention in Kansas City but found their delegates not to my liking. I was already involved in the U.S. National Student Association (USNSA) and its anti-war activities. That international focus led to a summer scholarship in Greece with the Experiment in International Living and the next summer as part of a USNSA student-leader tour of Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. It came out shortly after we returned from Asia that USNSA was infiltrated by the CIA to gather information on foreign student leaders. Our tour was rather benign in that regard, though I suspected my phone was tapped throughout the following year.