Okay, when and where I enter today is with disgust at Tim Scott’s cheap imitation of a civil rights icon. This man had the nerve to evoke Fanny Lou Hamer in an endorsement of Donald Trump. (Video evidence is below, but if you can’t stomach him, just keep reading.)
Fannie Lou Hamer was born the daughter of sharecroppers, so, like other children of the wicked racist labor system of perpetual debt and toil, she worked in the fields instead of the classroom in order for her family to survive. Greed and white supremacy kept her out of the classroom, and kept her poor.
Fannie Lou Hamer’s words:
Fannie Lou Hamer was unwittingly sterilized in 1961. That radicalized her.
Fannie Lou Hamer joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and advocated for voting rights. She was beaten and shot at for it. Ever the villain, the Mississippi legal and goveernmental entities upheld the statutes that kept a Black sharecropper’s daughter from the rights due her as a citizen.
Fannie Lou Hamer established the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in response to being systemically barred from representation by racists (who would, a short time later, flee to the Republican party).
Fannie Lou Hamer’s disruptive speech during the national Democratic Convention was legendary. It was televised, live, in August 1964, and you should read or listen to her testimony. Here is a portion of her testimony, highlighting what she endured just for registering to vote:
President Lyndon Johnson spontaneously aired a bogus press conference just to interrupt Fannie Lou Hamer’s testimony. (That tactic backfired because people were curious about why LBJ would do such a desperate thing, so the networks replayed her testimony several times.)
In the face of threats from the most powerful offices in the land, Fannie Lou Hamer kept going. And in a December 1964 speech given in Harlem, USA, Fannie Lou Hamer delivered these words:
In this, yet another electrifying speech, Fannie Lou Hamer uttered the iconic line, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” This is the context. Fannie Lou Hamer lived and died fighting the racist, sexist, harmful, violent, segregated systems that hoard power with rapacious greed.
To be crystal clear, Fannie Lou Hamer would never endorse Donald J. Trump.
Reader, understand. When they intended to make Fannie Lou Hamer wish she were dead, government-employed highway patrolmen were pleased to use Black men to beat this Black woman who was fighting for her human rights, at great cost.
At least then, the Black men were compelled as prisoners to do the bidding of corrupt people.
Tim Scott beats down democracy, self-respect, communal pride, and the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer, willingly. He needs to keep the words of Fannie Lou Hamer out his mouth.
This needed to be said and recorded for future generations to find, otherwise history will keep being rewritten with falsehoods.
I live in South Carolina. Tim Scott consistently chooses to uphold white supremacy and I hate it.