A Rural Story
In 1900, 90% of all African Americans lived in the South. Four out of five of them lived in rural areas. The Great Migration between 1910 and 1970 led an estimated six million African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the Northeast, Midwest and West seeking sanctuary from racial violence and the oppression of Jim Crow, and the possibility of economic and educational opportunities. Those who remained, through their kinship, labor and networks of communication, set the stage for the grassroots mobilization that powered the Civil Rights Movement.
Webster County, Mississippi gave us the indomitable Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper with limited formal education and limited material resources but an all-consuming passion for social justice. Hamer was the granddaughter of enslaved Africans and the youngest of twenty children born to parents that never left rural Mississippi. In 1962 at age forty-two, she attended a meeting at a local church in Sunflower County organized by activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) – the meeting started her on the path to becoming a voting rights activist. Hamer was able to connect the fights on the ground in the Mississippi Delta with the struggles of people all over the world who sought to overcome the politics of love with hate.
Although she is most known for her political activism, at the core of her efforts was a desire to improve the lives of the people in Sunflower County. “During the late 1960s, she launched the Freedom Farm Cooperative, a community-based rural project, to tackle poverty in Mississippi and advance economic empowerment. As someone whose life had been deeply affected by hunger and poverty, Hamer envisioned Freedom Farm as a response to hunger and poverty that ran rampant in Sunflower County.” Read more about Fannie Lou Hamer in Keisha N. Blain’s “Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America.”
Today, about 56% of all African Americans live in Southern states – 24% of them live in rural areas. African Americans in rural communities face the same struggles as their counterparts in large cities but must do so with an added layer of invisibility. “In defining rural white America as rural America, pundits, academics and lawmakers are perpetuating an incomplete and simplistic story about the many people who make up rural America and what they want and need. Whiteness is assumed; other races are shoved even further to the margins.” The erasure of African Americans in the rural story of America is the erasure of a wellspring of political activism, cultural heritage, artistic tradition, and wisdom. Through the Rural Forward program, the Rural Prosperity and Investment team at MDC provides capacity-building support to rural leaders, organizations, and coalitions to achieve equitable systems change across rural communities in the South.
Reading:
“Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America” by Keisha N. Blain
“A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration” by Steven Hahn
Kamilah A. Pickett is Director of the Race Matters Institute at MDC (RMI). Kamilah leads the social entrepreneurial work of RMI, which offers customized training, technical assistance, coaching, and product development to advance concrete actions in both operations and programming that strengthen an organization’s mission performance. RMI focuses specifically on promoting racial equity in organizational strategies, policies, and practices as a complement to the work of others who focus on racial equity at the individual and interpersonal levels.
