FINDING THE LIGHT
Santa Fe Opera celebrates life of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer
Women were the unsung heroines of the civil rights movement. They led organizations and worked as lawyers on school segregation lawsuits. They quietly organized and forcefully vocalized a demand for equality.
The Santa Fe Opera will celebrate the life and work of former sharecropper and civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer with the world premiere of “This Little Light of Mine” at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St. beginning Friday, Oct. 28, through Sunday, Oct. 30.
The opera dramatizes the story of Hamer, who rose to national prominence at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
In 1961, a white doctor performed a hysterectomy on Hamer without her consent while undergoing surgery to remove a uterine tumor. Such forced sterilization of Black women to reduce the Black population was so widespread it was dubbed a “Mississippi appendectomy.”
The opera is centered on Hamer’s appeal to the Convention’s Credentials Committee to replace Mississippi’s all-white delegation with that of the interracial Freedom Democratic Party. It was written by Hofstra University social justice composer Chandler Carter and librettist Diana Solomon-Glover. The Albuquerque Gospel Choir serves as the chorus. Philadelphiabased Jeri Lynne Johnson is the conductor.
“I knew the basics about her role in the civil rights movement,” Johnson said in a telephone interview from Philadelphia. “I did not know a lot about her personal life.”
In pandemic-ridden 2020, Johnson received an email from the Santa Fe Opera inviting her to lead the production. Organizers gave her a rehearsal time of under three weeks to debut excerpts on a Brooklyn barge before a very small audience.
“We had to rehearse everything on Zoom,” she said. “It was awful, as you can imagine.”
In the summer of 2021, the piece was workshopped with the Kentucky Opera in Louisville, Kentucky.
“The music is very interesting,” Johnson said. “Chandler Carter has done a really amazing job of using protest songs and protest music and the idioms of the Black church to help the story. There’s an intricate balance between the relationships of the characters and how they are expressed in the music. How do you give the audience this visceral understanding of what Fannie Lou went through? I think the music does a really beautiful job in bringing that dramatic weight.”
A University of New Mexico associate professor of music, Stevie DéJuan Springer will lead a 12-member, half male, half female gospel choir.
“I think many people in the African American community are aware of her importance,” he said, “... definitely people who have studied Black history. I have a lot of respect for who she is.”
Frustrated by the political process, Hamer turned to economics as a strategy for greater racial equality. In 1968, she began a “pig bank” to provide free pigs for Black farmers to breed, raise, and slaughter. A year later she launched the Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC), buying up land that Blacks could own and farm collectively. With the assistance of donors (including famed singer Harry Belafonte), she purchased 640 acres and launched a co-op store, boutique and sewing enterprise. She single-handedly ensured that 200 units of low-income housing were built — many still exist in Ruleville today. The FFC lasted until the mid1970s; at its heyday, it was among the largest employers in Sunflower County. Extensive travel and fundraising took Hamer away from the day-to-day operations, as did her failing health, and the FFC hobbled along until folding. Not long after, in 1977, Hamer died of breast cancer at age 59.
Springer had six weeks to prepare for the premiere.
“I gladly took this on (despite the deadline) because I believe in the composer and I believe in the team,” he said.