CHICAGO DAILY NEWS: LAST WEEK IN HISTORY
The best journalism of the civil rights era sparked action. Photos of Emmett Till’s beaten body in 1955 inspired Rosa Parks to remain in her bus seat months after the image ran in Jet magazine.
It also stopped white readers from tuning out and turning away. Till’s graphic photos and the video of police beating Selma peaceful protesters in 1965 stopped white audiences from explaining away racist brutality as isolated incidents or worst-case scenarios in the Jim Crow South.
In the summer of 1964, the Chicago Daily News embarked on a mission to show city readers what racism looked like in Mississippi. It sent reporter Nicholas von Hoffman to the state for six weeks to capture an accurate portrait of “a state and its people, white and black, who are playing a major role in the greatest domestic crisis now facing the nation,” the paper described in an advertisement for the series on Aug. 1, 1964, the day that Part I dropped.
Von Hoffman’s crisscrossing eventually landed him at the home of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer in Ruleville on the west side of the state on the Mississippi Delta. Hamer, who died March 14, 1977, sat on her front porch for the interview near “a big pecan tree that she loves in the front yard,” he later described in Part II, which debuted on Sept. 25, 1964. She met his gaze with “warm eyes, but her large dark brown features seem worn with a passion that is too exhausting” for her body.
“The first time I remember not being satisfied was when I was a small kid,” she began. “My family picked 60 bales of cotton, but we had no shoes. The white people had shoes; we was workin’; they wasn’t. They had food; we had none. Oh Lord, how I wished I was white.”
By this time, the nation knew Hamer’s name well. She had been on national television at the Democratic National Convention, where she spoke forcefully: “Righteousness exalts a nation, sin is a reproach.” During that broadcast, recapped in an Aug. 24, 1964, Daily News article, she described being arrested and beaten by Mississippi police as she and several others returned from a voter education workshop. Her vivid description shocked viewers.
But for all the bravery she showed and the fame she experienced, those things brought little money to the Hamer household.
White Mississippians didn’t try to hide their disdain for Hamer. “They hate her in Mississippi,” von Hoffman explained. “At the Carriage House, Natchez’s best restaurant, a grand dowager of a white woman at the next table says of her: ‘That [expletive] woman from Ruleville is the best actress I’ve ever seen.’”
During the summer of 1964, Hamer helped organize Freedom Summer, which brought hundreds of Black and white college students to the state to help run voter registrations for Black voters..
The students not only worked, but they also taught Hamer and many others about Black history, instilling a sense of pride in them.
“We have a beautiful heritage,” Hamer mused. “We are the onliest people that have had one man to march through a mob to go to school. We are the onliest people to have our babies sold from our breasts...”