Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) was an incredible woman who tackled poverty, racism in a white supremacist society, polio, permanent kidney damage, a blood clot in her eye, and loss of vision at the hands of local police for trying to vote in 1944, as well as losing her employment for same, and involuntarily sterilized. She was one of the leading Civil Rights advocates, along with Martin Luther King. I was well aware of the Civil Rights fights happening in Junior High and High School, but I never fathomed such horrendous treatment and suffering endured by those who dared and were so incredibly brave.
In the 1980s, I attended graduate school in Baltimore and stayed on for several years. My husband and his family were natives of Baltimore. Although I knew a lot of history, my research for my book on Baltimore’s role in the Maritime Underground Railroad revealed how a large majority of whites accepted a very sugar-coated version of any racial issues. Only within the last twenty years has it become more common knowledge.
I became interested in the Underground Railroad in Baltimore because I lived in a pre-Civil War mansion turned into apartments. Baltimore experienced extreme segregation. Racism was prevalent where I grew up, but it was unacceptable to express it openly. Innuendos and code words always masked it.
My Black piano teacher as a child how told me what it was like to be a Black jazz musician in an all-white society. She was circumspect about what she told me about—going in the back doors, keeping your head down, and the other treatment. I had read enough adult books by that time to fill in the blanks about how white men at a nightclub saw her. Her means of making a living mortified her, a necessity she, as an upright Christian, deeply regretted.
By the time I was seven, I realized that although my life was challenging, it would have been a lot worse if I were Black.
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