exhausted herself working three jobs. When she went into a hospital for a
minor stomach operation, the doctor sterilized her without her consent
because she was an indigent. She returned to the cotton fields in despair,
thinking ‘there must be some way we can change things.’
When SCLC’s James Bevel came to her church, Hamer was amazed to hear
that ‘it was our right as human beings to register and vote.’ Hamer and other
blacks completed the voter applications and then took the literacy test on the
Mississippi state constitution. Unsurprisingly, everyone failed. Hamer admit-
ted that she knew as much about the constitution ‘as a horse knows about
Christmas Day.’ In retaliation, Hamer’s landlord forced her off the land she
had worked for eighteen years. She fled to a friend’s home, which was soon
riddled with bullets. She fled again to her niece’s home forty miles away.
Fed up with the reprisals, Hamer returned to Ruleville and bluntly told the
registrar, ‘Now, you cain’t have me fired ’cause I’m already fired, and I won’t
have to move now, because I’m not livin’ in no white man’s house.’ Within a
month, she passed the test, only to face death threats from armed klansmen
who drove by her house every night.
Word of Hamer’s courage reached Bob Moses, who made her an SNCC
field secretary at $10 a week. At last in a job she loved, the irrepressible
Hamer worked 12-hour days for voter registration, spouting scripture and
singing hymns to drive away the fears of registrants. She offered free food and
clothing to anyone who would register. Her crusade landed her in jail, where
a state highway patrolman told her, ‘We are going to beat you until you
wish you were dead.’ Two designated prisoners pounded her with blackjacks
until she was blinded in one eye and sustained permanent kidney damage.
Persevering still, ‘Mississippi’s angriest woman’ insisted that ‘black people
must register and vote.’
Racists tried to shut down the voter drive by eliminating the state’s most
visible civil rights leader. Not only did Medgar Evers register black voters,
he encouraged sit-ins and organized boycotts of the state fair and Jackson’s
business district. After a read-in at a whites-only library, a spectator pistol-
whipped Evers, and the police clubbed him from behind. Anonymous death
threats came over the telephone, and his house was bombed. Facing his own
mortality, Evers remarked prophetically, ‘You can kill a man, but you can’t
kill an idea.’ After a lengthy strategy meeting that ended past midnight on
12 June 1963, the 37-year-old Evers returned to his home. A sniper waited for
him, crouching in the honeysuckle bushes behind the brightly lit carport. As
Evers got out of his station wagon carrying ‘Jim Crow Must Go’ T-shirts, he
was shot in the back with a deer-hunting rifle. With blood soaking his white
shirt, a dying Evers crawled up the stairs where his three children screamed,
‘Get up, Daddy, get up!’ After 25,000 mourners viewed his remains, Evers was
buried with full military honors in Virginia’s Arlington National Cemetery.104 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT