05/20/2026
Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977)
Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?
~ Isaiah 58:6
Civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer knew hard times. A Mississippi sharecropper’s daughter, she was picking cotton by the age of six. During attempts to simply vote, she was denied, harassed, beaten, humiliated, and shot at. Eventually, she got, in her famous words, “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” This injustice set her course into a life of activism. Something needed to be done! Hamer finally realized, “You can pray until you faint, but unless you get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap.” She cofounded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, helped to organize Freedom Summer, and launched a Black farming collective and other economic enterprises.
One summer evening she and other Black people were riding a bus back home after another failed attempt to vote. A white police officer pulled over the bus and took the driver into custody. The vehicle was apparently “too yellow” and resembled a school bus. As the sun went down, seventeen African Americans awaited their plight on a Mississippi back road. Would they be arrested? Beaten? Lynched?
Then suddenly, from the back of the bus, Fannie Lou’s voice cut through the silence. The same spirituals that gave courage to her mother, who had been enslaved, now brought much-needed comfort and courage to others. “Have a little talk with Jesus, / Tell him all about our troubles,” she sang: “Hear our feeble cry, / Answer by and by, / Feel the little prayer wheel turning, / Feel a fire a-burning, / Just a little talk with Jesus makes it right.”
Hamer was determined to “untie the cords of the yoke,” as Isaiah said. Her life created its own “prayer wheel,” as the song says: a wheel of prayer, praise, and action.
~ from the book Everything Could Be a Prayer by Kreg Yingst
