As Women’s History Month comes to a close, let’s remember the influential voting rights speech that Fannie Lou Hamer presented in Harlem, New York on December 20, 1964. She shared the platform with civil rights leader Malcolm X.
Although she had little formal education, Hamer skillfully used a public speaking technique called the narrative style. Her point was that the nation had a problem. A radical organizer might have called this a consciousness-raising speech. For, once one admits out loud that there was a problem, the solution – racial justice – becomes obvious.
Hamer’s simple thesis was that the United States had a values problem. She put it like this near her conclusion: “And I’ve been tired so long, now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired, and we want to change.” She didn’t, however, prove her point with logic. In narrative style, a speaker doesn’t present an argument like this:
“I believe that X, Y, and Z because the following evidence and proof show that I am right…”
No, instead, in the narrative style, a speaker tells a story, and the audience draws a conclusion from the story. And narrative is less like a debater’s proof; it is more a matter of telling a story that gives a moral or lesson. Sometimes the speaker states the lesson out right, and sometimes the speaker lets the audience figure out what the point is for themselves. In her speech, Hamer told her story and pounded the lesson into her audience as if she were wielding a sledgehammer.
Starting in her second paragraph, Hamer started her story:
“It was 31 August of 1962, the 18 of us traveled 26 miles to the country courthouse in Indianola, Mississippi, to try to register to become first-class citizens. It was 31 August 1962, that I was fired for trying to become a first-class citizen.”
That’s quite a narrative hook, isn’t it? And she didn’t say “register to vote.” She said, with incisive word choice, “try to register to become first-class citizens.” She continued her story:
“When we got to Indianola on 31 August 1962, we was met there by the state highway patrolmen, the city policemen and anybody – as some of you know that it worked in Mississippi, any white man that is able to wear khaki pair of pants without them falling off him and holding two guns can make a good law officer.”
She then explained to taking the literacy test that was
required for her to register to vote. She reported that the test had 21
questions. One of them asked “by whom are you employed – so we can be fired by
the time we get back home.” She then had to copy and narrate an explanation of
part of the state constitution.
"The Law Can't Change the Heart, but It Can Restrain the Heartless:" Martin Luther King, Jr.
After not being allowed to register, she explained that she
traveled back home, only to discover that she had already lost her job. She
then took refuge in a friend’s home only to find that:
“On 10 September 1962, 16 bullets were fired into the home of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Tucker, where I’d been living after I was fired from this plantation.”
She then hold how the FBI swarmed the community without managing to make a single arrest. She narrated how she later traveled to a voter education conference, when “a man jumped out of his car and said, “you are under arrest.” When she arrived in her jail cell, an officer asked where she was from, and she said she was from Ruleville. The officer said, “You’s from Ruleville all right and we are going to make you wish you was dead.” In matter-of-fact style, she explained that she endured several beatings, with one man replacing another when the first became too exhausted from swinging a blackjack at her. The beating left her with permanent injuries.
Her story was spellbinding. She then responded to the old
excuse that racial justice will take time:
“And you can always hear this long sob story: ‘You know it takes time.’ For three hundred years, we’ve given them time. And I’ve been tired so long, now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired, and we want a change.”
That was not the only excuse she refuted. When people want to pretend they are not doing evil, they tell lies. Hamer would have none of that:
“The truth is the only thing going is to free us. . . . If we want America to be a free society we have to stop telling lies, that’s all. Because we’re not free and you know were not free.”
Her only proof was her story. However, everyone listening – and everyone reading her story today – knows perfectly well that her story could be told thousands of times over. That is what gave it power. That is what made it convincing. We all know that she did not suffer injustice alone. That is why her conclusion could take a broad sweep:
“But this is something we going to have to learn to do and quit saying that we are free in America when I know we are not free. You are not free in Harlem. The people are not free in Chicago, because I’ve been there, too. They are not free in Philadelphia, because I’ve been there, too and when you get it over with all the way around, some of the places is a Mississippi in disguise. And we want a change.”
Decades later, after citing some poorly-informed statistics, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said that the South has changed. Well, of course, in many ways it has. African-Americans are no longer routinely arrested and beaten half to death just for trying to register to vote. Nevertheless, the sweeping voter suppression laws being proposed, and sometimes passed, around the nation show that many white people still fear minority votes. Fannie Lou Hamer’s battle is not over. We should take care to remember her story.
We human beings are not really all that logical. A good story can convince people faster than any kind of logical argument.
Research Note: For more information about the narrative method of persuasion, this article by Walter R. Fisher is a good place to begin.
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