What's it worth?

Pages 107-108, From Black Women Leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, by Zita Allen, copyright 1996.

[In 1963] “When the [Mississippi] police officer learned during questioning that [Fannie Lou] Hamer had been at citizenship training school [to teach blacks in the south how to register to vote] in Charleston, he interrupted her, ‘You went to march. You went to see Martin Luther King. We are not going to have it.’

…[Hamer said,] ‘So then I had to get over there on the bed flat on my stomach, and the man beat me—that man beat me until he gave out.’ After the other prisoner beat her with a blackjack, Hamer nearly passed out as she got off the cot. But the police officer said, ‘Hell, you can walk.’ Four weeks afterward, Hamer could still not sleep on her back. She had been disfigured so badly that she wouldn’t let her family see her for a month.

Another member of the group, Arnell Ponder, a coed from Clark College, was beaten by a guard who kept demanding, ‘Cain’t you say yessir, nigger? Cain’t you say yessire, bitch?’ Ponder, despite being repeatedly slapped, repeated reported, ‘Yes, I can say yessir.’ ‘Well, you say it,’ the guard ordered. ‘I don’t know you well enough,’ Ponder replied.

Hamer heard the sounds from an adjacent cell, and recalled, ‘She kept screamin’ and they kept beatin’ her and finally she started prayin’ for em, and she asked God to have mercy on ‘em because they didn’t know what they were doing.’ When [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] workers located Ponder and Hamer in jail and got permission to see the prisoners, Ponder’s face was so swollen she could barely talk. One SNCC worker reported, ‘She looked at me and was able to whisper one word: Freedom.’”