Her birthday is this weekend
Show up for others.
Give all you got.
Hold the weight of it all in your body.
Suffer the injustices,
until you can’t suffer from them anymore.
Say something.
Do something.
Pay the price.
Sound familiar?
Too familiar?
It’s Fannie Lou Hamer’s birthday on Sunday. She died at 59 years old.
She gave everything she had to help America fulfill its promises, including founding the Freedom Farm Cooperative, the legacy of which we talked about this past Saturday on The Liberation Line, and which helped to birth the new GirlTREK Garden Club, which you can join here.
Her vision for this country was so vivid, so just.
And she put her body on the line for it.
And we celebrate her for it.
She is revered as an icon, written about in books, talked about in lectures, memorialized on memorabilia, and celebrated as an activist and organizing hero.
And yet, the story is incomplete. We cannot force her into martyrdom or cast her as a superhero, the roles that Black women are always assigned. That narrative forces us to replicate a level of sacrifice and service that leaves no space for the radical self-care required for our survival, and it allows the unjust systems that broke Fannie down to still persist, unchecked.
Fannie Lou Hamer deserved not to die. She deserved to live. Every story about her work and her life, every article or think piece that is written about her birthday over this weekend should start the story from here—59 is too young.
What if Fannie Lou Hamer had 10 more years?
Black women live 4 years shorter than the national average for all women and 10 years shorter than the average for Asian women. Black women’s life expectancy is even lower in some regions—71 years in the U.S. South. Dying too early is a disproportionate risk for Black women in all phases of life; we face triple the maternal mortality rate and double the infant mortality rate of white women. Nearly 50% are affected by cardiovascular disease and we are up to 3 times more likely to experience worse outcomes at a younger age from cardiovascular disease compared to white women. Twenty-five percent over the age of 55 have Type 2 diabetes and we are two times more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes compared to white women.
But God.
The statistics tried to bury us but they didn’t know that in 2017 Oprah Winfrey would call us seed planters from the TED stage.
They didn’t know that we would, that same year, walk the streets of Sunflower Country, Mississippi [see above], the birthplace of Fannie Lou Hamer, on a mission to understand what her community needed and how we could serve.
They didn’t expect that there was already a quiet revolution unfolding there and that a woman would run out of her house waving her blue shirt, saying “my tribe is here.”
They didn’t know that we would return with an army of a million Black women, each carrying her own seeds.
But we did!!! [Word up to Cardi B.]
From Sunflower County to the South and beyond, we have a blueprint to save lives and revive the neighborhoods of the places that have borne the brunt of the deepest injustices in this country, but still hold such a deep well of joy and a promise of potential that Fannie Lou Hamer believed in and that we plan to fulfill.
It starts with our new Joy & Justice agenda, a 7-point plan that would make the ancestors proud. We’re unveiling the plan with some fanfare and support later this month in Atlanta and you are invited. Women from across the country are heading down to help us make history. If the spirit moves you and you are looking for a revival of hope or to build community, or to learn how to organize, make your way down too. Carpool or come alone, trust that it will be a sanctuary of healing and a fun time for all. Details here.
And if you know someone who should be there—an organization that we should be building with in this moment, leaders that we should network with, movements that we should collaborate with that are in the Atlanta area—please forward this email and tell them to consider this their personal invitation.
If you can’t make it to Atlanta, do not worry.
This fall it is poppin' off in a major way.
Next week we will roll out the registration for The Prayer Trek (and you know we wrestle not against flesh and blood), a new season of Black History Bootcamp, and our annual Thanksgiving tradition, the Black Family 5K. Our goal is to engage at least 50,000 of you in a joyous rebellion through our communities, to spread the gospel of Black women living longer, demonstrate the joy that is inherent in us, and demand the justice that is our birthright.
Tomorrow, we will be back on The Liberation Line at 9AM ET with a beautiful walk planned in solidarity with our sisters at Ujima, The National Center on Violence Against Women in the Black Community. We'll be on the line with Ujima CEO Karma Cottman and domestic violence survivor Kimya Motley.
GirlTREK members have been walking a 5K all week to raise funds to support Ujima’s work with domestic violence survivors, and we have created this resource guide for women who may be experiencing intimate partner violence.
The dial in number is the same (646) 876-9923 Code: 734464325#. The lines will be open. Press *9 to join a global conversation that is uniting Black women around the world to walk and talk about the most pressing issues in our lives while surfacing solutions and strategies that heal us at the deepest level.
In gratitude for this community and movement,
Vanessa (and Morgan)
Happy Birthday Fannie!
We walk in your footsteps.