I had the honor of speaking with filmmaker Joy Davenport, whose documentary Fannie Lou Hamer’s America is must viewing. Joy and I had a great conversation about Hamer’s life and activism, as well as the personal inspiration she’s provided.
Edited excerpts from our conversation:
SER: Your directorial debut was a documentary I very much enjoyed — 2022’s Fannie Lou Hamer’s America. She was the founder of the Freedom Democratic Party Mississippi, organizer of freedom summer, a volunteer-based campaign launched in the summer of 1964 to register as many Black voters in Mississippi as possible.
Important to stress that this is all very life-threatening work. Her life was very much in danger constantly for her work.
What drew you specifically to tell her story, especially as your first documentary?
JOY: So, this was a very long-term project. The research for it started when I was in undergrad and then later continued in my master's program. So the seed was initially planted when I learned about the MFTP because it was this grassroots organization. I was very idealistic about politics at the time, and I’d never heard of it.
It seemed so transformative and so unique. But growing up in Florida, going to public schools, I was never taught about that history. I knew nothing about any of these figures who I was learning about that were so pivotal.
And Mrs. Hamer specifically, she emphasized the need for integration across several lines of identity, that it was important that if a white person wanted to join her cause, that they should. If a rich person wanted to join her cause or if a rabbi or a preacher or just anybody, come along because you needed everybody. And I took that as an invitation because I was already really upset that this information had been kind of hidden from me.
So I just went all in on learning about the MFDP and SNCC and CORE and COFO and the alphabet soup of organizations that kind of rose up against the iceberg of Mississippi's political climate. And then in my master's, I did my thesis on the MFDP. I met Monica Land, who’s the grandniece of Mrs. Hamer and who’s the executive producer for the project. She asked me to join up as the editor, and then I ended up becoming the director. This is like 14 years of history, but it started in college when I was learning that there was this history that had basically been denied to me, and I wanted to know more.
One of the reasons that I think her history has been deliberately suppressed is because of how difficult it is to whitewash.
But her history resists that whitewashing because of how radical she was and how outspoken she was, and it's very difficult aside from like that one phrase [Tim Scott used at a Trump rally] really to pick something that you can appropriate for bad-faith causes. And I think because she was a woman and she was middle-aged when she got started in the movement and because she didn’t have a formal education Even the people she worked with had trouble figuring out how to categorize her.
She didn’t get the recognition, and it’s very difficult to use her for your own purposes.
Her voice is so unique to her, and her testimony is so unique to her life that it’s hard to twist.
SER: It is amazing to me because it feels so modern.
I’m listening to a Beatles album from that period and this is going on. So it doesn’t feel like ancient history, but she did not live in … I mean, it was America, but it wasn't America. The context of her being a free person in the world was sort of academic.
JOY: Yeah, she was savvy about the media as well. So sometimes when she would say that she didn't know that she could vote. She knew technically that these things were happening, and that it was possible for people to do these things, and also that it was impractical to try.
She knew people who were involved in the NAACP in the ‘50s, and they were murdered. So she worked with her community and just assumed voting as white people stuff, which was the common attitude for most of the Black population in Mississippi at the time out of the need for survival.
Because if you tried to register to vote, even worse, if you tried to encourage other people to register to vote, you would just be assassinated in broad daylight. And there’s so many cases where that happened. So it was an academic thing to her. It was just .. “well, that’s over there and other people can do it if they want, but it’s got nothing to do with me.”
And it wasn’t until the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee came in to Ruleville and had a mass meeting at her church that she decided, “I can do this. These are young folks. They’ve got training in things that I don’t have training in, but I know how things work in Mississippi.”
So she volunteered to be one of the two people to try and register and was a part of that first wave of registration attempts in ’63. It became clear to her and to the people around her that none of it was academic, that these rights are intellectually granted, but it was the people power on the ground that was required to make it happen. That’s what was going to do it. And the outside groups didn’t know what was going on in Mississippi. They needed her as much as she needed them. And that was the core of what became the MFDP.
SER: After this election, you know, part of the MAGA agenda has been to target queer people, specifically trans people. It’s like what they said about the Holocaust, which was political spin on what they said about the Holocaust, which was how 30 percent of the population can kill the other 30 percent if 30 percent just watches, except here we’re talking about one or two percent.
And maybe the Democratic Party will think it’s safer to just watch, because it’s “only” two percent of the population.
How do you feel as a queer person in America right now?
JOY: It’s really disorienting to watch people, people who I believe are of good faith, people who I’ve looked up to, kind of wringing their hands over the “trans problem.”And I’ve had people, good friends of mine, state to me kind of bluntly that it was trans people that cost the Democrats the election.
It’s such a bizarro worldview of things because I don’t recall any Democrats that I personally look up to standing up for me. It was mostly the people screaming about identity politics or the Republicans and their bad-faith attacks.
I transitioned halfway through the production of this film, and the biggest reason I did is because I was deep in the research and reading about what Mrs. Hamer went through by putting herself out there.
There was nowhere for her to hide. She could not hide who she was. She was arrested in Winona. She hadn't done anything wrong. She just was recognizable. So they thought they’d make an example out of her.
Reading and living this story for so many years, I just felt shame that I didn’t have the same courage, especially because when I transitioned was 2017, 2018 in that like kind of a small window that people called the trans tipping point, where it was acceptable.
I thought, there’s never going to be a time that I feel more comfortable doing this or more backed up by my own principles. And so I did it.
And then I watched things change and trans people become the hot button target for so many politics in this country. I don’t regret doing it, but it’s a very scary time. Because when I speak out about my own stories, I’m accused of being biased. I’m told that I can’t tell my own stories because I have an “interest” in this somehow.
Well, why not? That's the power of Mrs. Hamer’s voice. She’s telling her story. Her testimony can’t be denied because she lived it.
You see at the mainstream publications or in the discourse with the capital D, they’re always talking about “us,” but we’re never the voice. Always the subject, but never the speaker.
I don’t know what the project that I’m going to do will be. I don’t want it to be purely a reactionary project. But I do think that in the same way that I was inspired by hearing Mrs. Hamer just speak her testimony, I think we need to be able to create spaces for trans and gender exuberant and queer people to state their testimony in a place where their voice can be heard.
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