Fannie Lou Hamer

A decade into her career as a fearless civil rights leader, Fannie Lou Hamer put her considerable powers of persuasion and rhetoric to work on behalf of her neighbors and fellow cooperators, securing funding from numerous organizations and celebrities (including Harry Belafonte!) to establish a new kind of agricultural cooperative, called the Freedom Farm Cooperative. 

Freedom Farm Cooperative (FCC) was an agricultural, educational, and manufacturing cooperative which fed and employed thousands of families in what was at the time one of the most profoundly food insecure counties in America. Mrs. Hamer did all this without the federal support enjoyed by white farmers in her state, managing a web of rapidly shifting community needs, not to mention drought, floods, and full-on natural disasters. 

As the youngest of 20 children, she began working in the Mississippi cotton fields from the age of 6, abandoning her studies after the 6th grade to work full time. After years of observing–and experiencing–rampant racism and disenfranchisement, she began to volunteer, first in organizing local voter registration, and later with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). But this work was not without consequence; she faced firing, surveillance, assassination attempts, a vicious and depraved assault, and eviction from the farm where she and her husband were sharecroppers–all for her attempts to secure voting rights for herself and her neighbors.

Many others would have quit, but showing the determination that would later characterize her as a cooperative leader, Mrs. Hamer still utterly refused to relent. Her closing speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, broadcast on evening television, catapulted Mrs. Hamer to national prominence as one of the most charismatic and moving articulators of the struggle for civil rights.

Challenged, however, by the entrenched racist and corrupt political structures, she began to look at other avenues through which she could enact change. Voting, though critical, was only half the battle. She understood the deep and fundamental necessity of economic justice to guarantee the full expression of political rights–and made a cooperative the vehicle for achieving that justice.

Armed with clarity of vision, a wealth of national contacts and networks, and formidable fundraising acumen, Mrs. Hamer founded the FFC in 1969, with the aim of creating a self-sustaining farm providing food, employment, housing, and educational services for the people of rural Sunflower County, Mississippi.

From Mrs. Hamer’s initial innovative idea–a “Pig bank” which raised two thousand pigs from an initial donation of 55 animals–the co-op facilitated the purchase of 700 acres of land portioned into plots for vegetables to feed members and needy families, grazing ground for animals, and cash crops to pay the bills. The work extended into coordinating FHA loans to build homes, scholarships toward vocational training, the development of sewing cooperatives, and the distribution of disaster aid.

Though the FCC did not long outlive her, Mrs. Hamer’s efforts represent the practical application of generations of theory of Black economic group self-determination through collective ownership and cooperation. This, combined with her own heroic ambition and utter refusal to give up on her cooperative dream in the face of numerous and daunting obstacles beyond her control, makes Fannie Lou Hamer a formidable example of a cooperative founder.