By Shalise Manza Young
Angie Nixon looked into her camera, with journalist Don Lemon looking back. She offered a bright, “Good morning!” with a smile on her beautiful face.
Lemon asked the Florida state representative, a surprise winner in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate two weeks earlier, how she was doing. Nixon’s smile disappeared.
“I’m,” Nixon began. There was a long pause. She shrugged her shoulders, closed her eyes, and shook her head. “I’m just tired, Don.” She leaned out of the camera’s view for a moment to wipe her eyes and compose herself.
On the day she appeared with Lemon, she was enduring racist, vile attacks from a MAGA-verse personality who called Nixon and some of the most accomplished Black women in the country “ghetto Black bitches” on her podcast.
But watching Nixon, it was easy to feel that her emotional response came from a far deeper place, understandably so.
She isn’t just tired of the ugly vitriol.
She is tired of injustice. She’s tired of policies that disenfranchise voters, make the poor poorer and the wealthy wealthier. She’s tired of bullies.
Or, in the words of Nixon’s spiritual godmother Fannie Lou Hamer, she is sick and tired of being sick and tired.
If you know about Hamer — sadly, there’s a good chance you don’t — it’s clear to see why Nixon has modeled herself after the mighty icon from rural Mississippi.
Speaking to comedian and activist W. Kamau Bell recently, Nixon explained, “She was a sharecropper. And knowing my grandparents were sharecroppers in Georgia and I come from sharecropping, and knowing that she spoke so plainly and she went up against the Democratic establishment even though they were the ones who were supposed to have our backs at the time, and I feel like I’m doing something similar.”
Hamer was born in 1917, the youngest of 20 children. She began working in the cotton fields with her parents and siblings at age 6, and her formal education stopped around sixth grade, when she had to pick cotton full-time to help her aging parents.
Hamer’s fearlessness and commitment to fairness were evident even before she became active in the civil rights movement: according to one biographer, when she noticed that the white overseers were cheating sharecroppers by using altered pea weights to weigh their cotton harvests, Hamer switched out the weights when the overseers weren’t looking so that she and her fellow pickers were paid properly, effectively risking her life by doing so.
Hamer’s advocacy began in earnest in 1962 when, after a meeting with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members at her church, she and 17 others volunteered to travel to the county courthouse in Indianola, Mississippi, to register to vote. There was fear on the bus as they made the drive, so Hamer began singing “This Little Light of Mine” in her soaring voice.
The words inspired those on the bus, and the song would eventually become something of a trademark for Hamer.
The group of 18 weren’t successful that day, failing the diabolical “literacy test.” Hamer was officially registered five months later. The owner of the plantation where Hamer toiled told her she either had to withdraw her voter registration or leave his land. Unsurprisingly, Hamer opted for the latter.
Hamer’s presence on the trip to the courthouse left an impression on SNCC’s leaders, and she was recruited to attend the group’s conference in Nashville. She stood out there as well.
“It becomes clear we’re dealing with somebody different. This is no submissive, docile, servile sharecropper. This is a woman of considerable strength,” SNCC member Charles Cobb Jr. said years later.
In June 1963, Hamer was riding back to Mississippi from an SNCC voter registration event in South Carolina when the bus stopped at a terminal in Winona, Mississippi. The protestors were arrested after sitting at the “whites only” lunch counter. At the jail, Hamer was viciously beaten by multiple men, including two Black inmates who were forced to attack her under threat from officers.
She lived the rest of her life with a blood clot in one eye and a damaged kidney, among other injuries. But Hamer said the beating steeled her resolve; she would die for the cause if need be.
A year later, in the summer of 1964, she and other members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a group she co-founded, fought at the Democratic National Convention to be the state’s official delegation since the older Mississippi Democratic party was pro-segregation and willing to support the Republican presidential candidate that year, Barry Goldwater.
Hamer gave the testimony of her jailhouse bashing to the credentials committee.
“If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” she said. “Is this America? The land of the free and the home of the brave? Where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hook because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in America?”
President Lyndon B. Johnson was so fearful of Hamer that he called an impromptu — and ultimately useless — press conference during her speech to force NBC’s live coverage of the convention away from her and to him. But the network aired her impassioned speech later that night and for days after.
Hamer and the MFDP rejected the “compromise” they were offered by Johnson: two non-voting seats in the Mississippi delegation.
Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act the next year. Hamer died in 1977, at just 59 years old, her body weary from both the long-term injuries she incurred in 1963 and from fighting cancer.
Nixon has pointed to her own childhood as the reason she always stands in the gap for those being bullied. As a child, she saw her mother victimized by domestic violence. Her grandmother had to be hidden from white supremacist violence on “Ax Handle Sunday,” the day in 1960 when over 200 ax handle- and bat-wielding white men beat Black people taking part in lunch counter sit-ins in Jacksonville.
Unfortunately for all of us, Nixon will likely lose her battle against Republican incumbent Ashley Moody today. She hasn’t just been fighting the headwind of being a Black woman running in a statewide contest in Florida, just as Hamer fought the national Democratic party, but Nixon has also faced resistance from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which didn’t provide her with financial backing until October, showing yet again that “vote Blue no matter who” comes with a glaring asterisk.
Still, Nixon has stood as strong in her convictions as her shero, refusing to bend to appease what she calls the establishment.
“I’m not going to like, allow people to knock me off, you know, knock me down or whatever, or knock me off what I’m talking about and how I’m engaging,” she told Bell. Hamer “was unapologetic about who she is, and that is because — like, why should we change ourselves when the majority of people, you know, operate and live the way that I live, right, and speak the way that I speak?”
Somewhere, Fannie Lou is smiling. The fight continues.
Shalise Manza Young is an award-winning writer focused on the intersections of race, gender, politics, and sports. She is the director of track and field at Phillips Andover Academy. She and her family, including Contrarian Pet of the Week Coco, live in Boston. You can find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.
I wish so many black men were 1/10th as strong as so many black women are.