Suffolk University To Host Screening of Fannie Lou Hamer’s America
Award-winning filmmakers and author to participate in talkback 62 years after Hamer’s release from jail
BOSTON, MA – June 5, 2025 – The renowned Ford Hall Forum at Suffolk University and Our Bodies Ourselves will host a screening of the award-winning film, Fannie Lou Hamer’s America, on Thursday, June 12 at 6 pm. Afterward, Thato R. Mwosa, an assistant professor at Emerson College and screenwriter, will moderate a panel discussion featuring the filmmakers Joy Davenport and Monica Land, and Fannie Lou Hamer biographer Kate Clifford Larson.
The free hybrid event will be held in person at the Modern Theatre on Washington Street in Boston and on Zoom. Pre-registration is required.
The Ford Hall Forum is the nation's oldest continuously operating free public lecture series. Its mission is to foster an informed and effective citizenry and to promote freedom of speech through the public presentation of screenings, lectures, debates, and discussions.
"It is an honor to screen the award-winning documentary, Fannie Lou Hamer's America," said Susan H. Spurlock, the Forum’s executive director. "Fannie Lou Hamer was a courageous leader with a powerful voice and an unwavering commitment to justice.”
Organizers said Forum events “illuminate the key issues facing society by bringing to its podium knowledgeable and thought-provoking speakers.”
Partnering on the event is Our Bodies Ourselves, an educational, activist initiative supporting the health and sexuality of women and gender-expansive people. For over a half-century since the early publication of their landmark book, Our Bodies, Ourselves, OBOS has grown into an intersectional and global feminist force. Also located at Suffolk University, they carefully curate trustworthy, evidence-based resources and compelling personal stories, all framed by incisive feminist analysis on their freely accessible website.
“[Mrs. Hamer’s] lasting legacy as a symbol of the fight for civil rights and human rights continues to inspire social justice movements today,” Spurlock said. “We need her voice now more than ever!"
Produced by Hamer’s niece, Monica Land, Fannie Lou Hamer’s America allows the late activist and humanitarian to tell her own story in her own words – spoken and sung - through archival video and audio footage. The film premiered on PBS and WORLD Channel in February 2022, and later that year was named “Best TV Feature Documentary Or Mini-Series” by the International Documentary Association (IDA). In 2023, it won the “Best Documentary” award by The National Association for Multi-ethnicity in Communications (NAMIC).
“This film is such a labor of love, and it does exactly what I had hoped it would, preserve and amplify Aunt Fannie Lou’s voice and her legacy,” Land said. “It has been so well received and I’m always grateful and honored to be invited to talk about her, her many sacrifices, and what it took for us to make the film.”
The lead researchers on the film were Fannie Lou Hamer historians and biographers Maegan Parker Brooks, an Associate Professor at Willamette University and Davis W. Houck, the Fannie Lou Hamer Professor of Rhetorical Studies at Florida State University. Joy Davenport, also a Hamer historian, was the film’s director, editor and music composer.
"Being born and raised in the American South, and being a white person in the public school system, I wasn't taught anything about the real history of the place I called home. It wasn't until I went to college that I started to learn about the civil rights movement and the ongoing struggle for racial and human justice in this country,” she said.
Davenport said her imagination was particularly "captured by stories of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), of which Hamer was a member, and its commitment to reaching across demographic boundaries to build a true grassroots people's movement.
Two historical markers in Winona, MS commemorate the beating Fannie Lou Hamer and others endured in June 1963. Brutality In Winona and Winona Jail Beating. Both efforts were spearheaded by Davis W. Houck and Vickie Roberts Ratliff.
“These stories often are categorized narrowly as Black History or Women's History, but to me they represent Our History, and I wanted to dedicate my life and career to joining the march toward human dignity that they had participated in long before I was born,” she continued. “It was that spirit of intergenerational collaboration that drove me to work on this film about Mrs. Hamer, a singular figure whose powerful voice inspired countless people, young and old, Black and white, rich and poor, to join hands and fight for what was right. It is a spirit and a voice that we desperately need today."
Born in 1917, Fannie Lou Hamer was a Mississippi sharecropper who devoted herself to fighting for voting rights and Black political representation. Because of those efforts, Hamer and several other members of SNCC were arrested in Winona, MS on June 9, 1963, while returning home from a voter registration workshop in South Carolina. Hamer and three others, including 15-year-old June Johnson, were viciously beaten at the hands of local law enforcement. The activists were released three days later on June 12.
In December of that year, all five white defendants named in the federal complaint were acquitted by an all-white male jury. But Hamer’s efforts would still mobilize thousands of Black people to register to vote.
“I interviewed some of the former SNCC workers and they talked about how she had inspired them and changed their lives,” said Kate Clifford Larson, bestselling author of the critically acclaimed biography Walk With Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer. “Most of them had been teenagers and young adults when they met her and joined the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Now in their 70s and 80s, their memories remain vivid and deeply moving. I recall how their voices changed when they spoke of Mrs. Hamer, the deep reverence they held for her. I recall one coming to tears,” she continued.
Hamer died at the age of 59 on March 14, 1977, from breast cancer and the aftereffects of the jailhouse beating.
She was posthumously presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom by former president Joe Biden in January 2025.
“She was not the typical leader of the growing civil rights movement, which was, at the time, dominated by elite men and youthful radical activists,” Larson said. “As a middle-aged and impoverished Mississippi Delta cotton picker with a sixth-grade education, Hamer was an unlikely leader. She left an indelible mark on those who heard her voice.”