Fannie Lou Hamer's America (2022)

This is a film by a white woman who says that she wanted to tell about the life of Fannie Lou Hamer but she didn't feel confident taking control of the story. So she decided to let Hamer tell her own story. The result is a film where the dominant voice is that of Hamer herself.

Director Davenport states her intention:

“I want this film to be a platform for her prophetic voice, for her words and her songs, because it is wrong that we do not remember her. It is wrong that her voice was silenced. As a filmmaker, as a white woman telling a Black woman’s history, I have no right to speak for Mrs. Hamer. She is the only one who can tell her story. Not an omniscient narrator, not a talking head expert, just Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer from 626 East Lafayette Street, Ruleville, Mississippi. So this film was constructed using speeches, interviews, oral histories, television appearances, and performances that were recorded over the course of her life…”

The result is a film that does not recreate history; it reports what actually happened. Ed McNulty says about the speech she gave at the 1964 Democratic Convention, “This was a speech that put her in the class of Frederick Douglas, whose famous ‘July 4 Speech’ to a New York state audience in 1852 questioned the integrity of America. She missed out on school, and so would be considered semi-illiterate, but she was gifted with the ability to put words together in a forceful, memorable way, such as... ‘I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.’”