Black Women Are Beaten, Sexually Assaulted and Killed By Police. Why Don't We Talk About It?
On June 9, 1963, Fannie Lou Hamer was arrested in Montgomery County, Mississippi, along with June Johnson, Euvester Simpson, Rosemary Freeman, and Annelle Ponder. The five women were on their way back from a voter registration workshop in South Carolina. Upon their arrival at the Montgomery County jail, Hamer, Johnson, and Ponder were subjected to vicious brutality at the direction of notorious racist Sheriff Earl Wayne Patridge.
In the booking room, Johnson was stripped naked and slapped until her face was bloody and unrecognizable, then thrown into a cell. Deputies dragged Ponder into the booking room and beat her about the face as they yelled “Can you say ‘yes, sir,’ nigger? Can you say ‘yes, sir’?” When Ponder fell to the floor, they pulled her up and demanded that she address them as “sir” again. When she refused, the beating resumed.
When they were through with Ponder, the deputies came for Hamer. She was taken from her cell to another that held two Black male inmates. Deputies handed the inmates weapons and ordered them to beat Hamer or suffer the consequences. The first inmate, wielding a blackjack, beat her on the back until he tired. The second inmate was told to take over and resume the beating. When he was handed the blackjack, Hamer began to struggle and move her feet. Deputies instructed the inmate who had performed the first beating to sit on her feet so she couldn’t move them. When Hamer began to scream, one of the deputies hit her in the head, demanding she remain quiet. Hamer’s dress had worked up high above her shoulders, and she attempted to pull it down. In a display of racist sexual domination, a deputy walked over and yanked it back up.
Fannie Lou Hamer told her story in a speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, and continued to tell her story until her death in March of 1977. While her speech brought national attention to the severity of police brutality against civil rights activists, it did not change the narrative that Black cisgender men were the primary victims of violence at the hands of law enforcement—a narrative that persists today. ...