LEI dinner guest recalls Hamer
By Kathy Kemp
Billie Jean Young knows how lives can change through inspiration. Thirty-five years ago, the Choctaw County native drove to Tuskegee to hear a talk by a Mississippi woman named Fannie Lou Hamer, who, despite being poor and uneducated, had led the charge to register black voters during the civil rights movement.
"She just blew me away," Young recalls. "What struck me was, she spoke without fear. She called the names of powerful people who were oppressing her. She spoke about horrible events without whispering. She unabashedly talked about her life, the poverty, the hardships and the struggles."
Young had endured her own hardships as a sharecropper's daughter, the oldest of 14 children. She remembers the poverty that came after her father's death. She eventually dropped out of high school as an unwed mother. Young reached higher. She went back to school, becoming the first black woman to graduate from Judson College. She earned a law degree from Samford and went on to become a teacher, actress, poet and playwright. She is best known for her one-woman show, "Fannie Lou Hamer: This Little Light," which she's performed across the country since the mid 1980s.
Friday night, Young will talk about Hamer's influence on her life during her keynote speech at the Leading Edge Institute winter dinner in downtown Birmingham. Leading Edge Institute is a nonprofit leadership development program for Alabama's young women. The dinner will honor LEI's fifth annual class. Through her talk, Young says, she hopes to further motivate these young women to take themselves seriously, to be self-directed and to propel them into action.
"I want them to understand the need for diversity in leadership. I'd also like for them to understand their own uniqueness, as women, so they can harness those personal qualities in leadership," Young says. "Women possess them as a result of socialization. We are socialized to care, for example, and are sensitive to issues. We tend to bring with us more than ourselves. "Someone once said, `Educate a man, and you've educated one person. Educate a woman, and you've educated a family or a community.'"
Although Hamer had seemed like an obvious role model to the young black women of the 1960s and 1970s, Young, after moving to Mississippi in the early 1980s, was shocked to learn that few women seemed to know of her.
"Rural women would invoke her name, but the young people, and people my age, seemed to hardly know anything about her. It seemed she had never been," said Young. That spurred Young, then active in regional theater in Jackson, Miss., to write the one-woman show on Hamer.
In 1964, Hamer had detailed in a speech at the Democratic National Convention the atrocities she had endured while fighting for her rights in Mississippi. To coincide with last summer's Democratic National Convention in Boston, Young toured the show, by bus, from Ruleville, Miss., to Boston.
Young returned to Choctaw County eight years ago after a 20-year absence. There, she continues to write poetry and plays, and she frequently travels to give speeches and performances. Her Web site is www.billiejeanyoung.org).
"I hope that I am something of an inspiration, too," she said.
kkemp@bhamnews.com
