The Plough Music Series is a regular selection of music intended to lift the heart to God. It is not a playlist of background music: each installment focuses on a single piece worth pausing to enjoy.
Fannie Lou Hamer was the twentieth child born to a sharecropping family on a Mississippi plantation. She grew up picking cotton – by the time she was thirteen, she picked two to three hundred pounds of cotton every day – and endured the degradation and violence of Jim Crow society.
By the time she was in her thirties, Fannie Lou Hamer had had enough. She became involved in the growing Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King, volunteering for the voter registration campaign, a dangerous project that cost many activists their lives. Riding in 1962 in a rented bus with people who wanted to register, she led her companions in songs like “Go Tell it on the Mountain” and “This Little Light of Mine.” Singing not only brought courage, but was a reminder that the cause of justice is the cause of the God of righteousness – like King, Hamer fought injustice based on a deep grounding in the Bible and in Christian faith.
Two years later, thousands of volunteers came to Mississippi for “Freedom Summer” to continue voter registration efforts. Hamer was at the center of the action, organizing, exhorting, and singing. In a talk she gave at a Baptist school in Indianola, Mississippi in September 1964, she pointed out that God needs people to do his work:
We want people, we want people over us that’s concerned about the people because we are human beings. Regardless of how they have abused us for all these years, we always cared what was going on. We have prayed and we have hoped for God to bring about a change. And now the time have come for people to stand up.
Because God care. God care and we care. And we can no longer ignore the fact that we can’t sit down and wait for things to change because as long as they can keep their feet on our neck, they will always do it. But it’s time for us to stand up and be women and men.
Reflecting on the events of 1964, musician Sam Cooke, known as the “King of Soul,” wrote “A Change Is Gonna Come.” It is now fifty years since Freedom Summer, and time to reflect again on what has happened since then and the changes that still must be made to make Martin Luther King’s “beloved community” a reality.
I was born by the river in a little tent
Oh and just like the river I’ve been running ever since
It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will
It’s been too hard living but I’m afraid to die
Cause I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky
It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will
I go to the movie and I go downtown somebody keep
telling me don’t hang around
It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will
Then I go to my brother
And I say brother help me please
But he winds up knockin’ me
Back down on my knees
There been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long
But now I think I’m able to carry on
It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will
About the photo: Dated June 19, 1964, student volunteers at a civil rights training camp in Canton, Ohio, link arms and sing, “We Shall Overcome,” before travelling to Mississippi to register voters for the summer. Photo Credit: © Steve Schapiro/Corbis