“We want to live as decent human beings”
Fannie Lou Hamer in the March Trilogy
Global Literary Theory is proud to publish this story on the 60th anniversary of activist Fannie Lou Hamer’s speech, which was delivered at the Democratic Convention in 1964.
In a recent post, I wrote about a couple of individuals and events that I wish the March Trilogy spent some more time exploring. As I said in that post, I know that the trilogy could not cover everything and everyone involved in the Civil Rights Movement; however, as we move towards book three, we begin to see more of the movement outside of John Lewis’ direct involvement.
I assume this has to do with the success of books one and two and the knowledge that book three would be the culmination of the trilogy. We see references to Virgil Lamar Ware, Johnny Robinson, Viola Lizzuo, James Reeb, and more. We see how the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson in Marion, Alabama, sparked the Selma to Montgomery March. We see so much more, and yet even when we see so much more, we still do not see everything. Again, that is not a shock, and it goes to show how much more there is to the movement, not just the buttressed years of 1955–1965, but to the lengthy history before 1955 and to the arc of the future following 1965.
