Fannie Lou Hamer didn’t know she had the right to vote until she was 44. It was 1962 in the Jim Crow South, and poll taxes, literacy tests and other discriminatory, often violent practices prevented most Black people from casting ballots. The Mississippi native immediately became a civil rights activist.
Born in Tyler one year later, Dallas actor Liz Mikel says her parents were in a similar boat. The Voting Rights Act was still a couple of years away.
“My mother was a college professor. My father owned businesses,” recalls Mikel, who stars in the upcoming one-woman show 'Fannie: The Music and Life of Fannie Lou Hamer.' “These were God-fearing citizens, leaders in their community, and they couldn’t participate in the country where they paid taxes and made a difference.”
Hamer’s grandparents had been enslaved. The daughter of sharecroppers, she had started picking cotton by the time she was 6. Her come-to-Jesus moment came at a joint meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where she learned about her right to vote.
Later that summer, she began organizing voter registration drives. The next year, Hamer was beaten by authorities, suffering lifelong injuries after being arrested at a “whites-only” bus station. Undeterred, she co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and became a member of her home state’s first integrated delegation to the Democratic National Convention.
Mikel has played Hamer before, in a touring Florida production of "Ain’t I A Woman." In that play, the longtime company member of Dallas Theater Center, which is co-producing "Fannie" with Bishop Arts Theatre Center, portrayed not only the civil rights leader but also abolitionist Sojourner Truth, novelist Zora Neale Hurston and folk artist Clementine Hunter.
At the time, Mikel was familiar with the famous Hamer line, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” but she didn’t know a lot about her.
“When I started doing my research, I realized this woman had dared step up to talk about atrocities that had happened in Mississippi to her and other people by simply wanting to register to vote,” Mikel says in a phone interview. “Fannie Lou Hamer was one of those people out in the fields doing the backbreaking work, but still was not recognized as a United States citizen, still didn’t have a voice in what went on in their community. It just blew my mind. And the more I dig deeper, the prouder I am to be playing her right now.”
As Hamer tells her story, Cheryl West’s 75-minute play incorporates some of the Negro spirituals and freedom songs used by her and other civil rights activists.
“They come up organically,” Mikel explains. “Sometimes a song would calm the spirit of the people or would give them courage, support what they were going through. So, say they were getting ready to go to the courthouse for the first time to try to register to vote, but the feeling was volatile or negative. When they got there, they sang a song to try to calm themselves down and become united.”
Mikel is coming off playing a church usher in Dallas playwright Jonathan Norton’s "I Am Delivered’t." Before that, she spent more than a year in a production of the musical "1776" as it wound its way to Broadway and a national tour, portraying John Hancock and later Benjamin Franklin.
It was not her first time depicting men, or a founding father for that matter, having played Dr. Scott and Eddie in "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," Matthew Brady in "Inherit the Wind" and John Quincy Adams in "The Trials of Sam Houston," all for the Dallas Theater Center.
“I can’t play a gender, but I certainly can play the human condition,” Mikel says. “We all feel hurt; we all get hungry.”
She believes the unconventional casting of "1776" won over even skeptical fans of the musical.
“They thought it was a gimmick,” Mikel says. “And then some of those same people sat forward in their seats and said, ‘Oh, now I get why they did this. Now I understand.’ The fact is there were people on the stage who would not have been considered when the Declaration of Independence was written. They saw Black women; they saw Asian women; they saw nonbinary people; they saw indigenous people; they saw people that looked like them.”
In an election year, she hopes "Fannie" receives a similar reception.
“In this political climate, you have a lot of people that are apathetic and figure their vote doesn’t matter,” Mikel says. “But Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten within an inch of her life along with other people who were just trying to participate in this political process. People literally died for the right.”
Details"
"Fannie: The Music and Life of Fannie Lou Hamer" runs May 2-18 at Bishop Arts Theatre Center, 215 S. Tyler St., Dallas. $20-$55. bishopartstheatre.org. dallastheatercenter.org.
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