Fannie Lou Hamer's last surviving child dies At 56

by Mississippi Today, Mississippi Today
March 30, 2023

Jacqueline Hamer Flakes, the last living child of civil and voting rights advocate Fannie Lou Hamer. died this week and will be buried April 8 in Ruleville.

Flakes, who died March 27 at the age of 56 in her hometown of Ruleville, had been traveling and speaking about her mother's legacy. She had just returned from an engagement at a museum in Seattle.

Flakes, who had been battling breast cancer, was admitted to North Sunflower Medical Center on March 24 after complaining of weakness.

Ruby McWilliams, who helped raise Flakes and her older sister, Lenora, after Hamer's death, said in a news release that doctors sent her home on hospice and “friends and family were in and out to see her.”

Hamer and her husband Pap adopted Flakes, whom they nicknamed “Cookie”, and her sister Lenora, known as “Nook”, when their mother, Dorothy Jean, died in May 1967 of a cerebral hemorrhage six months after Flakes was born.

The Hamers had also adopted Dorothy Jean, Fannie Lou's niece, when she was an infant and the then-6-month-old Virgie Lee 10 years later.

Hamer, who worked throughout the Deep South as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to help poor Blacks register to vote, died of hypertension and breast cancer in 1977 and Pap Hamer died in 1992.

Flakes attended Ruleville High School and Mississippi Delta Community College. She worked as a relief dispatcher for the Ruleville Police Department and later the Sunflower County Sheriff's Department. She moved to Michigan in 1997 where she also worked as a dispatcher. She returned to Ruleville in 2009 and in 2015 went to work at city hall as the water clerk, replacing her sister, Lenora who retired after 26 years. Lenora died in July 2019.

When Virgie Ree died in 2017, Flakes stepped in as spokesperson for her mother's legacy. In 2021, she was interviewed for the documentary film, “Fannie Lou Hamer's America”, produced by her cousin and Hamer's niece, Monica Land. The following year, Flakes publilshed a book about her mother, “Mama Fannie”, by Concierge Publishing Services.

In June, she spoke in Winona,where a historical marker was unveiled at the jail site where Hamer and several others, including two teenagers, were beaten in June 1963.

Flakes has two sons, Shadney and Trenton.

Visitation will be from 4-6 p.m. April 7 at Byers Funeral Home in Ruleville. Services will be at 2:30 p.m. April 8 at New Jerusalem Missionary Baptist Church with burial at Mount Galilee Cemetery, both in Ruleville.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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News outlets take court action opposing former governor's effort to shield records

by Mississippi Today, Mississippi Today
March 30, 2023

Mississippi Today and two other news outlets have allied to oppose former Gov. Phil Bryant's effort to block the public from viewing emails and text messages that could shed new light on an ongoing investigation involving the misuse of federal welfare dollars.

In a Thursday filing in Hinds County Circuit Court, Mississippi Today, the Daily Journal, and the Mississippi Free Press have moved to protect the public's right to access government records.

The news organizations, which are represented by the Mississippi Center for Justice and the Center for Constitutional Rights, want to argue before a court that documents relating to communications from Bryant's time as governor should not be kept secret if they surface in the course of civil lawsuits that are ongoing over the welfare scandal.

“Although these records relate to one of the largest governmental abuses in this State's recent memory, Bryant seeks to keep them hidden from the public,” argued the news organizations in Friday's court filing.“The public in Mississippi has an interest in these records and what they could disclose about the scandal.”

In a joint statement, the editors of the news organizations said that the press has an obligation to fight on behalf of the public's right to access government records and the correspondence of public officials.

“One of the basic duties of a free press is to hold public officialsaccountable and ensure that the government remains as open and transparent to the people it serves as possible. We are taking action in court as part of our ongoing efforts to get at the truth of one of the largest public scandals in our state's history,” said Adam Ganucheau of Mississippi Today, Sam R. Hall of the Daily Journal and Donna Ladd of the Mississippi Free Press.

The state of Mississippi has sued numerous individuals and organizations in an effort to recover welfare funds that were allegedly misspent. Some of the targets of these civil lawsuits have also pleaded guilty in state and federal court to crimes linked to their use of public welfare dollars. None has served time to date.

Bryant has neither been charged criminally nor sued. Still, several defendants in lawsuits have asked him to turn over emails and text messages as part of an effort by those defendants to claim the former governor allegedly directed them to perform unlawful acts.

Bryant has denied these allegations and asked a judge to find that he doesn't have to provide copies of text messages, emails, and other responsive records. Bryant has selectively released some of his own text messages in a court filing, but does not want to release more, as a pending subpoena could require him to do.

If Judge E. Faye Peterson does force the former governor to turn over more of his communications to the court, he has asked the judge to place them under a protective order that would block the public from examining the documents.

In Thursday's motion, the three news organizations asked Peterson to allow them to present arguments in opposition to Bryant's request for a protective order.

“Transparency is the path to meaningful accountability in a functioning democracy, and Mississippians are owed both,” said Vangela M. Wade, president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Justice. “Our press should not be hampered by unnecessarily sealed records when reporting on this important case.”

Decades of state court cases have upheld the right of the press to step into ongoing litigation where matters of public access are in question, even when a news organization is not a party to that litigation.

Editor's note: Vangela M. Wade, president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Justice, is a member of Mississippi Today's board of directors.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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On this day in 1958

by Jerry Mitchell, Mississippi Today
March 30, 2023

MARCH 30, 1958

When Alvin Ailey and other young, modern Black dancers performed at New York City's 92^nd Street Y, it was meant to be a one-night event. Instead, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater company introduced the world to the discovery of what Black dancing could be, performing for audiences in 71 countries, including kings and queens.

Ailey grew up in Texas, “glued to my mother's hip. Sloshing through the terrain. Branches slashing against a child's body. Going from one place to another. Looking for a place to be. My mother off working in the fields. I used to pick cotton.”

In 1960, Ailey debuted Revelations, regarded as a masterpiece. Through his dances, he sought to show “dark deep things, beautiful things inside me that I'd always been trying to get out.” And when his friend, fellow choreographer Joyce Trisler died, he created a dance to honor her —a dance that illustrated both loneliness and celebration.

“I couldn't cry,” he later confessed, “until I saw this piece.”

In 1988, he received Kennedy Center Honors, with legendary broadcaster Walter Cronkite introducing him as “a choreographer who helped free Blacks from the cage of tap-dancing.”

Dying of AIDS, Ailey passed on his company to Judith Jamison, who said, “Alvin breathed in and never breathed out.” She continued: “We are his breath out.”

A 2021 documentary details his journey, and the Ailey school remains the largest place in New York City dedicated to training dancers.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.