Monica Land can still remember the hot sweltering summers she spent in Mississippi.
Born and raised in Chicago, she often traveled with her mother, a Mississippi native, to visit relatives in her home state.
One of those kin Land knew at the time as Aunt Fannie Lou, a woman married to one of Land’s great uncles.
“I remember going to Ruleville, and I remember seeing Aunt Fannie Lou a couple of times,” Land told The Enterprise-Tocsin this week. “Of course, I didn’t know who she was. She was Aunt Fannie Lou, someone who was always hospitable, funny, always had a funny story to tell. Whatever she had in the kitchen, you were welcome to it. I remember that clearly.”
Aunt Fannie Lou was of course Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the icons of the voting rights and civil rights movements in the 1960s and 1970s. The Ruleville native is famous for leading efforts to register African Americans to vote, notably at the Sunflower County Courthouse.
Hamer’s career as an activist spanned two decades, and she was harassed, arrested and beaten during her early voting rights efforts.
Land is one of the producers of a new documentary, Fannie Lou Hamer’s America, which will be airing on PBS and WORLD Channel next Tuesday and Thursday, respectively as part of the Peabody Award-winning documentary series America ReFramed.
The Tuesday, Feb. 22 PBS broadcast will air 8 p.m.-9:30 p.m. central time, and the Thursday, Feb. 24 WORLD Channel broadcast will air at 7 p.m. central time.
Land also participated in a panel discussion that preceded the world premier of the documentary.
Land, who has spent over a decade assembling the archival footage for the documentary, opened up about the process of telling her aunt’s story through her own voice.
Land said she began the project hoping to show Hamer’s personal and private side. She said many documentaries have featured civil rights colleagues talking about her activism, but she wanted to dig into her personal life.
“I had never seen a family member talking about her, discussing her life before activism,” Land said.
But getting hold of that kind of footage or first-hand information proved to be difficult.
“Once we started digging for the archival footage, wanting this to be told in her own voice, we didn’t have the archival footage to support that,” Land said. “What we found instead was a lot of footage that probably hasn’t been seen since it first aired over 50 years ago, and that’s amazing, because how many people watching this film are not 50 years old. This will be their first time seeing her influence and the powerful presence that she had when she spoke.”
Land said people will indeed get to see another side of Hamer through a lot of the seldom-seen footage.
“They’ll get to see her as she spoke to audiences 50 years ago,” she said. “They’ll get to see her passion, how she motivated people, what she was fighting for, in her own words. You don’t hear anyone else’s words. There’s no narration. There are no talking heads. It’s told completely in her voice.”
Land said that finding footage of Hamer was difficult, because a lot of old films are mislabeled, and she said at least one film’s label only described Hamer’s physical appearance.
Most of the documentary is archival footage, which consumed the majority of the film’s budget, Land said.
“Believe it or not, we’re a week from broadcast, and I was still looking for grant funds to pay for that footage last week, because that footage is so insanely expensive,” Land said. “The majority of our budget went toward archival footage.”
The end result is worth every penny for Land, who gets the opportunity to share her aunt’s story, from the fields of Sunflower County to the halls of Congress, through her own words.
