Put Miss. civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, a pro-lifer, on our $10 bill
It was announced just weeks ago that Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul will now be on the back of the new $10 bill expected to be released in a few years to help celebrate the passage of the 19th Amendment.
It has been duly noted that these so-called feminists were also pro-lifers and, as per usual, the quotes started flying. As well as the objections.
Did Stanton and Anthony, for instance really say this, or that? The pro-abortionists deny the sources of the quotes—and the pro-lifers swing back, as one might imagine.
It reminded me of an author named Kay Mills who, years ago, wrote a book placed in my hands by Mississippi civil rights hero Ed King. It was a biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, This Little Light of Mine. Ed told me that author Mills had compiled an exciting and relatively accurate biography and that I might find pages 261 and 274 particularly interesting.
Hamer ranks, as the book jacket attests, with "such figures as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Medgar Evers in the pantheon of near-legendary leaders that the civil rights movement of the 1960's produced." The Montgomery County, Mississippi, native was—among many other things—a co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus, a group that supported women of all races who wish to seek election to government office. She was responsible for encouraging multitudes of African-Americans in Mississippi to become registered voters, facilitated by her spiritual songs, colorful interpretation of Scripture, and indefatigable efforts to advance the Civil Right agenda. Hamer is widely acclaimed as a key component of the Civil Rights movement and is an inductee into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
So it interested me that Mills (by no means a pro-lifer) pointedly highlights Hamer's perspective on abortion. Frequently and forcefully, asserts the author, Fannie Lou Hamer expressed her unequivocal views.
Again…a pro-abortionists says that Ms. Hamer was frequently and forcefully and unequivocally pro-life. Well.
Said Hamer: "The methods used to take human lives, such as abortion...amounts to genocide." In a 1971 speech she declared "I believe that legal abortion is legal murder...to prevent God's will is a great sin."
"Now they talk about birth control and abortion for blacks. If they'd been talking that way when my mother was bearing children, I wouldn't be here now." After that "narrow escape to be here," she said she would fight for other kids, too, "because if you give them a chance, they might grow up to be Fannie Lou Hamer or something else."
Kay Mills writes that Hamer "always held that human life was sacred, that if young women did become pregnant, they should be helped to raise their children, not encouraged to terminate their pregnancies. She had raised other people's children, as had many in the black community" and considered such children to be truly the hope of the future.
So, as the pro-lifers and the pro-abortionist argue quotes, let me offer a Mississippi alternative: put pro-lifer and Civil Rights leader Fannie Lou on the $10 bill. I’d love to earn, admire, and spend that note the rest of my life.