Description
“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
— Fannie Lou Hamer
This oversized postcard is a reproduction (offset printed, NOT letterpress) of “Seeding the Vote,” part of the ongoing Dead Feminists poster series. This piece is a collaboration between Chandler O’Leary of Anagram Press and Jessica Spring of Springtide Press, created in support of equal voting rights for all, in the face of staggering and persistent voter suppression based on race.
The large letterpress poster is now sold out and won’t be reprinted—but this postcard faithfully reproduces the hand-lettered typography and hand-drawn illustrations of the original.
Seeding the Vote honors Fannie Lou Hamer’s home county of Sunflower County, Mississippi, where she planted the seeds for a voting rights campaign that grew rapidly into a blooming national movement. The first half of the quote sits “behind bars,” obscured by the stalks of wilted sunflowers, while the second half is festooned with vibrant yellow blossoms. Fannie’s portrait hovers above a trio of her iconic yellow voter registration buses—which are also designed to be reminiscent of other Civil Rights Movement buses in the American South, including Rosa Parks’ famous bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
Colophon reads:
Fannie Lou Hamer (1917 – 1977) was the youngest of 20 children born to Mississippi sharecroppers, and was picking cotton by age six. At 13, since she was literate, she became the plantation’s record keeper. Married in 1944, she continued plantation work with her husband. In 1961, Hamer was subjected by a white doctor to a hysterectomy without her consent, while undergoing surgery for a uterine tumor. Forced sterilization of Black women was so widespread it was dubbed a “Mississippi appendectomy.”
Starting in 1962, Hamer organized buses to register thousands of Black voters in Sunflower County, Mississippi. They faced continued voter suppression, a $100 fine for a bus that was too yellow, extortion, threats and assaults — and Hamer was fired from the plantation. In 1963, after she ran a literacy workshop to help Black voters overcome racist poll tests, police arrested her and beat her nearly to death. Nevertheless, she ran for Congress in 1964 and helped organize the Freedom Summer voter registration drive in Sunflower County. At the Democratic National Convention later that year, she co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an integrated group of activists who openly challenged the legality of Mississippi’s all-white, segregated delegation. Through it all, Hamer kept campaigning, while signing hyms and traditional spirituals to keep up morale among her followers. Today she is heralded as a civil rights icon, yet the refrain of her famous words is still familiar to the choir: “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Postcard size: 5 x 8 inches
PLEASE NOTE: this oversized postcard requires extra postage. It mails at the regular letter rate (currently 49 cents) within the U.S.
PAPER FINISH: this postcard is made from paper with a smooth, eggshell finish. If you write on it, we recommend using either a ballpoint pen or some form of permanent, smear-proof ink.
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This original artwork is copyright Chandler O’Leary and Jessica Spring 2018. Copyright is not transferable with the sale of this piece. The buyer is not entitled to reproduction rights.
WA state residents are subject to sales tax.
This postcard will ship flat in a protective mailer, via the United States Postal Service.
