Representing the 60s: Fannie Lou Hamer and Ron Kovic

            History has a tendency to become more removed and pixelated when studied based on events and dates, rather than the collection of individual lives. The biographical approach, where lives are studied to determine the real face of movements, counters this problem well in the Lives of Fannie Lou Hamer and Ron Kovic. Even though someone like Martin Luther King Jr. would help us understand what happened in the civil rights movement in the South easier, Fannie Lou Hamer is a better representation of how the actual change was caused by grassroots activism and interest. Similarly, Ron Kovic’s life forms almost a perfect mirror for the experience of the country from Jingoism in the 1950’s to the disillusionment during the initial and middle stages of the Vietnam war, to the anti-war activism of the later parts of the Vietnam war.

Ron Kovic

            Kovic starts his life as a normal white boy from rural New York state: fiercely patriotic, enchanted by war and war heroes, and generally living life to its best with little fear of anything except the communists. He ends his life differently: full of disillusionment, denouncing Jingoism and war, and physically broken. This parallels the American experience with the anti-war movement and the Vietnam war at large. Kovic can aid in understanding the anti-war movement from a ground-up perspective and assist us in understanding it as a logical outcome of the things that came before it, rather than simply an isolated event.

            The first aspect of Kovic’s life that helps us understand the larger history of the time is his pre-Vietnam patriotism. He was a normal American middle-class white boy during his childhood; he wanted to serve in the military as a Marine, hated the communists, and mourned that America “wasn’t first anymore” when the Soviets launched Sputnik.[1] Like most Americans, at least white middle-class men, Kovic’s patriotism during his life was almost jingoistic, believing that the Army recruiters that came to his school were “John Wayne and Audie Murphy,” and generally idolizing service to his country in the form of joining the Marines.[2]

            This Jingoism was shattered for Kovic, as it was for America at large, during the Vietnam war. This process started for Kovic in the training camp, where he was traumatized by the drill instructor and the training process, as is seen during his stream of consciousness writing.[3] However, he was still a patriot, writing that the anti-war protestors “would pay” for their actions once he learns of the protest movement.[4] But his experience in Vietnam, specifically in the hospital where he was treated as if he was on an assembly line, “changed all that.”[5] This again parallels the larger American experience, where the majority of Americans shifted from the pro-war stance of the early 60s to the anti-war movement of the middle and late ’60s. A prevalent issue when studying history is that a certain event or development would be treated as simply happening, without much attention on what actually caused it. Studying Ron Kovic’s life helps to prevent that.

Fannie Lou Hammer

            When studying the civil rights movement, or any historical event, it is easy to overlook the people on the ground creating change in favor of the national leaders. When attempting to understand the civil rights movement, the most important part of Fannie Lou Hamer’s life to focus on is the emphasis that her life places on local activism. It also illuminates the role of religion in grassroots activism as contrasted to the larger civil rights movement.

            Hamer started her career, which would eventually touch the powerful President Johnson, as a simple sharecropper in the South, dissatisfied by her economic and political situation. Showing this dissatisfaction, Hamer, in her speech “I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired,” commented that she and a group of African Americans tried to become “first-class citizens” by trying to get registered to vote but were turned away after an unfair test and had their lives ransacked by whites. This experience was common in the South during the early 1960s but it is too often overlooked - African Americans were mobilizing not because of the work of national leaders, but because they themselves had issues in their lives that they believed could be fixed. Hamer’s life helps us see this detail more closely. While civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X certainly had a massive impact, focusing on them loses this deeper level of granularity.

            In addition to helping historians make sense of the grassroots aspect of the civil rights movement, Hamer also provides insight into the use of religion as a spring of inspiration in her pursuit of civil rights, and also as a tool to legitimize herself to her audience and to convince them of her argument. Her usage of Biblical references is even shown in her first recorded speech, “I Don’t Mind My Light Shining,” where there is a Biblical quote in almost every sentence. She even encourages the audience to “open [their]… New Testaments when [they]… get home…,” showing a personal connection to her audience that most national activists did not display. This gives us insight into the more local and grassroots part of the civil rights movement: regular African Americans from the South were inspired by their religion and by the national leaders of the movement to pursue a better life for all African Americans.

Conclusion

            The biographical approach to history offers a more detailed and nuanced account of history. In the life of Ron Kovic, we can see that his life mirrored that of the nation at large. He experienced firsthand the Jingoism of America pre-Vietnam, its disillusionment in the war, and the anti-war activism during the later parts of the war. On the other hand, the life of Fannie Lou Hamer powerfully demonstrates that local activism and local concerns were the true driving force behind the civil rights movement, not the national leaders and movements that we focus on today.

[1] Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July (Canongate, 2019), 74.

[2] Ibid., 89.

[3] Ibid., 104.

[4] Ibid., 147.

[5] Ibid.