It began with a song – adapted words from Stevie Wonder’s “Living in the City.”

“A girl was born in hard-times Mississippi, surrounded by four walls that weren’t so pretty.
Her parents, Jim and Ella Townsend, gave her love and affection to keep her strong, moving in the right direction.
She was living just enough for Ruleville, Mississippi, and for the greater Mississippi Delta.
That girl was Fannie Lou Hamer.”

The musical adaptation was half-spoken, half-sung by J. Janice Coleman, a quilter, storyteller and English professor at Alcorn State. Coleman was visiting the Mississippi University for Women on behalf of the Women’s College, and the Gail P. Gunter Multi-Purpose Room was crowded with faculty, students and sewing enthusiasts.

On the table in front of Coleman was a quilt with the life-size portrait of Fannie Lou Hamer, a piece that she said took her more than a year to make. Displayed on the table next to Coleman were pillows and a giant purse – a “Fannie” pack. Hanging on a display rack was a cotton sack – “Fannie’s Cotton Picking Sack.”

Coleman said that each item was inspired by the life of Hamer, a voting and women’s rights activist and leader of the civil rights movement. The lecture continued with Coleman telling the story of Hamer’s first time picking cotton at the young age of 6.

“She was walking along a gravel road and singing nursery rhymes,” Coleman said. “A white man in a truck pulled up beside her and asked if she knew how to pick cotton. He told her that if she picked 30 pounds, she could get treats from his store – Cracker Jack, candy, whatever she wanted.”

Hamer picked 30 pounds and got her reward. The next week, he told her to pick 60 pounds. Thinking the same deal applied, she did – but, according to Coleman, this time she got nothing. Coleman says this was when Hamer realized she had been tricked into a labor that would define her life.

“Cotton became the fabric of her life,” Coleman said. “Cotton dresses, cotton fields, cotton pickers, cotton sacks, cotton quilts, even cottonmouth snakes slithering. There was no cotton candy.”

Coleman gave the lecture, titled “Three Years in the Life of Fannie Lou Hamer,” on Hamer and her work as a quilter as part of the Women’s College Colloquium Speaker Series. Coleman, a native of Mound Bayou, sews mainly from scraps and remnants to reflect the past and present life and culture of the Mississippi Delta. Offering questions for the event was sophomore communications major Merry MacLellan.

When MacLellan asked what the “Three Years” she was referencing in her title, Coleman said that 1962, ’63 and ’64 were the years in Hamer’s life she most wanted to represent in her work.

“She didn’t even know Black people could vote until 1962,” she said. “When the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee came and educated her, she joined the civil rights movement and never returned to fieldwork again.”

Coleman said in 1963, after successfully completing a voter registration program in Charleston, South Carolina, Hamer and several other Black women were arrested in Winona, Mississippi. At the jailhouse, white jailers beat Hamer and the other women, leaving her with lifelong injuries.

“After that, she said, ‘Ain’t nothing gonna turn me around,’” Coleman said. “She realized that if somebody was willing to kill her to keep her from voting, then it must have been a very important thing to do.”

In 1964, Hamer’s national reputation soared as she co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, or MFDP, which challenged the local Democratic Party’s efforts to block Black participation. That same year, Hamer helped organize Freedom Summer, and she announced her candidacy for the Mississippi House of Representatives but was barred from the ballot.

Coleman considered for months how to best represent Hamer’s bravery and struggle. She points out her choice to give Hamer lipstick and nail polish, saying that she felt it was only right to represent the inner beauty of Hamer’s work and life.

“I was thinking about her abused and broken body,” she said. “I was wondering, Do I depict that on this quilt? She walks with a permanent limp, do I show that? I knew the answer. Of course not.”

Coleman said that flags represent Hamer’s patriotism and her love for America. She notes that she often includes the pinwheel pattern in her work to remind viewers to keep moving forward despite difficulties. She also points out the microphone with its green button, referencing Hamer’s many speeches.

“I wanted her speaking,” she said. “I didn’t want to silence her voice. The microphone has a green button … that means it’s on.”

Coleman said she would spend 16 hours a day creating the piece, which was funded by a grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission. Balancing her duties as a professor and quilter isn’t easy, and she mostly quilts over summer breaks and holidays.
When asked just how long she had been sewing, Coleman said she had sewn all her life, but she has developed her patchwork art style over the course of 30 years. She views quilting not only as a vintage craft but as a versatile, academically significant medium.

“I think I might have started in the womb,” she joked. “I don’t ever remember a time when I was not sewing. Quilting Fannie Lou Hamer represents a progression of my sewing … With my scraps, I demonstrate the transformation between what they were and the art they have become.”

In closing, Coleman encouraged audience members to consider taking the scraps from their lives (old T-shirts, faded jeans, aged coverlets, threadbare sheets, rags, etc.) as materials to create their own patchwork art. Coleman said these repurposed items can become priceless when they become part of documenting your family history.

Jill Drouillard, director of the Women’s College, said that the theme for the spring 2026 colloquium series is “Women and the Arts” and honors the Women’s College’s inaugural study-away trip to New York City with MUW’s Art Department.

The Women’s College will continue its celebration of Women’s History Month with a talk from author Elise Smith on Tuesday in the Gail P. Gunter Room at MUW’s Fant Library. The talk will begin at 12:30, and Smith will discuss her book, “Southern Women, Southern Landscapes: Cultural Reflections in the Garden, 1870-1890.”

To view more of Coleman’s works, visit her online museum, the Mississippi Delta Shotgun Sewn Arts Museum, at https://mdssam.omeka.net.

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