Mutual Aid Has a Black American Blueprint

As we move toward Black History Month, I find myself thinking about Fannie Lou Hamer. often, especially when people talk about mutual aid as if it were a trendy framework. I also find myself wondering why so many people who speak fluently about mutual aid rarely reference her work, credit her strategy, or bring her name into the conversation at all.

So often, when people talk about mutual aid, they reach for models rooted in African, Asian, or Indigenous traditions abroad. And those histories matter deeply. But I think it’s just as important to name that there are phenomenal mutual aid blueprints born right here in the United States. Not only within the Black Panther Party, which we reference the most, but through other Black American organizers whose work laid foundations we are still standing on. Our history of collective survival, land stewardship, food sovereignty, and community care is not borrowed. It is homegrown. And too often, we skip past those names and those models as if they don’t exist.

As a Minnesotan, in yet another moment of unrest, I am thinking about my own community members. People I know. People I organize alongside. People who care deeply about resistance.

I am also thinking about sustainability and strategy. About what it takes to keep people fed, housed, and grounded over time. About how movements survive beyond the moment that sparks them.

This feels like a good time to sit with Fannie Lou Hamer’s work.

As we move through this moment, I want to encourage you to truly sit with her life and organizing. To understand how profound and visionary she was during one of the most deeply troubling periods for Black Americans.

I love reading the work of those organizing from lived experience in real time.

Fannie Lou Hamer was born in 1917 in Mississippi, the youngest of twenty children in a family of sharecroppers. From early childhood, her life was shaped by labor in the fields. Sharecropping controlled everything. Where families lived. What they ate. Whether children were safe. Whether rest was possible. White landowners held that power deliberately, using housing and employment to keep Black families dependent and vulnerable. That reality followed her into organizing.

In 1962, when Hamer joined others in an attempt to register to vote, she understood the danger. Shortly after, she was fired from the plantation where she lived and worked. Eviction was not incidental. It was a common tactic used by white landowners to destabilize Black families and threaten their lives. Losing housing often meant losing food, safety, and community all at once. It was meant to send a clear message. Political participation would cost you everything.

Not long after, while traveling with others who were organizing, Hamer was arrested. While incarcerated, she was brutally beaten by Mississippi police and by fellow inmates acting under police orders. The assault left her with permanent injuries. Kidney damage. Impaired vision. Chronic pain that stayed with her for the rest of her life. The violence was intentional. It was meant to break her body and warn anyone else who might consider resisting.

She survived it. And after that, she did not step away.

Her organizing deepened. She understood that asking people to resist without addressing food, housing, and safety was a setup. She had lived the consequences of that firsthand. Courage alone could not sustain people when eviction, hunger, and violence were always close behind.

Out of that understanding came the Freedom Farms Cooperative.

Hamer knew that as long as Black families were dependent on white landowners for work, housing, and food, they would remain vulnerable to retaliation. Freedom Farms was a way to interrupt that cycle. Land was collectively owned. Food was grown and shared. Families could eat without asking permission. People connected to the movement could survive without being coerced into silence.

It was collective survival.

Freedom Farms focused on stability. On reducing harm so people could remain engaged in the work without being destroyed by it. Hamer understood that access to land and food created room to breathe. It allowed people to make choices with less fear.

This work was not universally embraced.

Hamer was polarizing. She was dark skinned, poor, living rural, extremely opinionated, a womanist, and unapologetic. All of these things were deeply unfavorable, even within her own community, because they threatened power and hierarchy. Some people believed she was doing too much. Some feared retaliation and blamed her for escalating danger. Others wanted her to soften, to compromise, to move more quietly.

She was in community. She organized collectively. She had children. She had a husband. She was not alone.

And still, she carried a vision that many were not ready to hold.

There is a specific kind of loneliness that comes with that. Not isolation, but the experience of seeing clearly and moving anyway. Of building something long term in a moment that rewards urgency over endurance.

I feel that often in my own work here in Minnesota. I am in community. I am supported. I have a strong network. And still, carrying a long range vision for collective care, sustainability, and survival can feel heavy and lonely at times. Being the final executor is lonely. Being the one who holds the responsibility when something fails or succeeds is lonely. Being the one who has to make decisions that others do not want to make is lonely.

It is often not relatable to share this with others, because this is the nature of the Black woman’s burden. The inherited responsibility of feeling accountable for the healing of our culture, our people, and our society. Even when we did not ask for it. Even when we are exhausted. Even when our bodies are telling us to slow down.

I do not think the loneliness leaves unless we leave the work entirely. Or unless we have unlimited resources and the ability to build a team of fifty. And unfortunately, that is not the nature of grassroots work. Like Fannie, it is a small group. It is built from lived experience and struggle. It is shaped by suffering and trying to heal at the same time. It is sustained by people who are carrying too much and still showing up.

That is why you will hear me bring up Fannie Lou Hamer more often.

Not just as a historical figure. Not just as a civil rights icon. But as a blueprint. As someone who organized from the exact conditions she was trying to change. As someone who understood that survival, dignity, and sustainability were not side projects of resistance. They were the resistance.

As we move into Black History Month, I hope we remember her not only for what she endured, but for what she built. For the systems she imagined. For the way she rooted organizing in everyday survival.

Her blueprint is still here.

And if you are going to preach mutual aid, you should uplift her name frequently.

“Mutual Aid Has a Black American Blueprint” was originally published on Zedé’s substack.