By Alexie Villegas Zotomayor
Variety Features Editor

“EVERY woman has a story; every woman has a struggle. And that struggle makes you a great leader. The thing that cripples us is…shame, insecurity. Don’t be ashamed. Be proud.”
This was the message conveyed by Department of Public Safety’s first female commissioner, Rebecca Miller Warfield, in commemorating the struggles of women activists in the civil rights movement, specifically, Fanny Lou Hamer.
Warfield asked the audience: “Have you ever wondered how history happened? How change happens? It happens one person at a time; it happens one woman at a time.”
“If a woman’s destiny is determined at birth,” Warfield began, “then society dictates that we must be good daughters, good friends, loyal wives and compassionate caretakers. And maybe then, maybe then we will be great women. What about great leaders?”
Warfield said, “Women are the backbone of society, the backbone of the family. The thing that makes us great women, makes us great leaders. And you can’t discuss women, empowerment, education, and civil rights unless we discuss one woman — Fanny Lou Hamer.”
Hamer, a native of Mississippi, was the youngest of 20 children, and was described by Warfield as “a good daughter, a good wife and educated — sixth grade education.” And in 1962, Warfield said, Hamer decided that she was tired of being sick and tired. From discussing Hamer’s biography, Warfield segued into discussing the people of the commonwealth’s attempt at determining their relationship with the United States and tried to find parallels in the African Americans’ struggles for recognition of their rights and the Chamorro people’s decision to forge a closer relationship with the United States.
At the time that Hamer was making her decision, Warfield said, the people of the commonwealth were preparing to determine what their relationship with the United States was to be.
“So in 1962, when Fanny Lou Hamer met with civil rights workers to help fight for our freedom, the people of the CNMI were setting up their committee and choosing delegates so they could approach the U.S. president and the U.S. Congress and decide what kind of nation they wanted to be under the United States umbrella,” said Warfield.
Warfield noted that “our struggle as African Americans to become full citizens, and your struggle as people of the Marianas to gain independence and prosperity occurred simultaneously. But the CNMI was working toward integration with one of the most brutally segregated nations in the world. You as brown people were joining a nation in which other brown people were considered less than human.”
She also pointed out that the plight and struggle for equality and legal recognition in the United States by African Americans revealed the cruelty of a political system that indulged in government-sanctioned discrimination. She said, “The blood and determination of African Americans and their… supporters forced the United States to redefine what it meant to be part of America.”
Warfield again spoke of Hamer’s realization that she was “tired of being sick and tired and she decided she wanted to do something silly — register to vote.” Warfield told how Hamer was shot at many times as were the people she stayed with just because she had made that decision. But Hamer, Warfield said, did not give up. However, Hamer was arrested, jailed, and beaten up in a jail cell in Mississippi.
Citing the hardships — and the intense situation in the U.S. — that Hamer and the other African Americans had to go through in pursuit of becoming first class citizens, Warfield told the crowd, “This was the nation that you people of the Northern Marianas were joining.”
Hamer, Warfield said, was “one woman — a good mother, good daughter, loyal wife, with a sixth grade education who set the country on its heel using plain talk and heart.”
Proud of Hamer’s examples, Warfield said that she once sat at the feet of people whom Hamer inspired.
She then acknowledged that on Saipan, there are also Fanny Lou Hamers and mentioned Rep. Cinta M. Kaipat, Sen. Maria T. Pangelinan, Judge Ramona V. Manglona, and Maria Santos and said “lend a hand to your sisters!”
‘’I didn’t get here all by myself. I am standing on the shoulders of a lot of women. No one told me that I could be a great leader,” said Warfield.