Fannie Lou Hamer - was born on October 6, 1917 in Montgomery County, Mississippi. Fannie was an outspoken civil rights leader and veteran Mississippi voter rights worker. Mrs. Hamer was the youngest of twenty children. After reaching the sixth grade at the age of 12, she dropped out of school to work on the cotton plantations of the Delta. After her attempt to register to vote in 1962, [the plantation owner] demanded she retract her application or face eviction. Mrs. Hamer refused and was immediately kicked off his land. When she moved into town to stay with a family, white men pumped 16 shots into the house where she was staying, barely missing the occupants. Despite threats and violence, her spirit was unbowed, and her voice became more powerful and influential.

She helped organize Mississippi’s Freedom Summer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Fannie Lou Hammer is known widely for her speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. She suffered immensely because of her work for voting rights, it was at the convention where she described one incident in which after attending a workshop in Winona, Mississippi in 1963, she was falsely arrested along with two others by police. Hamer was beaten so badly with a blackjack in a cell by other inmates at the orders of police that she suffered permanent kidney damage. Fannie Lou Hamer died on March 14, 1977 in Mound Bayou, Mississippi at age 59.

Did You Know?

In 1964, Mrs. Hamer helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). During her testimony in front of the Credentials Committee at the Democratic Party’s national convention in Atlantic City, President Johnson staged an impromptu press conference for fear of the power of her story. Describing her brutal treatment at the hands of the Mississippi state police, she asked the committee, “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we…[are] threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”