Fannie Lou Hamer
Fannie Lou Hamer
Contributed by Sherletta McCaskill
Voting rights activist, community organizer, and leader in the Civil Rights Movement, Fannie Lou Hamer was born on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the youngest of twenty children born to sharecroppers. She grew up working in the cotton fields and left school at a young age to help support her family. Years later, when she attempted to register to vote in 1962, she was fired from her job and forced off the plantation where she had lived and worked for nearly two decades.
That moment changed the course of her life. Hamer began organizing Black voters across Mississippi, despite threats, arrest, and violence. In 1963, she was brutally beaten while jailed for attempting to desegregate a bus terminal. The assault left her with lifelong injuries, but it did not silence her.
As Vice Chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Hamer traveled to the 1964 Democratic National Convention and delivered a nationally televised testimony detailing the violence and intimidation used to prevent Black citizens from voting. Her words exposed the realities of voter suppression to millions of Americans.
Hamer later co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus to recruit and support women of all races seeking public office. Throughout her life, she insisted that political power must include those who had long been excluded. She died on March 14, 1977. Her legacy lives on in every effort to expand and protect the right to vote.