Fannie Lou Hamer

Early life

Fannie Lou Townsend was born on October 6, 1917, in Mississippi, the youngest of twenty children of sharecroppers Jim and Ella Townsend. The family soon moved to Sunflower County in the Delta. She began picking cotton at about six and left school after the sixth grade to work full time. Because she could read and write, she later became the timekeeper on the Marlow plantation near Ruleville, where she and her husband, Perry "Pap" Hamer, whom she married in 1944, worked as sharecroppers.

In 1961, during a hospital stay for a uterine tumor, she was given a hysterectomy without her informed consent. The National Women's History Museum notes that this practice was so common in the state that it was called a "Mississippi appendectomy."

Registering to vote

In August 1962 Hamer went to a meeting held by SNCC organizers in Ruleville. On August 31 she was among eighteen local people who rode a bus to the Sunflower County courthouse in Indianola to register. She was the first to go into the registrar's office and failed the literacy test. When the plantation owner demanded she withdraw her application and she refused, he made her leave. Days later shots were fired into the house where she was staying. She passed the test in January 1963.

SNCC and Winona

Hamer became a SNCC field secretary. Her singing and speaking drew others in. In June 1963, travelling with other activists on a trip tied to a citizenship-school workshop, she was arrested in Winona, Mississippi, and severely beaten in the jail. The beating left her with lasting injuries, including kidney damage.

The Freedom Democrats

In 1964 Hamer helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an open alternative to the state's whites-only Democratic Party, and ran for Congress. At the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City she testified before the Credentials Committee on August 22 about the violence she had suffered for trying to vote. President Lyndon Johnson called a press conference that pulled the live coverage away, but networks broadcast her testimony later that evening. The party offered the MFDP two at-large seats. Hamer and the delegation rejected the compromise and demanded full recognition.

In 1965 she joined Annie Devine and Victoria Gray in challenging the seating of Mississippi's congressional delegation. In 1968 she was seated as a delegate at the Democratic convention in Chicago.

Fighting poverty

Hamer turned increasingly to hunger in the Delta. She testified to a Senate subcommittee on poverty in 1967, started a "pig bank" with the National Council of Negro Women, and in 1969 founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative, which grew to nearly seven hundred acres. In 1971 she helped establish the National Women's Political Caucus. She died of breast cancer on March 14, 1977.

Legacy

The King Institute records Martin Luther King Jr.'s view that her testimony educated the nation. Her friend and fellow SNCC organizer Charles McLaurin credited her with inspiring many others to join the movement.