Biography fannie lou hamer
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Hamer, Fannie Lou
October 6, to March 14,
When Fannie Lou Hamer testified before the credentials committee of the Democratic National Convention, she told the world about the torture and abuse she experienced in her attempt to register to vote. Martin Luther King wrote that her “testimony educated a nation and brought the political powers to their knees in repentance, for the convention voted never again to seat a delegation that was racially segregated” (King, “Something Happening in Mississippi”).
Born to sharecroppers in Montgomery County, Mississippi, in , Fannie Lou was the youngest of 20 children. She grew up on a Sunflower County plantation and in the mids she married Perry Hamer, a tractor driver on a nearby plantation. For the next 18 years, she worked as a sharecropper and a timekeeper for the plantation owner.
In Robert Moses and other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came to Sunflower County to regist
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Fannie Lou Hamer
American civil rights activist (–)
Fannie Lou Hamer (; néeTownsend; October 6, &#;– March 14, ) was an American voting and women's rights activist, community organizer, and leader of the civil rights movement. She was the vice-chair of the Freedom Democratic Party, which she represented at the Democratic National Convention. Hamer also organized Mississippi's Freedom Summer along with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She was also a co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus, an organization created to recruit, train, and support women of all races who sought election to government offices.[1]
Hamer began her civil rights activism in , continuing it until her health declined nine years later. She was known for her use of spiritual hymns and quotes and her resilience in leading the civil rights movement for black women in Mississippi. She was extorted, threatened, harassed, shot at, and assaulted by racists, including m
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Fannie Lou Hamer
Fannie Lou Hamer sitting on her porch, circa s, Will D. Campbell papper, USM
October 6, – March 14,
Raised in Sunflower County, Mississippi
It was the power of Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer’s singing that first brought her to the attention of SNCC. In August of , eighteen local people from Sunflower County, Mississippi, including Mrs. Hamer, traveled by bus from Ruleville to the courthouse in Indianola. Despite armed vit men milling about the courthouse, the group entered the registrar’s office, intending to fill out the voter registration form as best they could. Mrs. Hamer was the first to enter.
When the group began heading home, the bus&#;an old school bus now used to frakt cotton pickers to the fields&#;was pulled over bygd the Indianola police at the edge of town. The driver was arrested for driving a bus of “the wrong color.” Fear rose among the passengers. But in the midst of the fear and uncertainty, Mrs. Hamer began to sing, raising her powerful vo