Fannie Lou Hamer

It was August 31, 1962, in Indianola, Mississippi.

A forty-four-year-old woman walked into the county courthouse. She wanted to register to vote.

Her name was Fannie Lou Hamer. She was given a reading and writing test. She failed.

Four days earlier, she had gone to her first civil rights meeting, in a church in Ruleville. She would later say that before 1962, she had never heard that Black people could vote.

Soon after, the plantation owner demanded that she withdraw her registration.

She refused. She had not gone down there for him, she said. She had gone down there for herself.

She lost her job. She lost her home.

Fannie Lou Hamer was born on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi. She was the youngest of twenty children. Her parents, Jim and Ella Townsend, were sharecroppers.

The family worked the cotton plantations of Sunflower County. Later, married to Perry Hamer, she spent eighteen years as a sharecropper and timekeeper on a plantation.

On September 10, 1962, sixteen shots were fired into the house where she was staying. She kept going.

In January 1963, she finally passed the test. She could finally vote.

That year, she became a field secretary for SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She was its oldest staff member.

In June 1963, in Winona, Mississippi, she was arrested along with other activists. In jail, police officers beat her. She carried the injuries for the rest of her life.

She testified against them in federal court. They were acquitted.

She kept going still.

In 1964, she co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

On August 22, 1964, in Atlantic City, Fannie Lou Hamer testified before the Credentials Committee of the Democratic National Convention.

President Lyndon B. Johnson hastily called a press conference to draw attention away.

Her party was offered two seats. She refused. They had not come all this way for two seats.

In 1968, she took her seat as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

In 1969, in Sunflower County, she founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative, to fight hunger among poor people, Black and white.

She started with forty acres. She ended with nearly seven hundred.

She died of breast cancer on March 14, 1977.

Her fight was born in a church in Ruleville, among her own people. It was never the fight of one woman alone. This way of standing up together echoes Ubuntu, without being the same thing.

What remains of her is the image of a sharecropper who refused to take her name off a voter roll. And who never backed down again.