Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977), American civil rights activist who became a national figure in 1964 with a speech to the Democratic National Convention in which she recounted the voter discrimination and violence against blacks in her home state of Mississippi. Hamer became a national symbol of the participation of poor Southern blacks in the civil rights movement.

Born Fannie Lou Townsend in Montgomery County, Mississippi, she was the last of 20 children in a family of sharecroppers. She began chopping and picking cotton as a child on a plantation in the Mississippi Delta. In 1944 she became a recordkeeper on a plantation, and the next year she married Perry Hamer, a fellow plantation worker. She lived and worked there until 1962 when she was fired because she attempted to register to vote. She and her family were also forced to move from the plantation. In 1963 Hamer did register to vote and committed herself to full-time civil rights activism. She began working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), organizing voter registration campaigns in the Mississippi Delta. Hamer was arrested several times, and in June 1963 she was severely beaten while in jail.

In 1964 white members of the Democratic Party in Mississippi continued the tradition of refusing to accept blacks in their delegation to the national party convention, where Lyndon Johnson would be nominated for president. In response, Hamer and others formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), an integrated party in which she was the vice chairperson. The MFDP sent 68 delegates to the national convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to challenge the white Democrats' right to represent Mississippi.

Hamer recounted for the convention the harassment that she and other blacks experienced when trying to register to vote in Mississippi. Specifically, she testified in a nationally televised interview about her experiences with police brutality. President Johnson, afraid that Hamer's testimony would inspire support for the MFDP, gave a live address that interrupted the television broadcast of her testimony. Johnson was unhappy that the controversy surrounding the MFDP challenge was marring his nomination. Led by him, Democratic party officials offered the black Mississippians two convention seats. Hamer and the MFDP, however, rejected the compromise offer and went home. The MFDP challenge resulted in a pledge from the Democratic Party not to seat delegates to the 1968 national convention who had been chosen through racially discriminatory means. It also made Hamer a national celebrity.

After 1964, Hamer continued to work for black voting rights and black candidates for public office in Mississippi. She also founded social service organizations and initiated economic development efforts, including the Freedom Farms Corporation, which was established in 1969 to help poor families raise food and livestock.