Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer was born on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the youngest of twenty children in a family of sharecroppers, and grew up in Sunflower County in the Delta. She left school after the sixth grade and picked cotton, and because she could read and write she became the timekeeper on the B. D. Marlowe plantation near Ruleville. In 1961 a white doctor removed her uterus without her consent during surgery for a tumor, a procedure known in the state as a "Mississippi appendectomy."

In August 1962 she rode a bus with eighteen others from Ruleville to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to vote, and failed the literacy test. Police stopped the bus and arrested its driver. When she refused the plantation owner's demand that she withdraw her application, she was evicted, and shots were later fired into the house where she was staying. She went to work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, whose organizers had first noticed her singing. On June 9, 1963, police in Winona, Mississippi, arrested her and fellow activists after members of the group sat at a "whites only" lunch counter; she was beaten in jail and left with lasting injuries to her eyes, legs and kidneys.

In 1964 she helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the state's segregated regular delegation, and she ran for Congress that year. At the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City she told the Credentials Committee about her eviction, the Winona beating and the literacy tests, asking, "Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave," and warning, "If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America." President Lyndon Johnson called a news conference during her testimony, and television cut away. Party leaders offered the Freedom Democrats two at-large seats. The delegation turned them down, and Hamer said, "We didn't come all this way for no two seats!" In 1968 she was seated as a delegate from Mississippi.

Her later work turned to land and food. In 1969 she founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative in Sunflower County, buying land with money raised on speaking tours; it grew from forty acres to nearly seven hundred and ran a livestock program called the Pig Bank. On July 10, 1971, she spoke at the founding of the National Women's Political Caucus in Washington, saying, "Nobody's free until everybody's free." She died of breast cancer on March 14, 1977.