Fannie Lou Hamer was an American civil rights activist who first learned she had the right to vote in 1962, more than 40 years after passage of the 19th Amendment.
Her courageous fight to register to vote in Montgomery County, Mississippi led to a lifetime of civil rights work that left her beaten, jailed and turned away from a political process that White America enjoyed freely.
Fannie was born in 1917, the 20th child of sharecropper parents. She started picking cotton at six, and at 12 left school to work in the fields. She and her husband adopted two daughters after a white doctor performed a hysterectomy against her consent, leaving her unable to have children. (This type of forced sterilization was a common practice in Mississippi at the time.)
She first tried to register to vote in August of 1962, and her civil rights work began. In 1964, she helped to organize Freedom Summer, bringing hundreds of college students to the deep South to register Black voters. She formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, pushing to integrate the state’s official Democratic party. She sought out donors and in 1968 bought 200 acres of land in Sunflower County, Mississippi for Black farmers to own collectively. Three years later she helped to found the National Women’s Political Caucus.
But it was her testimony to the 1964 Democratic Party Convention’s credentials committee that earned Fannie Lou Hamer national attention. It’s one of the most powerful speeches ever given about the injustice Black voters face when trying to exercise their guaranteed and lawful right to vote. A testimony lived that resonates with unfinished work today.