Fannie Lou Hamer (1917 - 1977)

Sat Oct 06, 1917

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Fannie Lou Hamer, born on this day in 1917, was a community organizer and leader within the civil rights movement. “I’m gonna be moving forward, and if they shoot me, I’m not going to fall back, I’m going to fall 5 feet 4 inches forward.”

Hamer was the co-founder and vice-chair of the Freedom Democratic Party, which she represented at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. 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 wish to seek election to government office.

While having surgery in 1961 to remove a tumor, a 44-year-old Hamer was also given a hysterectomy without consent by a white doctor. Known as a “Mississippi appendectomy”, this was a frequent occurrence under Mississippi’s compulsory, white supremacist sterilization plan to reduce the number of poor black people in the state.

Hamer was threatened, harassed, shot at, and assaulted by white supremacists and police while trying to register for and exercise her right to vote.

During a voter registration drive Hamer participated in, police fined the group because their bus was “too yellow”. When she returned home, her family’s landlord told her that, if didn’t withdraw her voter registration, she would be fired from her job and forced to leave.

On her way back from a SNCC organizing meeting, Hamer was arrested and beaten in custody. She sustained lifelong injuries from the assault, including a blood clot in her eye that left her partially blind.

Hamer later helped and encouraged thousands of African-Americans in Mississippi to become registered voters, and helped hundreds of disenfranchised people in her area through her work in programs like the Freedom Farm Cooperative, formed to subvert state oppression of poor black workers in the agricultural industry.

“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”

- Fannie Lou Hamer