Hamer, Fannie Lou

Source:

 African American National Biography

Hamer, Fannie Lou

(6 Oct. 1917–14 Mar. 1977),

civil rights activist, was born Fannie Lou Townsend in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the twentieth child of Lou Ella (maiden name unknown) and Jim Townsend, sharecroppers. When Hamer was two, the family moved to Sunflower County, where they lived in abject poverty. Even when they were able to rent land and buy stock, a jealous white neighbor poisoned the animals, forcing the family back into sharecropping. Hamer began picking cotton when she was six; she eventually was able to pick three to four hundred pounds a day, earning a penny a pound. Because of poverty she was forced to leave school at age twelve, barely able to read and write. She married Perry “Pap” Hamer in 1944. The couple adopted two daughters. For the next eighteen years Fannie Lou Hamer worked first as a sharecropper and then as a timekeeper on the plantation of B. D. Marlowe.

Fannie Lou Hamer at the Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey, August 1964. (Library of Congress.)

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Hamer appeared destined for a routine life of poverty, but two events in the early 1960s led her to become a political activist. When she was hospitalized for the removal of a uterine tumor in 1961, the surgeons performed a hysterectomy without her consent. In August 1962, still angry and bitter over the surgery, she went to a meeting in her hometown of Ruleville to hear James Forman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). After hearing their speeches on the importance of voting, she and seventeen others went to the courthouse in Indianola to try to register. They were told they could only enter the courthouse two at a time to be given the literacy test, which they all failed. On the trip back to Ruleville the group was stopped by the police and fined one hundred dollars for driving a bus that was the wrong color. Hamer subsequently became the group's leader. B. D. Marlowe called on her that evening and told her she had to withdraw her application to register. Hamer refused and was ordered to leave the plantation. Because Marlowe threatened to confiscate their belongings, Pap was compelled to work on the plantation until the harvest season was finished. For a time, Hamer stayed with various friends and relatives, and segregationist night riders shot into some of the homes where she was staying. Nevertheless, she remained active in the civil rights movement, serving as a field secretary for SNCC, working for voter registration, advocating welfare programs, and teaching citizenship classes.

Hamer gained national attention when she appeared before the credentials committee of the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), an organization attempting to unseat the state's regular, all-white delegation. Speaking as a delegate and cochair of the MFDP, she described atrocities inflicted on blacks seeking the right to vote and other civil rights. She spoke of the abuse she had suffered at the Montgomery County Jail, where white Mississippi law enforcement officers forced black inmates to beat her so badly that she had no feeling in her arms. Hamer and several others had been arrested for attempting to integrate the “whites only” section of the bus station in Winona, Mississippi, during the return trip from a voter registration training session in South Carolina. After giving her dramatic testimony, she wept before the committee. Although her emotional appeal generated sympathy for the plight of blacks in Mississippi among the millions watching on television, the committee rejected the MFDP's challenge.

That same year Hamer traveled to Ghana, Guinea, Nigeria, and several other African nations at the request and expense of those governments. Still, her primary interest was in helping the people of the Mississippi Delta. She lectured across the country, raising money and organizing. In 1965 she ran as an MFDP candidate for Congress, saying she was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” While many civil rights leaders abandoned grassroots efforts, she remained committed to organizing what she called “everyday” people in her community, frequently saying she preferred to face problems at home rather than run from them. In 1969 she launched the Freedom Farm Cooperative to provide homes and food for deprived families, white as well as black, in Sunflower County. The cooperative eventually acquired 680 acres. She remained active, however, at the national level. In 1971 she was elected to the steering committee of the National Women's Political Caucus, and the following year she supported the nomination of Sissy Farenthold as vice president in an address to the Democratic National Convention.

After a long battle with breast cancer, Hamer died at the all-black Mound Bayou Hospital, thirty miles from Ruleville. Civil rights leaders Andrew Young, Julian Bond, and Eleanor Holmes Norton attended her funeral.

This entry is taken from the American National Biography and is published here with the permission of the American Council of Learned Societies.

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