Fannie Lou Hamer
Fannie Lou Hamer[edit]
submitted by Arlyn Ilgenfritz
On October 6, 1917 Fannie Lou Hammer was the last of twenty children born to sharecroppers Jim and Lou Ella Townsend. While this industry is considered a step up from the slavery that her grandparents endured, it left her family, as well as the other families who lived by the same means, with little workable means of propelling themselves out of a state of poverty. The system works as follows: a family lives on the plantation of a white farmer. They work the land, farm the crops, and split the gains with the land owner, keeping half for themselves and handing half over. This is the way in which Fannie was raised.
She began working alongside her family in the cotton fields at age 6. By her 13th birthday, she was picking over 200 pounds of cotton a day. Her family saved as much as they could in order to buy a farm that they would be able to work and own themselves. Unfortunately, the white neighbor poisoned their animals to keep them from being successful. At the age of two, her family moved to Ruleville, Mississippi, where she resided until her death. Fannie received some level of formal education until the 6th grade. For the next years she continued learning and being instructed about the Bible.
In the 1940s, she married fellow sharecropper Perry Hamer. They both worked on the same plantation, for the Marlow family. While Fannie worked in the fields at first, when her boss figured out that she knew how to read and write, she became the plantation time keeper. As a supplement to their income, she and her husband ran a saloon where they served homemade liquor.
Fannie was much more than a sharecropper. She was a highly important actor in the Civil Rights movement. On August 31, 1962, Fannie and other activists went to the Indianola courthouse to register to vote. On the way there, their bus was stopped and all the riders where jailed. Upon returning to her plantation, her boss told her she must decide if she would rather have the right to vote or retain her position of employment. She moved off the plantation immediately. That same week, the house where she and her husband were staying was shot at 16 times.
That same year, she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This group organized sit-ins and other non-violent campaigns in the South to further the campaign for Civil Rights. After attending the first meeting, she concluded that she must register to vote, no matter what the costs. She achieved this goal in 1963. This same year she also became secretary of the SNCC. As part of her position, she helped run voter registration drives to encourage African Americans to pursue the right to vote.
In 1964, she helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDC). In that year, several members of the group went before the white Democratic National convention. Fannie spoke in before the Credentials Committee in a televised speech about the lacking rights of African Americans. She spoke at length about the inability to vote in elections and the extensive taxes and tests administered. Her speech provided two members of MFDC with the right to speak on the floor of the convention. Fannie did not stop there. In her quest for political and social equality, she challenged the Mississippi Congressional Representative for his seat. While the state refused to put her name on the ballot, she still received more votes than the opponent. Unfortunately, this did not earn her a seat in Congress. She served as a member of the Democratic National Committee from Mississippi from 1968 to 1971. In the subsequent years, she sparked vast change within her community, including the formation of many groups promoting equality and education about rights. The goal of all of these organizations was to unify the African American community in a way that would allow them to gain the tools necessary to achieve total equality.
Fannie died of cancer on March 17, 1977 at the age of 59.
http://www.ibiblio.org/sncc/hamer.html
http://www.beejae.com/hamer.htm