Hamer, Fannie Lou, 1917–1977, U.S. voting rights activist and civil rights leader, b. Montgomery County, Miss. Fannie Lou Hamer was the first woman from Mississippi—and the first African American since the Reconstruction period—to be a delegate at a national party convention. Born to sharecroppers, she grew up on a plantation and in the mid-1940s she married Perry Hamer, a tractor driver. For the next two decades, she worked as a sharecropper. In 1962, she was enlisted to work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to register Black voters. The following year, Hamer became the oldest employee at SNCC and worked as a field secretary for the organization, during which time she traveled across the South encouraging Black people to vote. In 1964, Hamer helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to challenge Mississippi's anti-civil rights delegation to the Democratic National Convention (DNC). On August 22, she appeared before the convention's credentials committee and talked about the challenges she had encountered when registering to vote.
After running for Congress in 1964 and 1965, Hamer continued to work for political and civil rights causes, including the Freedom Democrats, Head Start programs, and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign. She was also a main factor behind several poverty programs in Mississippi. Hamer served as a delegate to the 1968 DNC. The following year, Hamer helped found the Freedom Farms Cooperative, a nonprofit focused on alleviating hunger among poor Blacks and whites in Mississippi. Widely recognized as an inspirational female leader, Hamer was frequently asked to speak at feminist meetings and events. In 1971, she spoke at the founding of the National Women's Political Caucus. Hamer died of heart failure on March 14, 1977. Her gravestone reads: "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."
Reflecting on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, King thanked "great people" like the "Fannie Lou Hamers" whose "discipline, wise restraint, and majestic courage has led them down a nonviolent course in seeking to establish a reign of justice and a rule of love across this nation of ours." Hamer, like many civil rights leaders, was motivated by religious belief. Although she was only semi-literate, she had committed numerous Bible verses to memory. Hamer framed White Supremacist violence in biblical terms, understanding herself and the activists with whom she worked as "walking through the valley of shadow of death." Her religious faith sustained her and the retaliation she endured throughout her life drove her activism. Despite the myriad challenges Hamer endured as a Black woman living in poverty, she committed herself to helping others. A documentary, Fannie Lou Hamer’s America, told through recordings of Hamer's speeches and interviews, aired on PBS in February, 2022.
See C. K. Lee, For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (1999); K. Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (2007); M. P. Brooks and D. W. Houck, ed. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is (2011); M. P. Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir an Army: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rhetoric of the Black Freedom Movement (2014); C. B. Weatherford, Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement (2015); K. N. Blain, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America (2021).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
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