Born October 6, 1917, in Montgomery
County, Mississippi, Fannie Lou Hamer was the granddaughter of a slave
and the youngest of 20 children. Her parents were sharecroppers. Sharecropping,
or "halfing," as it is sometimes called, is a system of farming whereby
workers are allowed to live on a plantation in return for working the land.
When the crop is harvested, they split the profits in half with the plantation
owner. Sometimes the owner pays for the seed and fertilizer, but usually
the sharecropper pays those expenses out of his half. It's a hard way way
to make a living and sharecroppers generally are born poor, live poor,
and die poor.
At age six, Fannie Lou began helping her
parents in the cotton fields. By the time she was twelve, she was forced
to drop out of school and work full time to help support her family. Once
grown, she married another sharecropper named Perry "Pap" Hamer.
On August 31, 1962, Mrs. Hamer decided she
had had enough of sharecropping. Leaving her house in Ruleville, MS she
and 17 others took a bus to the courthouse in Indianola, the county seat,
to register to vote. On their return home, police stopped their bus. They
were told that their bus was the wrong color. Fannie Lou and the others
were arrested and jailed.
After being released from jail, the plantation
owner paid the Hamers a visit and told Fannie Lou that if she insisted
on voting, she would have to get off his land - even though she had been
there for eighteen years. She left the plantation that same day. Ten days
later, night riders fired 16 bullets into the home of the family with whom
she had gone to stay.
Mrs. Hamer began working on welfare and
voter registration programs for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
On June 3, 1963, Fannie Lou Hamer and other
civil rights workers arrived in Winona, MS by bus. They were ordered off
the bus and taken to Montgomery County Jail. The story continues "...Then
three white men came into my room. One was a state highway policeman (he
had the marking on his sleeve)... They said they were going to make me
wish I was dead. They made me lay down on my face and they ordered two
Negro prisoners to beat me with a blackjack. That was unbearable. The first
prisoner beat me until he was exhausted, then the second Negro began to
beat me. I had polio when I was about six years old. I was limp. I was
holding my hands behind me to protect my weak side. I began to work my
feet. My dress pulled up and I tried to smooth it down. One of the policemen
walked over and raised my dress as high as he could. They beat me until
my body was hard, 'til I couldn't bend my fingers or get up when they told
me to. That's how I got this blood clot in my eye - the sight's nearly
gone now. My kidney was injured from the blows they gave me on the back."
Mrs Hamer was left in the cell, bleeding
and battered, listening to the screams of Ann Powder, a fellow civil rights
worker, who was also undergoing a severe beating in another cell. She overheard
white policemen talking about throwing their bodies into the Big Black
River where they would never be found.
In 1964, presidential elections were being
held. In an effort to focus greater national attention on voting discrimination,
civil rights groups created the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP).
This new party sent a delegation, which included Fannie Lou Hamer, to Atlantic
City, where the Democratic Party was holding its presidential convention.
Its purpose was to challenge the all-white Mississippi delegation on the
grounds that it didn't fairly represent all the people of Mississippi,
since most black people hadn't been allowed to vote.
Fannie Lou Hamer spoke to the Credentials
Committee of the convention about the injustices that allowed an all-white
delegation to be seated from the state of Mississippi. Although her live
testimony was pre-empted by a presidential press conference, the national
networks aired her testimony, in its entirety, later in the evening. Now
all of America heard of the struggle in Mississippi's delta.
A compromise was reached that gave voting
and speaking rights to two delegates from the MFDP and seated the others
as honored guests. The Democrats agreed that in the future no delegation
would be seated from a state where anyone was illegally denied the vote.
A year later, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights
Act.
