Fannie Lou Hamer

American civil rights activist

• Born: October 6, 1917
• Birthplace: Montgomery County, Mississippi
• Died: March 14, 1977
• Place of death: Mound Bayou, Mississippi

Born a child of sharecroppers and a descendant of slaves, Hamer rose to prominence as a fearless and eloquent advocate for African American voting rights and as a leader in the larger Civil Rights movement. Her name became symbolic of the movement.

Early Life

Fannie Lou Hamer (HAY-mur) was born Fannie Lou Townsend in Montgomery County, Mississippi. She was the granddaughter of slaves and the last of twenty children born to James Lee Townsend and Lou Ella Bramlett. Her father was a Baptist preacher and bootlegger, her mother a domestic servant, and both were sharecroppers. The family was very poor; meals often consisted of greens and gravy or bread and onions. They lived in a small wooden house without running water or electricity. When Hamer was six years old, she was offered a reward of canned fish and Cracker Jacks candy from the sharecropper boss if she proved how well she could pick cotton. Excited, she passed the test and ended up joining her siblings and working in the fields twelve to fourteen hours a day.

Hamer attended school for several years, but for blacks the school was open for four winter months only, when field-workers could be spared. Still, she learned to read and write, won spelling bees, and sharpened her quick mind. Tragically, she contracted polio as a child and limped with a disabled leg for the rest of her life.

When Hamer was eleven, her family rented their own land, the first step toward independence, and bought three mules, two cows, a plow, and even a car. Two years later, however, someone, most likely a white neighbor who did not want the family to succeed, poisoned the mules, and the family was forced back to sharecropping. In 1939, Hamer’s father died, and soon after her mother was injured in an accident that deprived her of sight in one eye.

Life’s Work

Hamer married Perry “Pap” Hamer in 1945, and the couple resettled in nearby Sunflower City. They had their own home, with cold running water. They were able to have children of their own, but they took in and later adopted two girls, whom they raised as daughters. Hamer worked three jobs: picking cotton, supervising other field workers, and cleaning the home of the Marlowes, the plantation owners. The third job showed her how the white population lived, with standard amenities in homes of the day.

Life changed for Hamer in 1962. At a meeting conducted by civil rights workers from the North, she learned that African Americans had the right to vote. When the organizers called for people to register, Hamer raised her hand. This was no small decision. Though the law gave people the right to vote regardless of race, across the South there was much intimidation. African Americans were beaten, fired from their jobs, or killed if they dared to assert their constitutional rights; often, their property was vandalized and their homes burned. Pap chose not to register, but Hamer, knowing that registering to vote could affect her family and its livelihood, followed through on her pledge. On August 31, 1962, she was one of seventeen African Americans who met activists in the nearby town of Indianola and boarded a bus to take them to register. Voting officials asked the group to copy out a section of the Mississippi state constitution and explain its meaning. Hamer and the others, predictably, failed the test. On the return trip, the bus was stopped by police, ostensibly for being “too yellow,” and the driver was arrested and fined thirty dollars.

News of Hamer’s attempt to register spread quickly, and Pap’s boss threatened to evict the family from the land they worked. The Hamers moved out of their home and stayed with friends in Ruleville. Targeted intimidation ensued, including gunshots in their direction, and the Hamers left the county. Voting rights workers learned of Hamer’s courage as well, and they asked her to speak at a meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Nashville, Tennessee. Prior to this invitation, Hamer had never left her area of northern Mississippi. In Nashville, she addressed groups and spoke with reporters. When she returned to Ruleville, Pap was fired from his job, and the Hamers lost their home. Hamer took a job with the SNCC, making speeches, recruiting volunteers, and helping to build the organization.

In January of 1963, at the age of forty-five, Hamer finally passed the test and became a registered voter. Her struggle was far from over, however. Six months later, on June 9, she and a group of fellow activists were at a bus station in Winona, Tennessee, traveling home from a meeting. The entire group was arrested and beaten brutally with leather straps in jail. The event left Hamer scarred for life, but it galvanized her resolve. The group sued the officers who had beaten them, but an all-white jury acquitted the defendants on all charges.

As the 1964 presidential elections approached, civil rights workers felt that the Mississippi Democratic Party did not represent their views, so they formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). As a member, Hamer went to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, that summer. The MFDP sought to replace the Mississippi Democratic Party’s all-white delegation. Hamer spoke eloquently, arguing that the state deserved a representatively diverse delegation. The national party rejected the MFDP’s request. Hamer, nevertheless, tried to enter the convention, singing what would become her trademark song, “This Little Light of Mine.” Though ejected, her attempt was covered on the evening news across the nation. Later that year, Hamer ran for Congress, earning thirty thousand votes, not enough to win the race. In 1968, the MFDP was chosen to represent Mississippi Democrats at the national convention, and Hamer was a delegate.

In 1969, Hamer started the Freedom Farm Cooperative and was invited to the White House for a conference on health and nutrition. She also started a child care center for children of single and working mothers, bringing the Head Start program to rural Mississippi. She helped build homes for poor families through Young World Developers. She was awarded honorary degrees from Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C., Howard University in Washington, D.C., Morehouse College in Atlanta, and Columbia College in Chicago.

Plagued by her earlier fight with polio and by the injuries she suffered in 1963, Hamer’s poor health, which included diabetes, affected her throughout the late 1960’s and the 1970’s. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1976, the same year that her hometown of Ruleville celebrated Fannie Lou Hamer Day. She died in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, on March 14, 1977, at the age of fifty-nine. United Nations ambassador Andrew Young spoke at her funeral, and she was buried in Ruleville. Her gravestone reads, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Significance

Hamer’s life provides a stark example of personal accomplishments made through sheer will. Rising from the depths of poverty and living with pain through her life, she became a leader of the movement to bring African Americans to the polls. In so doing, she helped to empower a long-oppressed people, and to make them a significant and powerful force in the democratic process and in the shaping of twentieth century American history.

Bibliography

Donovan, Sandy. Fannie Lou Hamer. Chicago: Raintree, 2004. Part of the African American Biographies series for young readers, with short chapters, accessible text, and ample sidebars. Includes generous photographs, a glossary, a simple time line, a short bibliography, and an index.

Haskins, Jim. One More River to Cross: The Stories of Twelve Black Americans. New York: Scholastic, 1992. Targeted for adolescents and young adults, this volume includes a sixteen-page chapter on Hamer that is both readable and informative. It sets her among civil rights leaders such as Ralph Bunche, Shirley Chisholm, and Malcolm X. The book includes a bibliography and an index.

Lee, Chana Kai. For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. A scholarly, comprehensive, and unsentimental rendering of Hamer’s life and achievements. Includes several photographs, exhaustive notes, a bibliography, and an index.

Mills, Kay. This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. New York: Plume, 1994. At 390 pages, a comprehensive and heartfelt account, complete with chronology, a list of individuals important in Hamer’s life and work, extensive notes, and an index.

Olson, Lynne. Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830-1970. New York: Scribner, 2001. A fascinating account that includes Hamer in a parade of women, black and white, who kept the Civil Rights movement moving forward. Olson profiles more than sixty women, going beyond prominent figures like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Rosa Parks to place in context more obscure figures such as Mary Burks, Daisy Bates, and Penny Patch. The book provides plenty of photographs, endnotes, a bibliography, and an index.

Rubel, David. Fannie Lou Hamer: From Sharecropping to Politics. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Silver Burdett Press, 1990. A juvenile biography written with lively prose and plenty of background information about life in the South in the mid-twentieth century. The book has photographs, illustrations, and maps. Includes a timetable of events, an index, suggested readings, and an introduction by former U.N. ambassador Andrew Young.