In an act of protest, several members of the group sat at the bus station’s whites-only lunch counter. She continued to work as a sharecropper after her 1944 marriage to Perry "Pap" Hamer. In the wake of the Greensboro sit-in at a lunch counter Martin Luther King, Jr. was a social activist and Baptist minister who played a key role in the American civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968. Her appearances were good for fundraising, always a concern for civil rights organizations, and she spent the remainder of the 1960s balancing national activism with her work within Mississippi. Fannie Lou Hamer was an African American civil rights activist who led voting drives and co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Credit: Library of CongressSign up for the American Experience newsletter! The conference was a success, and Hamer left Nashville eager to take on her new role as a community organizer.Pap Hamer had stayed at the Marlow plantation, working through the harvest to pay off the family’s sharecropping debt, but in the fall of 1962 he rejoined his wife and daughters. Hamer was among those who testified before the Credentials Committee. Get kids back-to-school ready with Expedition: Learn! Tracy Sugarman, who spent the summer in Mississippi as both a volunteer and a journalist, accompanied Hamer as she visited Delta churches to encourage parishioners to register to vote. Fannie Lou Hamer, African American civil rights activist, cofounder (in 1964), and vice-chairperson of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which was established as an alternative to the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party. Marlow took possession of the Hamers’ car, as well as the contents of the house they had rented from him, so they started over in Ruleville. King sought equality and human rights for African Americans, the economically disadvantaged and all The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded in 1942, became one of the leading activist organizations in the early years of the American civil rights movement. The party held its own conventions at the precinct, county, and state levels to select a group to send to Atlantic City in August, where they would challenge the seating of the all-white Mississippi delegates at the Democratic National Convention. Get exclusive access to content from our 1768 First Edition with your subscription. In the summer of 1962, however, she made a life-changing decision to attend a protest meeting.
On August 31, 1962, she traveled with 17 others to the county courthouse in Indianola to accomplish this goal. Her book, To Praise Our Bridges: An Autobiography, was published in 1967. Fannie Lou Hamer was born in 1917, the 20th child of Lou Ella and James Lee Townsend, sharecroppers east of the Mississippi Delta. He sent Charles McLaurin, a young activist, to find Hamer and bring her to a SNCC conference at Fisk University in Nashville in the fall of 1962. Voting rights remained a priority, even after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and Hamer took the lead in lawsuits that led to the first elections in which large numbers of black residents of Sunflower County were registered and eligible to vote in 1967. Hamer was elected vice chair of the integrated delegation, which consisted of 64 black members and four white members.The MFDP’s goal was to persuade the convention’s Credentials Committee to seat them as Mississippi representatives. Pap drove Hamer and their daughters to Tallahatchie County, where they stayed with rural relatives for some time before returning to Sunflower County, ready to take up the fight.Her singing on the bus and her willingness to challenge the county registrar had been noticed by local organizers, and SNCC field secretary Bob Moses saw her as a potential leader. Although she managed to complete several years of school, by adolescence she was picking hundreds of pounds of cotton a day. This article was most recently revised and updated by Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) was a civil rights activist whose passionate depiction of her own suffering in a racist society helped focus attention on … She met civil rights activists there who were there to encourage African Americans to register to vote. Hamer’s ability to read and write earned her the job of timekeeper, a less physically demanding and more prestigious job within the sharecropping system.The Hamers adopted two daughters, girls whose own families were unable to care for them. All Rights Reserved.
She helped establish the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971.Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1976, Fannie Hamer continued to fight for civil rights.
Wells was an African American journalist and activist who led an anti-lynching crusade in the United States in the 1890s.Harriet Tubman escaped slavery to become a leading abolitionist. While the passengers were held on the bus, the deeply religious Hamer began to sing spirituals. Stokely Carmichael of SNCC, Ella Baker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women, and On June 21, 1964, three young men disappeared near the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi.Local Mississippi leadership prepared themselves psychologically and militarily for Freedom Summer.Fannie Lou Hamer helped fight for better representation among Mississippi Democrats in 1964. Fannie Lou Hamer fought for the right to vote in the 1960s, resisting brutal violence and imprisonment for years in Mississippi, where Jim Crow laws …