#fannie lou hamer

On This Day in Herstory, August 22nd 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer, spoke at the US Democratic National Convention about her efforts to register to vote in Mississippi. Fannie Lou Hamer was a voting, Civil Rights, and women’s rights activist. As a result of her activism, she was threatened, shot at, and assaulted by white supremacists and police. Despite this, she helped thousands of Black people in Mississippi register to vote.

Fannie Lou Townsend was born on October 6th 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi. She was the youngest of Ella and James Lee Townsend’s 20 children. When she was 2, her family moved to a plantation, where they worked as sharecroppers; she worked picking cotton from age 6. In the off seasons she attended a one-room school for sharecropper’s children; though she excelled in school, she had to drop out at age 12 to support her aging parents. Despite having a leg disfigured by polio, she regularly picked nearly 300 lbs of cotton a day. When she was 27, she married Perry “Pap” Hamer, a tractor driver on the plantation. Together they raised two girls who they later adopted. Unfortunately, one of the girls went on to die from internal hemorrhaging, when she was denied admission to the local hospital because of her mother’s activism. Fannie Lou was also the victim of racist hospital practices. In 1962, while having surgery to remove a tumor, she was given a hysterectomy without her consent; this was a normal occurrence in Mississippi hospitals, because of the state’s sterilization plan to reduce the number of poor Black people. Fannie Lou went on to coin the phrase “Mississippi appendectomy” as a euphemism for the involuntary or uninformed sterilization of Black women.Fannie Lou first became interested in the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s. At this time she attended annual Regional Council of Negro Leadership conferences, where Black voting rights and other Civil Rights issues were discussed. She learned about the constitutional right to vote in 1962. On August 31st, she traveled to Indianola, Mississippi, to register to vote. The registration test, was designed to keep Black people from voting. One part of the test asked for an explanation of de facto laws. Fannie said, “I knowed [sic] as much about a facto law as a horse knows about Christmas Day.” After she failed the test, she returned home to her boss. He said of her registration, “we’re not ready for that in Mississippi.” She was immediately fired and kicked off the plantation.The following month, Fannie Lou  was shot at 16 times in a drive-by shooting by white supremacists; she came away unharmed. In December, she went to the courthouse in Indianola to take the literacy part of the registration test, but failed. She told the registrar that “You’ll see me every 30 days till I pass”. She later remarked, “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared — but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.” In January, she took the registration test a third time. She passed, and became a registered voter in the State of Mississippi. When she attempted to vote that fall, she learned her registration was essentially useless; the county required voters to have two poll tax receipts, a rule had by many southern states. These laws along with the literacy tests and local government acts of coercion, were used to deter Black and Native American voter. She later paid for and acquired the requisite poll tax receipts.In 1963, Fannie Lou and other activists tried to travel by bus to a pro-citizenship conference in Charleston, South Carolina. The bus stopped in Winona, Mississippi, where some of the activists went inside a local cafe. They were refused service by the waitress, and then a Mississippi State highway patrolman took out his billy club and intimidated the activists into leaving. Eventually, the patrolman and a police chief arrested many of the activists. When Fannie Lou asked if the arrested activists could continue their journey, she arrested her as well. She was then taken to a cell where two inmates were ordered, by the police, to beat her. She was held down, and when she screamed, they were ordered to beat her harder. When she attempted to resist an officer, “walked over, took my dress, pulled it up over my shoulders, leaving my body exposed to five men.” Many others in the group were beaten and assaulted too. Following her release from jail, it took her more than a month to recover, but she never made a full recovery. Despite the physical and psychological effects, this incident had on her, she returned to Mississippi to organize voter registration drives. In 1964, she helped to co-found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. In August of that year, she and other activists traveled to the Democratic National Convention to stand as the official delegation for the state of Mississippi. It was at this convention that she testified about the struggles Black people faced in Mississippi when registering to vote. Most major news networks broadcasted her testimony to the nation. As a result of her testimony and the demands made by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party for Black representation, in 1968 the MFDP was finally seated, after the Democratic Party adopted a clause which demanded equality of representation from their states’ delegations. In 1972, Fannie Lou was elected as a national party delegate.She felt that Black people were not technically free if they were not afforded the same opportunities as white people. By June 1974, Fannie Lou was in very poor health. Two years later she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died of complications of hypertension and breast cancer on March 14th 1977, in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, she was 59 years old. Her tombstone is engraved with one of her famous quotes, “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”