Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer (October 6, 1917 – March 14, 1977), born Fannie Lou Townsend, was an American voting rights activist and civil rights leader. She was a field secretary with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

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April 10, 2026

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April 10, 2026

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"when I think about this, in order to become president of the United States, you have to be nominated by one of the two political parties, so the crucial thing for me was, in reflecting back, was the 1964 challenge of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to the National Democratic Convention, because that was where the stage was set that allowed this to happen, because without opening up the national political structure in the country, this wasn’t going to happen. And, you know, we could have gotten the right to vote without the opening up of the national political party structure. And the party structure wasn’t opened up by getting the right to vote; the party structure was opened up by directly challenging in Mississippi the right of Mississippi to send an all-white delegation to the 1964 National Democratic Convention. And it was Fannie Lou Hamer and all the people in that delegation that really forced the national Democratic Party to open up, you know?...all I heard and all I saw was Fannie Lou Hamer giving her testimony. I had no idea that while she was giving her testimony, that the President, Lyndon Johnson, was so afraid of this woman, who had been raised and lived her life as a sharecropper and had been working on the Marlow plantation in Sunflower County, outside of Ruleville. He was so afraid of her that he went — you know, at that time, we just had the three networks: ABC, NBC and CBS. And he went to — notified all three networks that he had a special announcement, because he was terrified that her testimony was so powerful and she was so authentic that people would flood the convention, the credentials committee, with telegrams demanding that her party be seated. And so, he went and interrupted her testimony."

- Fannie Lou Hamer

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"Mrs. Hamer is short and stocky, her skin like weather-beaten copper, her eyes soft and large; she walks with a limp because she had polio as a child, and when she sings she is crying out to the heavens. She told what happened after she went down to register: "The thirty-first of August in '62, the day I went into the courthouse to register, well, after I'd gotten back home, this man that I had worked for as a timekeeper and sharecropper for eighteen years, he said that I would just have to leave....So I told him I wasn't trying to register for him, I was trying to register for myself. . . . I didn't have no other choice because for one time I wanted things to be different...Mrs. Hamer became a field secretary for SNCC after her eviction from the plantation. Just as Moses and the other "outsiders" had become insiders, now the insiders were beginning to become outsiders to the society they had grown up in. As Mrs. Hamer put it: "You know they said outsiders was coming in and beginning to get the people stirred up because they've always been satisfied. Well, as long as I can remember, I've never been satisfied. It was twenty of us, six girls and fourteen boys, and we just barely was making it. You know I could see the whites was going to school at a time when we would be out of school…and most of the time we didn't have anything to wear. I knew it was something wrong. ... I always sensed that we was the one who always do the hard work, you know..." I asked her if she was going to remain with the movement, and she responded with the words to a song: "I told them if they ever miss me from the movement and couldn't find me nowhere, come on over to the graveyard, and I'll be buried there.""

- Fannie Lou Hamer

• 0 likes• civil-rights-activists• anti-war-activists• women-activists-from-the-united-states• women-s-rights-activists• 20th-century-african-american-women•