70 Facts About Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer was an American voting and women's rights activist, community organizer, and leader of the civil rights movement.

Fannie Lou Hamer was the vice-chair of the Freedom Democratic Party, which she represented at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Fannie Lou Hamer was a co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus, an organization created to recruit, train, and support women of all races who sought election to government offices.

Fannie Lou Hamer began her civil rights activism in 1962, continuing it until her health declined nine years later.

Fannie Lou Hamer was known for her use of spiritual hymns and biblical quotes, and for her resilience in leading the civil rights movement for black women in Mississippi.

Fannie Lou Hamer was threatened, harassed, shot at, and assaulted by racists, including members of the police, while she was trying to register to vote.

Fannie Lou Hamer later helped and encouraged thousands of African Americans in Mississippi to become registered voters, and assisted hundreds of disenfranchised people in her area through her work in programs such as the Freedom Farm Cooperative.

Fannie Lou Hamer ran for the US House in 1964, losing to Jamie Whitten, and she ran for the Mississippi State Senate in 1971.

Fannie Lou Hamer died on March 14,1977, aged 59, in Mound Bayou, Mississippi.

Fannie Lou Hamer was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1993.

Fannie Lou Hamer was the last of the 20 children of Lou Ella and James Lee Townsend.

Fannie Lou Hamer loved reading and excelled in spelling bees and reciting poetry, but at age 12 she had to leave school to help support her aging parents.

Fannie Lou Hamer continued to develop her reading and interpretation skills in Bible study at her church; in later years Lawrence Guyot admired her ability to connect "the biblical exhortations for liberation and [the struggle for civil rights] any time that she wanted to and move in and out to any frames of reference".

Fannie Lou Hamer was sickly too when I got her; suffered from malnutrition.

Fannie Lou Hamer became interested in the civil rights movement in the 1950s.

Fannie Lou Hamer heard leaders of the local movement speak at annual Regional Council of Negro Leadership conferences, held in Mound Bayou, Mississippi.

Fannie Lou Hamer became a good friend of RCNL founder and head T R M Howard.

Fannie Lou Hamer told the registrar, "You'll see me every 30 days till I pass".

Fannie Lou Hamer was successful and was informed that she was now a registered voter in Mississippi.

Fannie Lou Hamer later paid for and acquired the requisite poll tax receipts.

Fannie Lou Hamer began to become more involved in the activism of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee after these incidents.

Fannie Lou Hamer attended many Southern Christian Leadership Conferences, where she sometimes taught classes, and various SNCC workshops.

Fannie Lou Hamer traveled to gather signatures for petitions to attempt to be granted federal resources for impoverished black families across the South.

Many of these first attempts to register more black voters in Mississippi were met with the same problems Fannie Lou Hamer had found in trying to register herself.

Fannie Lou Hamer moved between homes over the next several days for protection.

On September 10,1962, while staying with friend Mary Tucker, Fannie Lou Hamer was shot at 15 times in a drive-by shooting by racists.

On June 9,1963, Fannie Lou Hamer was returning from a voter registration workshop by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Charleston, South Carolina.

Fannie Lou Hamer left the bus and inquired if they could continue their journey back to Greenwood, Mississippi.

Once in county jail, Fannie Lou Hamer's colleagues were beaten by the police in the booking room.

Fannie Lou Hamer was then taken to a cell where two inmates were ordered, by the state trooper, to beat her using a baton.

Fannie Lou Hamer needed more than a month to recuperate from the beatings and never fully recovered.

Fannie Lou Hamer was known to the volunteers of Freedom Summer as a motherly figure who believed that the civil rights effort should be multi-racial in nature.

In 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which sought to prevent the region's all-white Democratic Party from stifling African-American voices and to ensure there was a party for everyone that did not tolerate exploitation or discrimination.

In 1972, Fannie Lou Hamer was elected as a national party delegate.

Also in 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer embarked on a plan to run in the Democratic primary in her Mississippi US House district.

Fannie Lou Hamer was soundly defeated in the primary by the segregationist incumbent Jamie Whitten, but her action set in motion a consequential series of events.

Fannie Lou Hamer used the compiled evidence to file an election contest in the US House, "challenging the seating of the Mississippi congressional delegation on the grounds that their elections were marred by voting discrimination and unconstitutional disenfranchisement of Black voters".

Fannie Lou Hamer traveled around the country, speaking at colleges, universities, and institutions.

Fannie Lou Hamer was not rich, as confirmed by her clothing and vernacular.

For instance, NAACP leader Roy Wilkins said Fannie Lou Hamer was "ignorant", and President Lyndon Johnson looked down on her.

In 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer received an honorary degree from Tougaloo College, much to the dismay of a group of black intellectuals who thought she was undeserving of such an honor because she was "unlettered".

Fannie Lou Hamer had seen her mother walk around with a concealed pistol in an attempt to protect her children from white land owners who were known to beat sharecroppers' children.

Fannie Lou Hamer's mother instilled a sense of pride in being black when Fannie Lou Hamer did not perceive that being black was a benefit during her childhood.

Fannie Lou Hamer's father was a Baptist preacher who often entertained the family with jokes at the end of the day.

Fannie Lou Hamer's family encouraged her to recite her poetry to the family and their guests.

Fannie Lou Hamer became a plantation timekeeper, a position that made her the point person who had to communicate with both the white land owners and the black sharecroppers, which helped her practice communicating to different kinds of people.

Fannie Lou Hamer was always doing the best she had with whatever she had.

At speaking engagements, Fannie Lou Hamer made speeches and sang, often with the Freedom Singers.

Fannie Lou Hamer put her whole self into her singing, adding a power to the group.

Fannie Lou Hamer appeared along with Malcolm X In her speech, "Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired", she chronicled the violence and injustices she experienced while trying to register to vote.

Fannie Lou Hamer believed that blacks should not be dependent on any group, so she wanted to give them a voice through an agricultural movement.

Fannie Lou Hamer adamantly opposed abortion, calling it "legalized murder" in a 1969 speech at the White House and describing her position in terms of her Christian faith.

Fannie Lou Hamer feared that both were simply white supremacist tools to regulate the lives of impoverished Black people and even prevent the growth of the Black population.

Fannie Lou Hamer objected to this, and consequently, she pioneered the Freedom Farm Cooperative in 1969, an attempt to redistribute economic power across groups and solidify an economic standing among African Americans.

Fannie Lou Hamer made it her mission to make land more accessible to African Americans.

Fannie Lou Hamer used the success of the bank to begin fundraising for the main farming corporation.

Fannie Lou Hamer was able to convince the then-editor of the Harvard Crimson, James Fallows, to write an article that advocated for donations to the FFC.

In 1961, while undergoing surgery to remove a tumor, Fannie Lou Hamer was forced to undergo a hysterectomy by a white doctor without her consent; this medical procedure was frequently performed in accordance with Mississippi's compulsory sterilization plan to reduce the number of poor blacks in the state.

Fannie Lou Hamer is credited with coining the phrase "Mississippi appendectomy", a euphemism for involuntary or uninformed sterilization of black women, a common practice in the South during the 1960s.

Fannie Lou Hamer died of complications from hypertension and breast cancer on March 14,1977, aged 59, at Taborian Hospital, Mound Bayou, Mississippi.

Fannie Lou Hamer was buried in her hometown of Ruleville, Mississippi.

Fannie Lou Hamer received many awards both in her lifetime and posthumously.

Fannie Lou Hamer received a Doctor of Law from Shaw University, and honorary degrees from Columbia College Chicago in 1970 and Howard University in 1972.

Fannie Lou Hamer was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1993.

Fannie Lou Hamer received the Paul Robeson Award from Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, the Mary Church Terrell Award from Delta Sigma Theta sorority, the National Sojourner Truth Meritorious Service Award.

Fannie Lou Hamer is an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta.

Fannie Lou Hamer is one of 28 civil rights icons depicted on the Buffalo, New York Freedom Wall.

Cheryl L West wrote the play Fannie: The Music and Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, which premiered at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2022 as part of a co-production shared among Kenny Leon's True Colors Theatre Company, the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, City Theatre Company, and DEMASKUS Theater Collective.

The band Chairman Dances' song "Fannie Lou Hamer" describes Hamer's bus journey to Indianola, Mississippi, to register voters.

Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves unveiled it at the site of the 1964 Democratic National Convention, honoring Fannie Lou Hamer's work advocating for an integrated delegation at the convention.