Fannie lou hamer biography essay
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Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer rose from humble beginnings in the Mississippi Delta to become one of the most important, passionate, and powerful voices of the civil and voting rights movements and a leader in the efforts for greater economic opportunities for African Americans.
Hamer was born on October 6, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the 20th and last child of sharecroppers Lou Ella and James Townsend. She grew up in poverty, and at age six Hamer joined her family picking cotton. By age 12, she left school to work. In , she married Perry Hamer and the couple toiled on the Mississippi plantation owned bygd W.D. Marlow until Because Hamer was the only worker who could read and write, she also served as plantation timekeeper.
In , Hamer received a hysterectomy bygd a white doctor without her consent while undergoing surgery to remove a uterine tumor. Such forced sterilization of Black women, as a way to reduce the Black population, was so widespread it was dubbed a “Mississippi appe
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Hamer, Fannie Lou
October 6, to March 14,
When Fannie Lou Hamer testified before the credentials committee of the Democratic National Convention, she told the world about the torture and abuse she experienced in her attempt to lista to vote. Martin Luther King wrote that her “testimony educated a nation and brought the political powers to their knees in repentance, for the convention voted never again to seat a delegation that was racially segregated” (King, “Something Happening in Mississippi”).
Born to sharecroppers in Montgomery County, Mississippi, in , Fannie Lou was the youngest of 20 children. She grew up on a Sunflower County plantation and in the mids she married Perry Hamer, a tractor driver on a nearby plantation. For the next 18 years, she worked as a sharecropper and a timekeeper for the plantation owner.
In Robert Moses and other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came to Sunflower County to regist
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“The Sweat and Blood of Fannie Lou Hamer”
She paid a price, however, with police beatings that left her permanently disabled. She lost a daughter because no hospital in Mississippi would treat a child of Fannie Lou Hamer. The Ku Klux Klan shot into a friend’s house 16 times while Hamer was staying there. Despite this, Hamer remained.
“Why should I leave Ruleville and why should I leave Mississippi?” she once asked a journalist. “You don’t run away from problems. You just face them.”
Hamer was born in , the youngest of 20 children, and spent her life as a sharecropper with little formal education, though she loved to read. When she was twenty-seven, she married Perry “Pap” Hamer. They tried for a family, but Hamer had several miscarriages, so they adopted two girls. In , a white doctor gave Hamer a hysterectomy without her consent while she was undergoing surgery to remove a uterine tumor. The practice was so commonly performed on poor Black women that it was nicknamed a “Mississi