Born Fannie Lou Townsend in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the youngest of 20 children of sharecroppers. When she was two years old, the family moved to a plantation in Sunflower County, and since the age of 6, she was picking cotton and attending a one-room school. At 12, she left school to work on the field, picking an average of 200–300 pounds of cotton a day. In 1945, at the age of 28, she married Perry “Pap” Hamer and moved to the Marlow plantation, where he worked as a tractor driver. There, she was the only literate worker, and the plantation owner made her the timekeeper. During the 1950s, after attending the Regional Council of Negro Leadership conference, she became involved in the civil rights movement. In 1962, at the age of 45, she answered a call from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to register to vote. She failed the unfair literacy test required for registration and got arrested for her attempt. Afterward, she was fired from the plantation and had to hide from the violent responses of white racists. On her third attempt, she passed the test only to realize she is not allowed to register to vote without two poll tax receipts – a method that aimed to fail black people to vote after the 1870 ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. After those events, Hamer became more involved with the SNCC, teaching classes and acting as a field secretary, traveling to gather signatures for voter registration. In 1963, on her way back from a pro-citizenship conference, 46 years old Hamer, alongside other black women, was arrested in Winona, Mississippi, for sitting in a “whites-only” café. In those four days she spent in the local jail, Hamer and her fellow activists were brutally beaten. This event left her with lifelong injuries, including kidney damage, leg damage, and a blood clot in her left eye. Soon after, Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), challenging the regional Democratic party’s attempts to prevent black participation. Within four years, the MFDP had succeeded in its mission, and Hamer was a member of Mississippi’s first integrated delegation. In 1972 she was elected as a national party delegate. In 1968, Hamer founded the Pig Bank, suppling black farmers pigs to breed and slaughter, providing them nutritious food and means to earn money. In the following year, this initiative expanded into the Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC), buying land for black people to farm collectively. Hamer raised enough funds to purchase 640 acres, where she established 200 housing units, a coop store, and a sewing workshop. Over time, the FFC offered more and more services for its residents, including a housing agency, a scholarship fund, and financial counseling. In 1971, Hamer co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus, promoting the notion that women who act together are by default a voting majority, regardless of race or ethnicity. In the following years, she suffered numerous nervous breakdowns that required hospitalizations and was also diagnosed with breast cancer. She died of complications of the disease at the age of 59. Read more...