Fannie+Lou+Hamer

by Sydney Grade 5



Fannie Lou Hamer was a brave freedom fighter. When she was young, she was a sharecropper. She really didn’t have a childhood. When she was older, Fannie and others struggled to get their rights to vote. They weren’t allowed to vote because they were Black. She became a part of the Mississippi Democratic Party. She joined the democratic party because she wanted to represent Blacks in voting. Fannie Lou said “This is only the beginning”.

Before Fannie Lou Hamer was a freedom fighter she was a very poor little girl who was born on October 6, 1917 in Rulesville, Mississippi. She was the youngest one of twenty children. She picked cotton at the age of six. Fannie Lou Hamer had a hard childhood. She went to school but she had to drop out because she and her family lost their house and their source of money. So they had to go back to cotton picking. At the age of twenty four Fannie got married to a man named Perry. Perry and Fannie adopted two children.

In 1962 Fannie Lou heard about a mass meeting in a church with James Bevel from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. James Foreman from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other Black and white activists also attended. Fannie said “I had never heard the freedom songs before.” She was happy that there were many activists. “They really wanted to change the world. I knew they wanted Blacks to register to vote” she said. She was interested in protesting for Blacks to vote, so Fannie and seventeen others signed up to vote at the Sunflower County Courthouse. Their group was very scared because they knew that at any second a white police officer could lock them up in jail. But they went in carefully and one by one took the test. Fannie Lou and the seventeen others failed the test, but that wasn’t the end for Fannie Lou. She had a lot of sorting out to do. When her husband’s job found out she was trying to vote, Perry was fired from his job. Fannie was upset, but she told her family that she was determined, and that they were in this together. She wanted to prove that she could help change segregation.

Fannie Lou joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1962. She worked as a field secretary. She felt a kind of security and never felt alone in her ideas anymore. So Fannie went back to the Sunflower County Courthouse to register to vote. She passed the test on January 10th, 1963 and became the first of 30,000 Blacks to vote there. She went to Charleston, South Carolina to go to a voter education workshop. When she was on her way back from her workshop she and a group of friends stopped at Winona, Mississippi terminal. A few minutes later Fannie saw six people running out of the terminal. Fannie got off the bus to see what was going on and one of her group members said that they were ordered out of the terminal. So Fannie got back on the bus and saw out the window that some of the group members were being arrested. Fannie got off the bus and they arrested her, too. Fannie Lou was put through abuse. She was beaten so much that she could hardly move. She was called names and threatened to be killed.

In May, 1964, the very first Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party office opened. The office was opened to give a picture of life in Mississippi, and of how hard it was to get Blacks elected to the Democratic Party Convention. So Fannie Lou and many others challenged the state’s white political structure by entering the June 6th primary pick of Democratic candidates for Congress. Fannie Lou announced her candidacy for the congressional seat held by James Writlon. She was the first Black woman to run for Congress from the Second District of Mississippi. She was also elected vice president of the delegation from the MFDP. The MFDP decided that they truly wanted to get a seat at the Convention so they held elections. They collected money, they toured around the state, and there were Democratic Freedom clubs. In the end, the Mississippi Democratic delegation was voted in. The MFDP was given a few seats, but they didn’t get what they asked for so they walked out of the convention.

Fannie Lou had become an activist for Black voters. On March 14, 1977, she died of diabetes, breast cancer and heart trouble. Her last words were “I’ve made my peace with God”. Because of Fannie Lou Hamer and others, African Americans are allowed to vote in Mississippi.

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Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Lou_Hamer