Fannie Lou Hamer and education: from a sixth-grade schoolroom to Head Start

What schooling did Hamer have?

She went to a one-room school for the children of sharecroppers, open in the winter months when there was no field work, and she left after the sixth grade. She later said she had loved reading and reciting poems. Leaving school at about twelve was common for Delta children of her generation, whose labor their families needed. That experience stayed with her: she often argued that the plantation system kept Black children out of school on purpose.

How did she teach others?

In June 1963 she went to a week of citizenship school training run by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in South Carolina, learning to teach adults to read the registration form and the state constitution. It was on the way home from that training that she was arrested and beaten in Winona; see Winona, 1963. Citizenship classes, held in churches and homes, were a core part of SNCC's work in the Delta, and Hamer taught and spoke at them.

In 1964 she welcomed the Freedom Schools that summer volunteers ran across Mississippi, including one in Ruleville. Our page on the Freedom Schools describes what they taught.

What did she do for young children?

From 1965 she supported Head Start centers in Sunflower County run by the Child Development Group of Mississippi, and in 1970 she founded a day care center in Ruleville. The Child Development Group was unusual because it hired local parents, many with little schooling, as teachers and staff, which brought paychecks into poor homes. Mississippi politicians attacked its federal funding again and again, and by the late 1960s much of its work had passed to other agencies. The Ruleville marker on Byron Street records the Fannie Lou Hamer Day Care Center, founded in 1970.

What did she do about segregated schools?

In 1970 she was a plaintiff in Hamer et al. v. Sunflower County, which, the Mississippi Encyclopedia says, produced a single merged school system and protected the jobs of Black teachers and principals. Desegregation in many Delta counties led white families to leave public schools for private academies, and Black educators often lost their jobs in mergers. The case tried to stop that.

How did colleges honor her?

Shaw University, Columbia College Chicago (1970) and Howard University (1972) gave her honorary degrees. She spoke at many campuses in the North, where students raised money for her projects. For classroom materials about her, use our free lesson plan for grades 6 to 12.