Fannie Lou Hamer: a biography

Where did Fannie Lou Hamer grow up?

She was born Fannie Lou Townsend in Montgomery County, Mississippi, on October 6, 1917, and grew up on cotton plantations in Sunflower County, in the heart of the Delta. She was the youngest of twenty children born to Jim and Lou Ella Townsend, both sharecroppers. Around 1919 the family moved west to the Delta, where the soil was richer and the plantations larger, and settled near the town of Ruleville.

Sharecropping meant the family farmed land they did not own in exchange for a share of the crop, minus whatever the landowner charged for seed, tools, housing and supplies bought on credit. In most years that arithmetic left Black tenant families owing money at the end of the season. Hamer later described a childhood of hunger and patched clothes, and of watching her parents work themselves down.

She started picking cotton at about age six. She went to a one-room school for sharecroppers' children during the winter months, when there was no field work, and she loved to read and recite. Her schooling ended after the sixth grade, when she was about twelve, because the family needed her in the fields. As a child she also had polio, which left her with a limp for the rest of her life.

The photograph at the top of this page was taken at Mileston Plantation in Holmes County in 1939 by Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration. It shows the kind of work Hamer did through her childhood and early adult years.

What was her life like on the Marlow plantation?

In the mid-1940s she married Perry "Pap" Hamer, a tractor driver, and the two spent about eighteen years on the W. D. Marlow plantation outside Ruleville. Sources give the wedding year as 1944 or 1945. Because she could read and write, the owner made her the plantation's timekeeper, the person who recorded how much cotton each worker picked and how many hours each worked. She also did domestic work in the owner's house.

The Hamers could not have children of their own, and they raised two girls, Dorothy Jean and Vergie Ree, whom they took in from families who could not care for them. Our page on her family has more on her parents, husband and daughters.

In 1961 she went to the hospital in Sunflower County to have a small uterine tumor removed. The white surgeon performed a hysterectomy without telling her or asking her consent. She learned what had happened only afterward. Hamer later called this kind of operation, which was done to many poor Black women in the South, a "Mississippi appendectomy," and she spoke about it in public at a time when almost no one did.

How did she join the civil rights movement?

In August 1962 she went to a mass meeting at William Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in Ruleville, where SNCC organizers asked who would go to the courthouse to register to vote. She raised her hand. SNCC had sent Charles McLaurin, Charlie Cobb and Landy McNair to Sunflower County that summer, and local leader Amzie Moore had introduced them at a Ruleville church. The meeting Hamer attended was one of the first in the county. Our page on William Chapel tells the church's story.

She had followed politics before. In the 1950s she had attended rallies of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership in nearby Mound Bayou, where speakers such as Dr. T. R. M. Howard talked about voting and civil rights. But in Sunflower County, where Black residents were a majority, almost none were registered, and trying was dangerous.

What happened when she tried to register?

On August 31, 1962, she rode a bus with seventeen other Black residents of Ruleville to the Sunflower County courthouse in Indianola, where she failed the literacy test and was then thrown off the plantation. According to the SNCC Digital Gateway, she was the first of the group to enter the circuit clerk's office. Mississippi's test required applicants to copy and interpret a section of the state constitution chosen by the clerk, who decided alone whether the answer passed. Hamer was given a section on de facto laws, a term she had never heard.

On the way home, police stopped the bus and arrested the driver for driving a bus of the "wrong color," a yellow that the officers said could be confused with a school bus. While the group waited, Hamer started singing hymns and freedom songs, which calmed the others. That evening the plantation owner told her to withdraw her application or leave. She left the same night. Her husband had to stay on the plantation until the harvest was finished.

She moved into Ruleville to stay with friends. On the night of September 10, 1962, night riders fired into several Black homes in town, including the house of Mary Tucker, where Hamer had been staying. She was not hurt, though two young women were wounded at another house. Soon afterward she went to stay with relatives in Tallahatchie County for about three months. She went back to the Indianola courthouse in December 1962 and failed again. On January 10, 1963, on her third try, she passed. She then found she also needed poll tax receipts before she could vote.

What work did she do for SNCC?

From late 1962 she worked with SNCC on voter registration in the Delta, and in 1963 she became a SNCC field secretary. She taught people how to fill out the registration form, went door to door, spoke at mass meetings and led the singing that held them together. Organizers noticed early that her voice could steady a frightened room; "This Little Light of Mine" became closely tied to her.

In June 1963 she traveled with other Mississippi activists to a citizenship education workshop run by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in South Carolina. On the way home, on June 9, the group was arrested at the bus station in Winona, Mississippi, after some of its members sat at the lunch counter. In the Winona jail, officers beat June Johnson, Annell Ponder and others, and then had two Black prisoners beat Hamer with a blackjack. Lawrence Guyot, who came to post bail, was beaten too. They were released on June 12, 1963, to the news that Medgar Evers had been murdered in Jackson. The beating left Hamer with injuries she never fully recovered from. In December 1963 an all-white federal jury in Oxford acquitted the Winona police chief and the Montgomery County sheriff. Read the full account on our page about Winona.

That fall she helped with the Freedom Vote, a mock election organized by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) to show that Black Mississippians wanted to vote. About 80,000 people cast ballots.

What did she do in 1964?

In 1964 she ran for Congress, helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, hosted Freedom Summer volunteers and testified at the Democratic National Convention. In the June Democratic primary she challenged Representative Jamie Whitten in Mississippi's Second District. Few Black citizens could vote, and she lost heavily, but the campaign put her name and the issue of disfranchisement before the public.

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was formed in April 1964 as an integrated alternative to the all-white regular state Democratic Party. During Freedom Summer, when hundreds of mostly white college students came to Mississippi to help with voter registration and Freedom Schools, the Hamers' house in Ruleville took in volunteers. The MFDP elected a delegation of 68 people, Hamer among them, to go to the national convention in Atlantic City and demand the seats of the regular delegation.

On August 22, 1964, she told the convention's Credentials Committee what had happened to her in Indianola, on the plantation and in the Winona jail. President Lyndon Johnson called a press conference while she was speaking, and the live coverage cut away, but many networks broadcast her testimony in full that evening. Our page on the testimony explains what she said and why it mattered. When party leaders offered the MFDP two at-large seats, which would have gone to Aaron Henry and Ed King, and left the regular delegation in place, the MFDP voted to refuse. Hamer's remark that they "didn't come all this way for no two seats" became one of the best-remembered lines of the convention. The MFDP page covers the challenge and its outcome.

In September 1964 she traveled to Guinea in West Africa with a SNCC delegation that included John Lewis, Bob Moses, Julian Bond and James Forman, at the invitation of President Sékou Touré, a trip arranged with help from Harry Belafonte. See Africa and the 1964 Guinea trip. In December she spoke in Harlem, where Malcolm X shared a platform with her.

What was the 1965 Congressional Challenge?

In January 1965 the MFDP asked the U.S. House to refuse to seat Mississippi's five white congressmen, on the grounds that Black citizens had been kept from voting, and it put forward Hamer, Annie Devine and Victoria Gray for three of the seats. On January 4, 1965, Capitol Police kept the three women out of the House chamber, and members of the party held a silent vigil outside. Lawyers and volunteers then gathered sworn testimony from hundreds of Mississippians about voting discrimination. In September 1965 the House voted to dismiss the challenge, but the testimony added to the case for the Voting Rights Act, which President Johnson signed in August 1965. More on the challenge.

What did she do after 1965?

She kept organizing in Sunflower County, through lawsuits, Head Start centers, economic projects and new campaigns for office. In Hamer v. Campbell (1965) she and others sued county officials over discriminatory voter registration and local elections. She supported the Child Development Group of Mississippi, which ran early Head Start centers, and the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union. In 1967 she published a short autobiography, To Praise Our Bridges.

In 1968 an integrated group called the Loyal Democrats of Mississippi, which included many MFDP members, was seated at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in place of the regular delegation, and Hamer was among its delegates. We cover that convention on a separate page. She was also a delegate in 1972.

With help from the National Council of Negro Women she started a "pig bank" in 1968, lending pigs to families who returned piglets to the bank. In 1969 she founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative, which bought land near Ruleville so poor families could grow food, and which ran housing and other projects until it closed in the mid-1970s. In 1970 she was a plaintiff in a case that forced Sunflower County to desegregate its public schools. Read more about the Freedom Farm.

In 1971 she helped found the National Women's Political Caucus, and that year she ran for the Mississippi State Senate and lost. Colleges, including Shaw University, Columbia College Chicago and Howard University, gave her honorary degrees.

How did her life end?

Her health failed in the 1970s, and she died of heart failure, after breast cancer, hypertension and diabetes, at the Taborian Hospital in Mound Bayou on March 14, 1977. She was 59. Her funeral was held at William Chapel in Ruleville, and so many people came that an overflow service was held at Ruleville Central High School. Andrew Young, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, spoke. She was buried in Ruleville, on land that is now the Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden. Her headstone carries the words most often linked with her name: "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired." Her husband, Perry Hamer, is buried beside her.

How is she remembered?

She is remembered through a statue and memorial garden in Ruleville, Mississippi Freedom Trail markers, schools and institutions named for her, and national honors that came long after her death. Congress renamed the Ruleville post office for her in 1994. The 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act carries her name together with those of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King. A bronze statue by Brian Hanlon was dedicated in Ruleville on October 5, 2012, and on January 4, 2025, President Joe Biden awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Our legacy page gathers these honors in one place.