Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer

"If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question American. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hook because of our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in America?" Fannie Lou Hammer before the Democratic National Convention, 1964. Fannie Lou Hamer is best known for her involvement in the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC). The SNCC was at the head of the American voter registration drives of the 1960's. Hamer was a spokeswoman for the Mississippi Freedom Party (MFDP), which ultimately succeeded in electing many blacks to national office in the state of Mississippi. Through her work with the SNCC and her part in the MFDP Hamer has had a large impact in America's History.

There is no evidence to show that Fannie Lou Hamer's work in the civil rights movement was meant to be, other than her own heartbreaking childhood. "Hamer's involvement in the civil rights cause was more than a function of generic identification with the collective suffering of her race, class, and sex. What seemed an insurmountable combination of poverty and racism to many sharecropping families was, for Hamer, an inspiration to relentless effort". October 6, 1917 Hamer was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi; the youngest of 20 children. She had 14 brothers and 5 sister. Her parents Jim and Lou Ella Townsend, were sharecroppers who fed their whole family on $1.25 a day. While Fannie was outside playing the plantation owner drove up and asked if she could pick cotton. After Fannie agreed to pick cotton after the owner promised her "a 'reward' of sardines, a quarter-pound of chee...

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... Kai. For freedom's sake: the life of Fannie Lou Hamer / Chana Kai Lee. University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Marsh, Charles. God's Long Summer. Princeton University Press, 1997.

Rubel, David. Fannie Lou Hamer: from sharecropping to politics. Silver Burdett Press, 1990.

Books Found on American: History and Life database:

Bryan, Dianetta Gail. Her-Story Unsilenced: Black Female Activists in the Civil Rights Movement. Vol. 5 of Sage: A Scholarly Journal On Black Women 1988. 60-64.

Rooks, Noliwe. The Women Who Said, I AM. Vol. Sage: A Scholarly Journal On Black Women 1988.

Primary Document: Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer April 14, 1972. The interviewer is Dr. Neil McMillen.

"An Oral History with Fannie Lou Hamer" The University Of Southern Mississippi, 17 January 2001 cited 24 April 2001; available from www.lib.usm.edu/~spcol/crda/oh/hamer.htm.