Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer was born to sharecropper parents in Mississippi, the youngest of twenty children. She began picking cotton at age six and was forced to leave school at twelve. In 1961, she was sterilized without her consent during a medical procedure — a practice so common among Black women in Mississippi it was called a "Mississippi appendectomy."

In 1962, at age 44, she attempted to register to vote and was thrown off the plantation where she had worked for 18 years. The following year, she was arrested and beaten severely in a Winona, Mississippi jail. Rather than be silenced, she became more determined.

Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and delivered riveting testimony at the 1964 Democratic National Convention that was so powerful President Johnson called an impromptu press conference to pre-empt her broadcast. She spent the rest of her life fighting for voting rights, economic justice, and the dignity of poor Black Southerners.