Fannie Lou Hamer was a sharecropper in the Mississippi Delta who, at forty-four, tried to register to vote and lost her job and home for it. She became one of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s most effective organizers, survived a brutal jailhouse beating, and in 1964 told a national television audience what Black Mississippians endured for seeking the ballot. She spent the rest of her life fighting for political power and economic survival for the rural poor.
At a Glance
- Born
- 6 October 1917, Montgomery County, Mississippi
- Died
- 14 March 1977, Mound Bayou, Mississippi
- Birth name
- Fannie Lou Townsend
- Known for
- Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (1964); testimony before the Democratic National Convention Credentials Committee (22 August 1964); Freedom Farm Cooperative (1969)
- Fields
- Civil Rights · Politics · Organizing
- Era
- Civil Rights Era
Early Life
Fannie Lou Townsend was born on 6 October 1917 in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the twentieth child of James Lee (Jim) and Lou Ella (Ella) Townsend, sharecroppers. In 1919 the family moved to a plantation in Sunflower County, in the Mississippi Delta. She began picking cotton at six and left school around 1930, at twelve, to work full-time in the fields; she had completed the sixth grade. An attack of polio, around the age of sixteen, left her with a lasting limp.
In 1944 she married Perry “Pap” Hamer and moved to the W. D. Marlow plantation near Ruleville, where she worked in the fields and as the plantation’s record-keeper. The Hamers raised two girls, relatives whom they adopted. In 1961 a white doctor performed a hysterectomy on her without her consent, a practice so common among poor Black women in the state that she called it a “Mississippi appendectomy.”
Life and Work
On 27 August 1962 Hamer attended a mass meeting at William Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in Ruleville, where SNCC and Southern Christian Leadership Conference organizers urged local people to register. Four days later, on 31 August, she was among eighteen people who rode a bus twenty-six miles to the Sunflower County courthouse in Indianola to attempt to register. She failed the literacy test, which required interpreting a section of the state constitution. That evening the plantation owner told her to withdraw her application or leave; she left. On 10 September shots were fired into the house where she was staying. She passed the test on her second try in January 1963, by then working as a SNCC field secretary.
On 9 June 1963, returning by bus from a voter-education workshop, Hamer and other activists were arrested in Winona, Mississippi, after members of the group tried to use a whites-only bus-station restaurant. In the Montgomery County jail, officers forced two Black prisoners to beat her with a blackjack. She suffered kidney damage and a permanent injury to one eye. The officers were tried in federal court in Oxford that December and acquitted by an all-white jury. That fall she gave her first known recorded speech, at a Freedom Vote rally in Greenwood.
In April 1964 Hamer helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to challenge the all-white regular state Democratic Party, which excluded Black voters. That spring she ran for Congress in the Democratic primary, the first Black woman from Mississippi to seek a congressional seat. At the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, the MFDP sought to be seated in place of the regular delegation. On 22 August 1964 Hamer testified before the Credentials Committee, describing her eviction and the Winona beating and asking whether this was America, “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” President Lyndon B. Johnson called an impromptu press conference to draw the networks away, but her testimony was rebroadcast that evening. The MFDP rejected a compromise offering two at-large seats. That autumn Hamer travelled to West Africa with a SNCC delegation, and in December 1964 she spoke in Harlem at a rally where Malcolm X introduced her.
Hamer kept up the fight in Congress and the courts. In January 1965 she, Annie Devine, and Victoria Gray went to Washington to contest the seating of Mississippi’s congressmen, and in April 1965 she became lead plaintiff in Hamer v. Campbell, challenging local elections held under discriminatory registration. In August 1968 she was formally seated as a delegate from Mississippi at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Increasingly she turned to the poverty that kept Black Delta families dependent. In 1967 her elder daughter, Dorothy Jean, died of complications related to anemia and malnutrition, a loss the family attributed to poverty and inadequate health care. With help from the National Council of Negro Women she started a “pig bank” in 1968, and in 1969 she bought the first forty acres of the Freedom Farm Cooperative, which grew to roughly seven hundred acres and provided food, housing assistance, and work. In July 1971 she was a founding member of the National Women’s Political Caucus.
Legacy
Hamer suffered in her last years from breast cancer, hypertension, and diabetes. She died of heart failure at a hospital in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, on 14 March 1977, and was buried in Ruleville after a funeral at William Chapel Church. Her gravestone bears her best-known phrase, “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
The 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act was named in part for her. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993, and a bronze statue of her was dedicated in Ruleville in 2012. On 4 January 2025 President Joe Biden awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously. Historians now place her among the movement’s most important grassroots leaders, a figure whose testimony and organizing showed that the demand for the vote in Mississippi was inseparable from demands for land, work, and bodily autonomy.
Fannie Lou Hamer’s fight for the ballot in Mississippi showed that voting rights were bound up with economic survival, bodily safety, and the power of ordinary people to testify to injustice. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 6 October 1917 Born Fannie Lou Townsend in Montgomery County, Mississippi.
- 1944 Marries Perry “Pap” Hamer; settles on the Marlow plantation near Ruleville.
- 31 August 1962 Attempts to register to vote in Indianola; evicted from the plantation that night.
- January 1963 Passes the registration test on her second attempt.
- 9 June 1963 Arrested and beaten in the Montgomery County jail in Winona, Mississippi.
- April 1964 Helps found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
- 22 August 1964 Testifies before the Credentials Committee at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.
- August 1968 Seated as a Mississippi delegate at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
- 1969 Founds the Freedom Farm Cooperative in Sunflower County.
- 14 March 1977 Dies in Mound Bayou, Mississippi.
Sources and Further Reading
- SNCC Digital Gateway, “Fannie Lou Hamer.” Link
- National Women’s History Museum, “Fannie Lou Hamer.” Link
- Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, “Hamer, Fannie Lou.” Link
- Fannie Lou Hamer’s America project, “Fannie Lou Hamer Timeline.” Link
- Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
- Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: Dutton, 1993).
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By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.