“Righteousness exalts a nation. Hate just makes people miserable,” was one of Fannie Lou Hamer’s mantras. She fought passionately against attempts to deny Black people the right to vote.
Born in 1917 in Montgomery County, Miss., Hamer was the youngest of 20 children. She excelled at school but went to work to help support her sharecropper parents at age 12.
She was fired and evicted from her land in 1962 after returning from her first attempt to register to vote. The next year, after leading another voter registration drive, Hamer was arrested for sitting in a “whites only” restaurant in Winona, Miss. She was beaten at the jailhouse, where one officer declared, “We’re going to make you wish you was dead.” The beating left her with injuries that affected her throughout her life.
Hamer joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She helped organize the Freedom Summer of 1964 and the Freedom Farm Cooperative.
Keisha Blain has written in Until I Am Free, a new biography of Hamer, about Lyndon Johnson’s attempt to drown out Hamer’s Congressional testimony calling for mandatory integrated state party delegations. His plan backfired — her moving speech was rebroadcast, reaching a large national audience.
Hamer died of breast cancer in 1977. Her words are still a rallying cry: “We have a long fight, and this fight is not mine alone, but you are not free whether you are white or black, until I am free.” —Kate Wallace Rogers
