![]() ![]() ![]() In 1962, Hamer attended a meeting about black voter registration sponsored by SNCC. After going to the hospital for a minor surgery, she was sterilized without her knowledge and was unable to have children, though she later adopted. Hamer married in 1944 and moved with her husband to Ruleville, Miss., where they were sharecroppers on a plantation. She eventually dropped out of school and worked full-time to help her family. Her parents were sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta and Hamer started working in the fields at age 6. You needed someone who expressed Mississippi in their bones to be able to reach through.”īorn in Montgomery County, Miss., Fannie Lou Hamer was the youngest of 20 children. Once she broke through that the gate was up. “Her testimony really undermined the levees that Mississippi had built against the whole country. “Fannie Lou Hamer became the authentic voice of Mississippi and the struggle of black people in Mississippi to the nation at the National Democratic Convention,” said Moses, who was co-director of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. The all-white, male Southern Democrats who ruled the state switched to the Republican Party and Mississippi remains a solidly Red state today. Moses told The Crisis magazine that Hamer’s plea helped to shift the political party structure in Mississippi. Johnson wasn't "afraid of Martin Luther King's testimony, he's afraid of Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony." Johnson gave an impromptu press conference during Hamer's speech, interrupting her televised testimony. In the recent documentary "Freedom Summer" by Stanley Nelson, Bob Moses of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee noted that President Lyndon B. The event became a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement and a historic time in Mississippi politics. Her powerful perspective shed light on the conditions of blacks and the injustices they endured fighting for civil rights. Hamer’s passionate testimony was televised before a national audience. ![]()
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