Topic: Women's History Month
(Couldn't post to the blog yesterday, so you get two today. :)
Despite her childhood in Mississippi, where she was given a scant education and worked from the age of six, Hamer was able to contribute in a leadership position in the civil rights movement of the 60's. She was also the twentieth child born to her mother.
Still a sharecropper on a plantation in Mississippi, Hamer became politically active in 1962, at the age of 45, when she attended her first civil rights meeting. Her passions were enflamed and she answered the call, going with 17 people to register to vote at the Sunflower County Courthouse. They were stonewalled for the entire business day and their bus was pulled over and their driver arrested on the way home for "driving a bus of the wrong color." She was subsequently fired from her job as a sharecropper, and she lost her home in the process. She received a $9,000 water bill for a house that had no running water. Her daughter and husband were arrested and she was shot at and threatened when racists targeted her house. She was relentlessly harassed but stood her ground. She got no protection from the police or City Hall, despite repeated requests.
She was later arrested and beaten severely twice, acts which caused her serious nervous and kidney damage. After the first beating, the Justice Department pressed charges against five police officers but the trial was a mockery of American justice and all five were acquitted.
Hamer surprising qualified to run for Congress in 1964, though she was defeated in the Primary. Of the 68% black population in her voting district, estimates put registered voter numbers at 8% because of the obstacles put before black registrants. During that election season she formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party with other black self-appointed delegates, and they attended the Democratic National Convention that year, where they protested the whites-only delegation. As speaker for the party, she spoke before the Credentials Committee at the convention.
Fannie Hamer contributed hugely to the civil rights movement that swept through America in the 60's. In just 14 years, she managed to make an indelible impression on American Women's history, as well as Black history before she died at the age of 59.
Posted by Anna Belle
at 9:04 AM EST
