Fannie Lou Hamer

Illustration by Brittanie Mitchell

Fannie Lou Hamer was a community organizer who was born October 6th 1917 into a large family in Ruleville, Mississippi, and up until she was a teenager worked as a sharecropper.

During the 1960s she became deeply involved with civil rights activism and voter rights for Black people by joining the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as a field organizer to educate and register people to vote. She also spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 1964 to describe the abuses she and other organizers had experienced at the hands of the police.