Fannie Lou Hamer: Civil Rights Icon's Life and Legacy

Fannie Lou Hamer, born October 16, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, was the youngest of 20 children. She worked as a sharecropper on W.D. Marlow's plantation in Rueville, Mississippi. Despite polio, she picked 200 pounds of cotton daily and educated herself at night. In 1961, she was forcibly sterilized during a tumor removal. In 1962, she attempted to register to vote, leading to her firing and eviction. In 1963, she was arrested in Winona, Mississippi, and brutally beaten, causing permanent injuries. She co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in 1964, delivering a televised testimony at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. She ran for Congress in Mississippi's 2nd Congressional District in 1964 but lost. She used music to inspire action. Hamer died in 1977 from breast cancer and injuries from the 1963 beating. She was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1993. President Joe Biden awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.