HAMER, FANNIE LOU TOWNSEND
Fannie Lou Hamer worked for voter registration for African Americans in the U.S. South and helped establish the Mississippi Freedom DEMOCRATIC PARTY (MFDP), which successfully challenged the all-white Democratic party in Mississippi.
Hamer was born October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County,Mississippi. She was the twenti-
eth and youngest child of Jim Townsend and
Lou Ella Townsend, who were sharecroppers in
rural Mississippi. Hamer grew up in a tar paper
shack and slept on a cotton sack stuffed with dry
grass. She first went into the cotton fields to
work when she was six years old, picking thirty
pounds of cotton a week. By the time she was
thirteen years old, Hamer was picking two hun-
dred to three hundred pounds of cotton each
week. Because of her family’s poverty, she was
forced to end her formal education after the
sixth grade.
In 1944, when she was twenty-seven, Hamer
married Perry (“Pap”) Hamer, a sharecropper
on a nearby plantation owned by the Marlowe
family, near Ruleville, Mississippi. Hamer spent
the next eighteen years working in the fields
chopping cotton. Her husband also ran a small
saloon, and they made liquor to sell.
In August 1962, Hamer attended a meeting
sponsored by the SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN
LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE (SCLC) and the
STUDENT NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COM-
MITTEE (SNCC, pronounced Snick). The SCLC
was founded in 1957 by a group of black minis-
ters led by MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. , and coor-
dinated the CIVIL RIGHTS activities of ministers.
SNCC was organized in 1960 by students and
other young people, and SNCC workers had
recently come to Ruleville to organize voter reg-
