Fannie Lou Hamer and the Fight for Voting Rights

Two years before she ran for Congress, Fannie Lou Hamer did not know she had the right to vote. According to Hamer, she first learned of this right at the age of forty-four. On August 27, 1962, Hamer attended a meeting organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an interracial civil rights organization, at a local church in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Convinced to go by a close friend, Hamer had a revelation while listening to the young SNCC activists: she could help transform American society through the power of her vote. She would go on to volunteer to join the campaign to register to vote, and a few days later, Hamer traveled with 17 other civil rights activists to Indianola, Mississippi, to attempt to register to vote.

Soon, she became the oldest field secretary for the SNCC, and, in a matter of years, emerged as one of the most influential civil rights activists in the movement. While her contributions are many, Hamer is perhaps most well known for her unwavering fight to expand voting rights for Black Americans. Her grassroots efforts during the early 1960s, which gained nationwide attention at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, laid the groundwork for the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

An Inclusive Political Vision

Hamer’s personal trajectory and experiences informed her political work later in life. Born into a sharecropping family on October 6, 1917, she was the youngest of 20 children and the granddaughter of enslaved people. Hamer survived a bout with polio as a child, which left her with a permanent limp. What others might have perceived as an impediment, however, only served to fuel Hamer’s passion. Indeed, she embraced her full identity as a Black working-poor woman with a disability to craft an inclusive political vision.

That vision, best encapsulated in her well-known mantra “nobody’s free until everybody’s free,” was a guiding force in Hamer’s political organizing in the South and beyond. This work placed her in significant physical danger. Hamer’s efforts placed her in the path of white supremacists who employed tactics such as intimidation, economic retaliation, literacy tests, violence, and more, to limit Black access to vote.

In June 1963, Hamer and several other activists were arrested in Winona, Mississippi, as they were returning from a voter’s workshop in South Carolina. The group was taken to the Montgomery County Jail, where they endured four days of abuse. Hamer was beaten by police officers—who enlisted prisoners to aid them—resulting in kidney damage, a blood clot in her eye, and a worsened limp.

The Fight for Rights and Representation

Unlike so many others, Hamer lived to tell her story. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Atlantic City, New Jersey, she boldly denounced state-sanctioned violence on the national stage and called attention to the varied strategies white supremacists employed in their effort to block Black people from the ballot box. Along with other activists in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), an organization Hamer helped to establish several months earlier, Hamer challenged the legitimacy of their state party’s all-white delegation. She and other MFDP activists hoped the national party would compel the state party to give up seats to the MFDP rather than suffer the embarrassment of exposing the lack of equal representation at the core of the Democratic Party. The MFDP also attempted to raise awareness of the broader struggles Black people faced throughout the South as they attempted to exercise their constitutional right to vote.

Hamer’s ascent into national acclaim challenged the preconceptions of many of her colleagues and foes whose conception of leadership did not include an impoverished and disabled Black woman with limited formal education. She surprised her critics by revealing how the trials she withstood had only strengthened her resolve to fight for civil and human rights, and she refused to be ashamed of her background. When challenged by Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. at the DNC to recognize his status within the Democratic Party, Hamer responded by simply asking, “How many bales of cotton have you picked?” For Hamer, lived experiences were just as valuable—perhaps even more so—than formal education, visibility, and political access.

Testifying before the Credentials Committee, Hamer used her speech to describe the acts of racist violence Black people faced on a daily basis in the Jim Crow South before recounting her own painful experience in Winona. “Is this America,” she asked, as tears welled up in her eyes, “the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”

Paving the Way for Equal Access to Voting

Hamer had pulled back the curtain. The United States could not claim to be a democracy while withholding voting rights from millions of its citizens. Although the MFDP delegation did not secure its intended seats at the convention, Hamer’s passionate speech set in motion a series of events that led to the 1965 passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act. Her address, combined with the nationwide protests led by Black activists, compelled President Lyndon B. Johnson—who had interrupted Hamer’s speech with a press conference of his own—to introduce federal legislation that banned local laws, like literacy tests, that blocked African Americans from the ballot box. The act also put in place restrictions on how certain states could implement new election laws.

Despite the many roadblocks she faced, Hamer persisted in her fight for Black voting rights. She recognized a problem, and she set out to find solutions. She called upon everyone in the United States to play an active role in building an inclusive democracy—one that would live up to the Constitutional ideals on which the nation was founded.

Related Reading:

• Excluded from National Leadership, Black Women Were the Backbone of the Civil Rights Movement 
• Angela Davis’s Imprisonment Inspired a Movement
• Kitty Cone: Advocate for Disability Rights