Women’s History Month: Fannie Lou Hamer

March is Women’s History Month. YWCA Mahoning Valley celebrates all women: past, present and the women of our future. Today, we want to shed a light on Fannie Lou Hamer. She was an activist for voting and women’s rights, a leader in the Civil Rights movement and a community organizer. Hamer was brought up in rural Mississippi. The youngest of twenty children, she began working alongside her parents as sharecroppers at the age of six, she eventually dropped out of school at the age of 12 to help out her family and work as a fulltime sharecropper. In 1944, Hamer married Perry Hamer and they moved to Ruleville, Mississippi where they continued to be sharecroppers. Hamer would eventually go through a traumatic event. When undergoing surgery for a uterine tumor removal, she received a hysterectomy by a white doctor without her consent. Forced sterilization against Black women was used to reduce the Black population and was dubbed a “Mississippi appendectomy”. Although she and her husband were not able to have children biologically, they adopted two daughters. 1962 marked the beginning of Hamer’s activism. She attended a local meeting held by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a committee that encouraged Black people to register to vote which was something she never heard before: Black people having the right to vote.

On August 31, Hamer along with 17 others, traveled to the county courthouse in Indianola, Mississippi. However, they encountered opposition from local and state law enforcement, only allowing for Hamer and one other person to register. After registering to vote, Hamer was fired from her job and driven from the plantation she called home for over two decades. This action only pushed her further into activism. Two years later Hamer spoke a powerful testimony at the Democratic National Convention where she famously said, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired”. Throughout her time as an activist Hamer endured many sacrifices including harassment, violence and economic hardship. After a successful voter registration program in Charleston, South Carolina, Hamer and several other Black women were arrested for sitting in a White’s only bus station, they were taken to the Winona jailhouse where they were brutally beaten. Hamer endured significant and permanent injuries such as a blood clot in her eye, kidney damage and leg damage. Despite the violence she endured, Hamer continued her advocacy for social justice. In 1964, Hamer helped organize Freedom Summer, which brought together hundreds of college students, both Black and White, to help Black voter registration in the South. She would continue her fight for equality and justice until her passing in 1977.  Fannie Lou Hamer is one of the many women YWCA strives to embody while doing our work for the ongoing fight for racial justice and equity. Happy Women’s History Month!