William Chapel

William Chapel. . The historic William Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, established in 1922, was a longtime meeting place for civil rights activists before the organization of the modern civil rights movement. In 1962 the Reverend J. D. Story was the pastor when Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) members came to Ruleville to start a voter registration drive. While attending a mass meeting at William Chapel, Fannie Lou Hamer was inspired to attempt to register to vote for the first time.

William Chapel Missionary Baptist Church , This church, for decades a place where disenfranchised people gathered to affirm their worth through their faith, became a regular meeting place of civil rights organizers. Today it stands as a symbol of the freedom struggles of the Mississippi Delta. Fannie Lou Hamer attended what was known as a "mass meeting" here in August 1962 to hear workers from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They had come to Ruleville in Sunflower County, one of the most intractable areas of segregation, to spread the news of voter registration for African Americans, James Bevel, a young colleague of Martin Luther King Jr. quoted a passage in the Bible from the book of Matthew, words that inspired those gathered to claim what was rightfully theirs. Then SNCC member James Forman explained their constitutional right to the vote. Isolated from national news for most of her life. Fannie Lou Hamer and others attending the meeting had never heard that they could register to vote, and this knowledge, delivered powerfully to her during the mass meeting inspired her to join the fight for freedom. She went on to become an organizer of Mississippi Freedom Summer for SNCC and later became the vice-chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, attending the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in that capacity.

The Rev. J. D. Story, pastor of William Chapel during this turbulent time (1966-1979), was a courageous freedom fighter in his own right. Encouraging civil rights organizations to hold meetings there when other churches feared being firebombed, he was revered for always saying, "The doors of the church are open." Mass meetings were held every Friday at 7:30 p.m. for a number of years, and the church was in fact firebombed after a civil rights rally in June 1964. Mrs. Mary Tucker, a prominent figure in the Sunflower Freedom Movement, was one of the founding trustees.

After Fannie Lou Hamer's death at the age of fifty-nine, her funeral was held in William Chapel in April 1977 and attended by more than five thousand people. She was eulogized by other civil rights leaders including Vernon Jordan, Hodding Carter III, and Congressman Andrew Young.