Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer. Jim Crow Grounded in Atlantic City.

"All my life I've been sick and tired. Now I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired"

, Born the twentieth child of sharecropper parents, Fannie Lou attended a "mass meeting" in 1962 held by the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at the age of 44. Learning about voting rights at the meeting inspired Fannie Lou to register for herself. She and her husband Perry were fired from the Sunflower County, Mississippi plantation where they lived and worked for 18 years after the owner was informed of her activity. Ms. Hamer went to work as a Field Organizer for SNCC and became a founding member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in 1964. The MFDP was formed to expose the Jim Crow Laws which were embraced by the Mississippi State Democratic Committee., She and fellow MFDP members arrived in Atlantic City to attend the Democratic National Convention to unseat the all white, all male Mississippi Delegation in August of 1964. Fannie Lou appeared before the Credentials Committee of August 22, 1954 and gave historic testimony recounting the beatings and intimidation she and others suffered at the hands of Mississippi law enforcement while attempting to register to vote. President Lyndon Johnson, concerned about televised exposure of these brutal revelations preempted her testimony with an impromptu news conference. National TV Networks responded by televising the testimony later that night and for days afterward., In the end the MFDP failed to be seated at the Atlantic City Convention. Less than one year later President Johnson signed into law the 1965 Voting Rights Act which dismantled Jim Crow laws throughout the South At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago Fannie Lou Hamer became the first Black delegate since Reconstruction and the first woman ever seated in the Mississippi Delegation with thunderous applause and a standing ovation.