At the age of 59, Fannie Lou Hamer, a former sharecropper who became a prominent figure in the Southern civil rights movement of the 1960s and became one of its most influential leaders and symbols, passed away due to cancer.
Fannie Lou Hamer, who became a nationally recognized fighter for equal rights for blacks throughout the 1960s, passed away yesterday from cancer at Mount Bayon Community Hospital in Mississippi, which is located thirty miles north of her home in Ruleville. At the age of sixty, she was. Leaving her livelihood as a sharecropper on a cotton plantation, Mrs. Hamer joined the civil rights activists working in the Mississippi Delta region in 1962, when she was 45 years old.
These activists were primarily comprised of young people living in the region. Over the course of the subsequent fifteen years, she emerged as one of the most prominent, respected, and long-lasting black leaders serving in the Deep South. She encouraged black people working in cotton or soybean fields to register to vote, join labor unions, or organize agricultural cooperatives by using her booming voice and a rural knowledge that was laced with a sense of homegrown experience. When Mrs. Hamer informed Congressmen and northern audiences about the civil rights workers who had been arrested, beaten, and murdered in her state, she did so in a more subdued manner, but she did not lose any of her forcefulness.
An experienced observer of the civil rights scene has stated that she “electrified this nation with a television appearance during the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City.” Atlantic City was the location of the convention. Through her work, she brought the genuine life and death realities of Mississippi into the homes of people all throughout the United States. During the same convention, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which she had assisted in establishing, made a challenge to the regular party, which was run by white people, for seats. However, they were unsuccessful in their attempt.
In the year 1968, a few of the delegates belonging to the black-ledf party were seated, and in 1972, the black group succeeded the whites in their position. In spite of the fact that she was assaulted, detained, and shot at, Mrs. Hamer did not permit herself to harbor hatred toward white people. She expressed her feelings by saying, “I feel sorry for anybody that could let hatred wrap them up.
There’s no way I could ever despise anybody and still have hope of seeing them? “The face of God” Despite the fact that her health was deteriorating, Mrs. Hamer assisted in the process of uniting the black and white branches of Mississippi’s Democratic Party over the winter of 1975–1976. This one, integrated unit represented the state at the Democratic Convention held in New York the previous year.
Although she is well-known on a national scale, she resides in a three-room house in Ruleville, which has a population of 2,000 people. When she was younger, she once posed the question to a journalist, “Why should I leave Ruleville and why should I leave Mississippi?” “we go to the big city, and with the kind of education that they give us in Mississippi, I have problems,” she said. I’d end up waiting in a queue for soup there. It is for this reason that we wish to alter Mississippi. It is not possible to avoid problems; rather, you must confront them head-on.
The youngest of twenty children born to Jim and Lou Ella Townsend, who worked as sharecroppers on a plantation in Montgomery County, Mr. Hammer was the youngest of the families. Beginning at the age of six, she began working in the fields. She had a total of approximately six years of formal education, which she received after the crops were harvested and she was allowed to attend school.
She recalled that she was hungry for the majority of the time. It was in 1945 when she tied the knot with Perry “Pap” Hamer, a young man who had been responsible for plowing the cotton fields that the Hamer family had established. Together, they adopted two daughters, Jean and Virgie Ree. Jean Hamer passed away in 1968 due to malnutrition “because we were poor throughout her entire life,” Mrs. Hamer explained to an interviewer. A Ruleville Baptist Church was the location of Mrs. Hamer’s attendance at civil rights marches in the year 1962.
At one point in time, she made the following statement: “They discussed how it was our rights as human beings to register and vote.” I had no idea that we had the ability to vote previously. It was never disclosed to us. As soon as Mrs. Hamer started working as a field worker with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in December of 1962, she was immediately given the order to leave the shack that she and her family were living in on Dave Milo’s farm, which was located close to Ruleville.
