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Biography of Fannie Lou HamerName: Fannie Lou HamerBirth Date: October 6, 1917 Death Date: March 14, 1977 Place of Birth: Montgomery County, Mississippi, United States Nationality: American Gender: Female Occupations: civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977), field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was an outspoken advocate for civil rights for African Americans.For more than half of Fannie Lou Hamer's life, she was a rural agricultural worker who saw no end to the cycle of poverty and humiliation that was the plight of most southern African Americans. Fannie Lou, born October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, was the last of twenty children born to Jim and Ella Townsend. When she was two years old the family moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi, where Fannie resided for the rest of her life. At age six she joined the other family members working as a sharecropper picking cotton. By the time she was 13 she could pick between two and three hundred pounds of cotton a day.In spite of intensive labor the Townsends were always in need because sharecroppers had to give a portion of …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…was a member of the board of trustees of the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change.Hamer underwent a radical mastectomy in 1976 and died of cancer March 14, 1977, in the Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Hospital. Associated Organizations Further Reading There are several biographies of Hamer, including Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: the Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (1993), and a children's book, Fannie Lou Hamer: From Sharecropping to Politics, by David Rubel with an introduction by Andrew Young (1990). Many histories of the civil rights movement in the South include information about Hamer. These include Vicki Crawford, Jacqueline Rouse, and Barbara Woods, Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-1965 (1990); Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 (1987); and various histories of SNCC and its leaders. A collection of Fannie Lou Hamer papers is available on microfilm from the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana. |