Born in Ruleville, Mississippi, on October 6, 1917, Fannie Lou Townsend was the youngest of 20 children. By the time she was six, she was working the fields with her sharecropper parents. Amid poverty and racial exploitation, she received only a sixth-grade education.
In l942 she married Perry ╥Pap╙ Hamer with whom she adopted two girls, one of whom died in l967. Her civil rights activism began with a mass meeting organized in August 1962 by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), where she answered a call for volunteers to challenge voter registration procedures that excluded African-Americans. Her civil-rights activity cost her and her husband their jobs at the Marlow Plantation. Despite this and other harassments, she continued her civil-rights work, becoming a field secretary for SNCC and a registered voter in 1963.
In l964 she became vice-chairperson of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), established after unsuccessful attempts by African-Americans to work with the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party. She ran as an MFDP candidate for Congress in the Second Congressional District of Mississippi. As a leader of the MFDP she gave a nationally televised address to the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention describing the violence and injustices suffered by civil rights activists, including a jailhouse beating which left her crippled.
Hamer published To Praise Our Bridges: An Autobiography, l967. As a member of the Democratic National Committee for Mississippi l968╨1971 and the Policy Council of the National Women╒s Political Caucus, 1971╨1977, she actively opposed the Vietnam War and worked tirelessly on projects to improve economic conditions in Mississippi, including the Delta Ministry, the Freedom Farms Corporation, and the Young World Developers. She was awarded honorary degrees from several universities, including Tougaloo College, Howard University, and Morehouse College. She died on March 15, l977.
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