Fannie Lou Hamer - A Tribute

and before I stopped talking the owner of the plantation came and said family, do you know that dad told you what I said and I said yes sir, he said well, I mean, he said if you don't come down and pick up your registration you'll have to leave? that then if you come down and withdraw you might still have to leave because we're not set up for that in Mississippi and I turned to him and told him I didn't try to register for you, I tried to register for myself. a history maker for the ages Fannie Lou Hamer was extraordinary and all women, the youngest of 20 children, at the age of six had joined her family in the cotton fields of Mississippi, although she was stricken with polio , young Fanny could rescue up to 300 pounds of cotton a day. day Fanny the activist learned to stare into danger, she was shot, she was beaten, she was imprisoned, she was threatened, and once a sheriff told her, she will make you wish you were dead.

Fannie Lou was a collaborator. She is reaching across racial, generational and gender divides, she is working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. launched Mississippi Freedom Summer joined with white women to form the national women's political group launched the pork project to help impoverish sharecroppers with the National Council of Black Women and founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative to support rural economic development in 1964 led the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party to the Democratic National Convention and demanded to be chosen as a delegate the same year she ran for the United States Senate, five years before Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman to win the congressional elections, her defense was relentless, but so were the illnesses that led her to an early grave. she at 59 years old.

During surgery to remove a uterine tumor in 1961, without her consent, she received a hysterectomy. Fannie Lou (labeled as this is widely practiced for the sterilization of black and native Mississippian women), appendectomy in 1963, endured brutal physical and sexual assault by Mississippi police. She was beaten so brutally that her eyes swelled and her long-term illness and traumas followed, including a blood clot in her left eye, kidney damage and other injuries that never healed in the 1970s. called nervous exhaustion stopped his activism. Fannie Lou Hamer died on March 14, 1977. This extraordinary woman, who made history for centuries, paved the way to full citizenship.

Happy Birthday.