“But what was the point of being scared? The only thing could do was kill me, and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.”Īt the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Hamer rose to national prominence. “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d a been a little scared,” she said. Eventually, she passed the literacy test and paid the poll tax so she could vote. Hamer spent the rest of her life doing just that. She said, ‘They kicked me off the plantation, they set me free. Hamer said in that strong, authoritative voice. Hamer came into the Baptist church and said she had been ordered off the plantation,” recalled former SNCC organizer Dora Churnet in the New York Times. “I went down to register for myself.” She was forced to leave. “I didn’t go down there to register for you,” Hamer replied. When Hamer finally made it home, the plantation owner already knew about what she’d done and told Hamer that if she didn’t withdraw her registration, she’d have to leave. On their way home from Indianola, Hamer and the others were stopped by police, who said their bus was the wrong color, and fined $100. At that time in Mississippi, if you registered to vote, your name and address ran in the paper for two weeks so the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists could terrorize you if you were Black. Both she and the other test-taker failed, but Hamer said she would return until she passed.
“I knowed as much about a facto law as a horse knows about Christmas Day,” Hamer said later. They had to answer questions about the Mississippi constitution and de facto laws of the state. Only she and one other person were allowed to take the literacy test.
The next day, Hamer was on a bus with 17 other people headed to the county seat in Indianola to register. “I had never heard, until 1962, that Black people could register and vote,” she said. In the summer of 1962, Hamer attended a meeting led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The practice was so commonly performed on poor Black women that it was nicknamed a “Mississippi appendectomy.” In 1961, a white doctor gave Hamer a hysterectomy without her consent while she was undergoing surgery to remove a uterine tumor. They tried for a family, but Hamer had several miscarriages, so they adopted two girls. When she was twenty-seven, she married Perry “Pap” Hamer. Hamer was born in 1917, the youngest of 20 children, and spent her life as a sharecropper with little formal education, though she loved to read. “Why should I leave Ruleville and why should I leave Mississippi?” she once asked a journalist. The Ku Klux Klan shot into a friend’s house 16 times while Hamer was staying there. She lost a daughter because no hospital in Mississippi would treat a child of Fannie Lou Hamer. She paid a price, however, with police beatings that left her permanently disabled.
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