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Good Evening:<br>
<br>
Today our spotlight is on <b>Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer (1917-1977) - </b>civil
rights activist. The youngest of 20 children, Fannie Lou Townsend was
born in Mississippi and began working in the cotton fields at age six.
As an infant, she suffered a serious leg injury, but her family could
not afford medical care, and she limped for the rest of her life. <font><font>Hamer
dropped out of school after the sixth grade in order to help her
family. Although she never received a formal educated Hamer went on to
be a dynamic speaker and civil rights worker. </font></font><font
face="Arial"><font size="-1">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</font>.</font><font><font>
</font></font>At one point, her father managed to save enough money to
buy three mules that would allow him to work his own land, but the
animals were poisoned by whites angry at the family's success. In
1945, she married Perry "Pap" Hamer, a sharecropper, living in
Ruleville, Sunflower County.<br>
<br>
On August 31, 1962, a day after attending a voter registration meeting,
Mrs. Hamer and 17 other African Americans rented a bus to go to
Indianola, the county seat, to try to register to vote. At that time,
only 155 black people out of an eligible black population of 13,524 in
Sunflower County were registered. Mrs. Hamer's gorup was rejected, and
on the way home, the driver of the bus was arrested on the charge that
the yellow bus looked too much like a school bus. When Mrs. Hamer
finally returned home, she was ordered to leave the plantation where
she lived and worked for 18 years. Several nights later, shots were
fired into the home of the woman with whom she had gone to stay.<br>
<br>
<font><font>In 1963 after many attempts Hamer final became registered
to vote. To help others register to vote, she worked as a field
secretary for for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC). </font></font>In 1963, while returning from a voter
education training session, Mrs. Hamer and several others, including
15-year-old June Johnson and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) leader lawrence Guyot, were arrested in Winona and jailed. All
were beaten, and Mrs. Hamer sustained permanent kidney damage. While
they were in jail, <i>Medgar Evers</i> was murdered, and publicity
surrounding his death persuaded officials to free Mrs. Hamer and the
others. In speaking of the b eating later, Mrs. Hamer said, "We're
tired of all this beating, we're tired of taking this. It's been a
hundred years and we're still being beaten and shot at, crosses are
still being burned, because we want to vote. But I'm going to stay in
Mississippi, and if they shoot me down, I'll be buried here."<br>
<br>
Mrs. Hamer became a leader in SNCC voter registration efforts, a
position that cost her husband his job. No one would hire him, and the
family was forced to live on the $10 a week Mrs. hamer recieved from
SNCC. In 1964, Mrs. Hamer helped form the new Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party, which challenged the right of the regular all-white
Mississippi delegation to be seated at the Democratic Party
presidential convention being held in New Jersey.<font face="Arial"
size="-1">"If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I
question America," she said. "Is this America? The land of the free and
the home of the brave? Where we have to sleep with our telephones off
the hook, because our lives be threatened daily." Hamer discussed the
abuse she had suffered in retaliation for attending a civil rights
meeting. "They beat me and they beat me with the long, flat black-jack.
I screamed to God in pain...." As a compromise measure the Democratic
Party leadership offered the MFDP delegation two seats, which they
refused. Hamer said, "We didn't come for no two seats when all of us is
tired." And no MFDP member was seated.</font>
<p align="left"><font face="Arial" size="-1">In 1965 Hamer, Victoria
Gray, and Annie Devine ran for Congress and challenged the seating of
the regular Mississippi representatives before the U.S. House of
Representatives. Though they were unsuccessful in their challenge, the
1965 elections were later overturned. Hamer continued to be politically
active and from 1968 to 1971 was a member of the Democratic National
Committee from Mississippi.</font></p>
In 1966, she took in her two grandchildren after their mother bled to
death when local hospitals would not accept her. She also helped care
for her son who has been disabled in Vietnam. <font><font>She
organized grass-root antipoverty projects. In 1965 "Mississippi"
magazine named Hamer one of six "women of influence" in the state. In
1968 she created a food cooperative to benefit the poor and in 1969 she
founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative. In 1972 she help found National
Women's Political caucus and later worked on issues such as school
desegregation, child day care, and low income housing. Hamer was an
inspiration in the struggle for civil rights. Hamer underwent a radical
mastectomy in 1976 and died of cancer at the age of 59 on March 14,
1977 in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Hospital.</font></font><br>
<br>
Mrs. Hamer's effectiveness stemmed from her oratory (some say her
skills were second only to those of Martin Luther King, Jr.), her
inspirational singing, and her tireless devotion to the cause of poor
blacks. She is famous for saying, <i><b>"I'm sick and tired of being
sick and tired."<br>
<br>
</b></i>Mrs. Hamer proved that even though life deals you lemons, you
still have to keep up the fight and continue to move forward. She
never allowed her limp, her husband's inability to be employable, her
beating/jail time or the death of a daughter or disability of a son, to
prevent her from standing up for what is right.<br>
<br>
Until Tomorrow.<br>
<br>
<br>
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