FANNIE LOU HAMER

Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer (born Fannie Lou Townsend on October 6, 1917 - March 14, 1977) was an American voting privileges activist and municipal privileges leader.

She was instrumental in coordinating Mississippi Freedom Summer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and subsequent became the Vice-Chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, assisting the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in that capacity. Her plain-spoken kind and fervent conviction in the Biblical righteousness of her origin profited her a status as an electrifying speaker and unchanging champion of municipal rights. (Colman, 1993)

Hamer came to some yearly seminars of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL) in the all-black village of Mound Bayou, Mississippi. The RCNL was directed by Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a municipal privileges foremost and rich very dark entrepreneur, and was a blend municipal privileges and self-help organization. The yearly RCNL seminars boasted entertainers, for example Mahalia Jackson, speakers, for example Thurgood Marshall and Rep. Charles Diggs of Michigan, and panels on voting privileges and other municipal privileges issues. Without her information or permission, she was sterilized in 1961 by a white medical practitioner as a part of the state of Mississippi's design to decrease the number of poor blacks in the state. Despite the risks and aggression, the labour rapidly shifted after school desegregation to dispute segregation in other areas. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a constituent of the Montgomery, Alabama, agency of the NAACP, was notified to stop her chair on a town coach to a white person. When Parks denied to proceed, she was arrested. The localized NAACP, directed by Edgar D. Nixon, identified that the apprehend of Parks might rally localized blacks to dispute segregated buses. Montgomery's very dark community had long been furious about their mistreatment on town motor advisers where white drivers were often impolite and abusive. The community had before advised a boycott of the motor advisers, and nearly overnight one was organized. The Montgomery coach boycott was an direct achievement, with effectively agreed support from the 50,000 blacks in Montgomery. It continued for more than a year and dramatized to the American public the conclusion of blacks in the South to end segregation. A government court organised Montgomery's motor advisers desegregated in November 1956, and the boycott completed in triumph. (Colman, 1993)

Partly as a outcome of the March on Washington, President Kennedy suggested a new municipal privileges law. After Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, the new leader, Lyndon Johnson, powerfully advised its route as a tribute to Kennedy's memory. Over furious disagreement from Southern legislators, Johnson shoved the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress. It prohibited segregation in public accommodations and discrimination in learning and employment. It furthermore provided the boss agency of government the power to enforce the act's provisions.

The year 1964 was the climax of SNCC's firm promise to municipal privileges activism at the community level. Starting in 1961 SNCC and CORE coordinated voter registration crusades in ...