Fannie Lou Hammer

Mississippi in the early 1900s was a state of great opportunity. Where child received a well earned education, parents made more than enough money to support their family and security was granted, if you your skin color was white. While on the other side of the tracks, where their was limited opportunity for important. Child are forced to leave their inadequate education work because father and mother are not making enough money to feed them self’s and protects was not enforced, was an all to common situation for blacks. In horrific situations are when leaders, such as Fannie Lou Hamer, rise up and speak. Despite the obstacles of physical and emotional attacks, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer was able to make major contribution to American politics, society, and culture. On October 6, 1917, the 20th child of Jim and Ella Townsend was born. Fannie Lou would become her name and with her birth the family when through a grim winter that yea in Montgomery county, Mississippi. During the World War 1, many blacks sharecroppers left the fields for jobs in the North. Fannie Lou’s parents decided to take advantage of the shortage and headed further south, where they ended up sharecropping on a plantation outside of tiny Ruleville, in Sunflower county, Mississippi. At the age of six, Hamer started picking cotton part time and at age twelve, she was picking full time. After finishing the sixth grade, Fannie Lou was able to read and do arithmetic, but writing was an art she would never master. August 26, 1962 was the first “mass meeting” Mrs. Hamer attended, were she heard the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) preaching that all human beings have to right to vote. After that meeting , the life of this 44 year old field worker was suddenly turned upside down. Five days after attending the meeting, she and 17 others boarded a big yellow bus to Indianola, where they would try to register to vote. The registering