Home > West's Encyclopedia of American Law > Hamer, Fannie Lou Townsend

Fannie Lou Hamer worked for voter registration for African Americans in the U.S. South and helped establish the Mississippi Freedom DEMOCRATIC PARTY (MFDP), which successfully challenged the all-white Democratic party in Mississippi.

Hamer was born October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi. She was the twentieth and youngest child of Jim Townsend and Lou Ella Townsend, who were sharecroppers in rural Mississippi. Hamer grew up in a tar paper shack and slept on a cotton sack stuffed with dry grass. She first went into the cotton fields to work when she was six years old, picking thirty pounds of cotton a week. By the time she was thirteen years old, Hamer was picking two hundred to three hundred pounds of cotton each week. Because of her family's poverty, she was forced to end her formal education after the sixth grade.

In 1944, when she was...