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Fannie Lou Hamer Essay examples

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Fannie Lou Hamer

"If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question American. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hook because of our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in America?" Fannie Lou Hammer before the Democratic National Convention, 1964. Fannie Lou Hamer is best known for her involvement in the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC). The SNCC was at the head of the American voter registration drives of the 1960's. Hamer was a spokeswoman for the Mississippi Freedom Party (MFDP), which ultimately succeeded in electing many blacks to national office in the state of Mississippi. …show more content…

When accepting the offer Fannie gave no thought that she would continue to pick cotton day after day. By the time Hamer was six she began to work in the fields. When asked about her childhood later in life, Fannie Lou stated that: "Life was very hard; we never hardly had enough to eat; we didn't have clothes to wear. We had to work real hard, because I started working when I was six years old. I didn't have a chance to go to school too much, because school would only last about four months at the time when I was a kid going to school. Most of the time we didn't have clothes to wear to that (school); and then if any work would come up that we would have to do, the parents would take us out of the school to cut stalks and burn stalks or work in dead lands or things like that. It was just really tough as a kid when I was a child".
By the time Hamer was twelve, her parent had saved up enough money to rest some land and buy a tractor of their own. It was this difficult childhood, which lead Hamer to fight for the rights of the black people. Up until 1962 Fannie was like many black people ignorant of voting knowledge. She did not even know how to register. However, one changed her life. She attended a mass meeting at the Williams Chapel Church in Ruleville, Mississippi. This meeting was lead by workers from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They

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