With that in mind, it's time for the Way Black History Fact that I'm going to have to get through this quickly because there's a lot here, but it's very important, I promise. Today's a Way Black History Fact is sponsored by Underground Beach Club. From the Streets to the Beach. For the latest in beachwear, visit Underground Beach Club dot com. This comes from Women's History dot org. And we're talking about Fanny lou Townsend Hamer. Remember that name. She's a
very amazing person, all right. She rose from humble beginnings in the Mississippi Delta to become one of the most important, passionate, and powerful voices of the civil and voting rights movements, and a leader in the efforts for greater economic opportunities for African Americans. Hamer was born on October sixth, nineteen seventeen, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the twentieth and last child of sharecroppers Luella and James Townsend, and age six, Hamer joined
her family picking cotton. By twelve, she left school to work. In nineteen forty four, she married Harry Hamer, and the couple toiled on the Mississippi Plantation owned by bad Marlowe until nineteen sixty two. Because Hamer was the only worker who could read and wrote, she also served as the plantation timekeeper. In nineteen sixty one, Hamer received a hysterectomy by a white doctor without her consent while undergoing surgery
to remove a uterine tumor. Such forced sterilization of black women as a way to reduce the black population was so widespread it was dubbed a Mississippi appendectomy. Unable to have children of their own, the Hamers adopted two daughters. That summer, Hamer attended a meeting led by civil rights activist Jane Foreman of the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee SNCC and James Bevell of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference SCLC.
Hammer was incensed by efforts to deny blacks the right to vote. She became an SNCC organizer and on August thirty first, nineteen sixty two, led seventeen volunteers to register to vote at Indian App Indianola, Mississippi Courthouse, sorry denied the right to vote due to an unfair literacy test. The group was harassed on their way home when police stopped their bus and fined them one hundred dollars for the trump up charge that the bus was too yellow
that night. Right that night, Marlowe fired Hamer for her attempt to vote. Her husband was required to stay until the harvest. Marlowe confiscated much of their property. The Hamers moved to Ruleville, Mississippi, and Sunflower County with very little. In June nineteen sixty three, after successfully competing a voter completing a voter registration program in Charleston, South Carolina, Hamer and several other black women were arrested for sitting in
a whites only bus station restaurant in Winona, Mississippi. At the Winona jail House, she and several of the women were brutally beaten, leaving Hamer with lifelong injuries from a blood clot in her eye, kidney damage, and leg damage. In nineteen fifty four, Hamer's national reputation soared as she co founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the
local Democratic Party's efforts to block black participation. Hamer and other MFDP members went to the Democratic National Convention that year arguing to be recognized as the official delegation, but Hammer spoke before the Credential Committee calling for mandatory integrated state delegations. President Lyndon Johnson held a televised press conference so she would not get any television airtime. But her delegations had become a reality, and Hamer was a member
of the Mississippi's first integrated delegation. All right, I'm not going to finish this, but in nineteen sixty four, Hamer helped organize the Freedom Summer, which brought hundreds of college shoes in black and white to help with African American voter registration and segregated South from skipped down. Frustrated by the political process, Hamer returned to economic strategy for greater
racial equality. In nineteen sixty eight, she began a Pig Bank to provide three pigs to black farmers to breed, raise, and slaughter. A year later, she launched a Freedom Farm Cooperative. I have to skip down. There's so many great things here, but traveling, fundraising, and bailing health took her from the day to day operations, and she died of breast cancer at age fifteen nine in nineteen seventy seven. Please read more about her