Working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which recruited her to help with voter-registration drives, Hamer became a community organizer, women's rights activist, and co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Starting in the early 1960s and until her death in 1977, she was an irresistible force, not merely joining the swelling wave of change brought by civil rights but keeping it in motion. And so Fannie Lou Hamer lifted up her voice. And she was denied the most basic of all rights in Americathe right to cast a ballotin a state in which Blacks constituted nearly half the population. She was subjected without her consent to an operation that deprived her of children. She left school at 12 to pick cotton, as those before her had done, in a world in which white supremacy was an unassailable citadel.
She was born the 20th child in a family that had lived in the Mississippi Delta for generations, first as enslaved people and then as sharecroppers.
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