home of the free because of the brave st louis

“I had never heard, until 1962, that Black people could register and vote,” she said. In the summer of 1962, Hamer attended a meeting led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The practice was so commonly performed on poor Black women that it was nicknamed a “Mississippi appendectomy.” In 1961, a white doctor gave Hamer a hysterectomy without her consent while she was undergoing surgery to remove a uterine tumor. They tried for a family, but Hamer had several miscarriages, so they adopted two girls. When she was twenty-seven, she married Perry “Pap” Hamer. Hamer was born in 1917, the youngest of 20 children, and spent her life as a sharecropper with little formal education, though she loved to read. “Why should I leave Ruleville and why should I leave Mississippi?” she once asked a journalist. The Ku Klux Klan shot into a friend’s house 16 times while Hamer was staying there.

She lost a daughter because no hospital in Mississippi would treat a child of Fannie Lou Hamer. She paid a price, however, with police beatings that left her permanently disabled.

Home of the free because of the brave st louis