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Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer, (1917-1977), was the founder and Vice Chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She led the black delegates from Mississippi to the 1964 National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. A sharecropper who learned to read and write, Ms. Hamer was forced to leave the plantation she worked on in 1962 after attempting to register to vote. She then joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, (SNCC), and became a field Secretary. Late in 1962 she was finally able to register to vote.