Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977), field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was an outspoken advocate for civil rights for African Americans.

For more than half of Fannie Lou Hamer's life, she was a rural agricultural worker who saw no end to the cycle of poverty and humiliation that was the plight of most southern African Americans. Fannie Lou, born October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, was the last of twenty children born to Jim and Ella Townsend. When she was two years old the family moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi, where Fannie resided for the rest of her life. At age six she joined the other family members working as a sharecropper picking cotton. By the time she was 13 she could pick between two and three hundred pounds of cotton a day.

In spite of intensive labor the Townsends were always in need because sharecroppers had to give...