Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer was an American voting and women's rights activist, community organiser and leader of the civil rights movement. A plantation timekeeper in Mississippi, she was fired after trying to register to vote in 1962 and became a field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Beaten almost to death in jail after an arrest at Winona in June 1963, she went on to help organise the Freedom Summer. As vice-chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party she gave televised testimony to the credentials committee of the 1964 Democratic National Convention.