It wasn’t called voter suppression back then, but civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer knew exactly how white authorities in Mississippi felt about Black people voting in the 1960s.

Fannie Lou Hamer was born in 1917, the 20th child of Lou Ella and James Lee Townsend, sharecroppers east of the Mississippi Delta. She first joined her family in the cotton fields at the age of six.

Fannie Lou Hamer stood before the Democratic National Convention (DNC). She delivered one of the most searing indictments of American democracy. “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of ...

Her work has previously appeared in USA Today and Washington Life Magazine. When former sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer first learned that Black people were finally allowed to vote, she knew exactly ...