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 ...