When Fannie Lou Hamer testified before the Credentials Committee of the 1964 Democratic National Convention, she made the nation aware of the exclusion of African Americans from Mississippi's political process. Her testimony, which was aired on the evening television news, resulted in the Democratic Party offering the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) two at-large seats in the Mississippi delegation. Although Martin Luther King, Jr. and liberal Democrats supported the compromise, the MFDP rejected it. “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats,” said Hamer.
Born in 1917 in Montgomery County, Mississippi, to cotton sharecroppers Ella and Jim Townsend, Fannie Lou was the youngest of twenty children. She grew up on a Sunflower County plantation and in 1945 married Perry Hamer, a tractor driver on a cotton plantation owned by W. D. Marlow. For the next eighteen years, she worked as a sharecropper and a timekeeper for the plantation's owner.
In 1962, Robert Moses and other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came to Sunflower County to educate black citizens on their right to vote. Inspired by what she learned from the SNCC workers and by her studies at Septima Clark's citizenship school, Hamer attempted to register to vote in Indianola. When her landlord and employer learned of the attempt, he fired Hamer and forced her to leave her home. Hamer suffered repeated threats and a severe beating in the Winona, Mississippi jail, but she was determined to vote. In 1963, she became a field secretary for SNCC, and by the time she cast her first vote in 1964, she was already very active in politics. "I cast my first vote for myself, because I was running for Congress," she recalled.
In 1964, Hamer helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as an alternative to the state’s white-controlled Democratic Party. When the MFDP challenged the all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, Hamer gave an impassioned account of the violence she and other civil rights activists had suffered when they tried to exercise their right to vote. She closed her testimony by stating, "If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America."
The failure of Lyndon B. Johnson and the Democratic Party to support the MFDP’s challenge, as well as the ensuing rejection of the compromise by the MFDP, exacerbated the growing ideological differences among civil rights adherents. The efforts of the MFDP, however, had a lasting impact on the democratic process. Reflecting on the 1964 convention and the contributions of Fannie Lou Hamer and MFDP leader Aaron Henry, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “Their testimony educated a nation and brought the political powers to their knees in repentance, for the convention voted never again to seat a delegation that was racially segregated.”
Hamer continued her career in political organizing and civil rights work as a delegate to the 1968 Democratic National Convention. In 1969, she helped found the Freedom Farms Corporation, a nonprofit farming cooperative organized to alleviate hunger among poor blacks and whites in Mississippi . She remained active in civic affairs in Mississippi throughout her life and continued to speak and give interviews about the black freedom movement until her death from cancer in 1977.