Fannie Lou Hamer was born into a sharecropping family in Mississippi in 1917. She became a critical activist for voting rights, desegregation, and political representation both at the national level and in Mississippi politics.

Like many other Black Americans who fought for civil rights, Hamer often encountered danger, threats, and violence in the course of her work. In 1963, police jailed her after a protest and brutally beat her and other activists, leaving Hamer with lifelong injuries.

Hamer’s work continued — she helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and ran for Congress, challenging segregationists within the Democratic Party. She taught, trained, sang, and fundraised — pushing the American democratic experiment to become more successful, and more real.

“If we’re trying to break down this barrier of segregation, we can’t segregate ourselves.”

During the Freedom Summer of 1964, college students from the North — many of them white — traveled south to participate in the Civil Rights Movement. Some of Hamer’s co-organizers were wary of including these others, but Hamer modeled an attitude of working together for the common good, even across deep differences: “If we’re trying to break down this barrier of segregation, we can’t segregate ourselves.”

Hamer’s resilience and her hope that America could be a place of equality and equal representation yields a legacy that inspires us to protect and mature our democracy.