Fannie Lou Hamer

Mississippi sharecropper and civil rights activist who organized voter registration drives across Sunflower County. On June 9, 1963, she was severely beaten by police at a Winona, Mississippi jail while returning from a voter registration training program — suffering permanent kidney damage. Her 1964 Democratic National Convention testimony, broadcast nationally after President Johnson tried to preempt it, exposed the systematic violence used to nullify the Fifteenth Amendment across the Deep South. She co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the National Women's Political Caucus.