Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Townsend was born in 1917 in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the last of twenty children of sharecroppers, and was picking cotton by the age of six. She left school after sixth grade to work full time. In 1961, in hospital for a small tumour, she was given a hysterectomy without her consent, a practice so common that Black women in the state called it a "Mississippi appendectomy".

In August 1962, at 44, she went to a civil rights meeting and learned that Black people were legally entitled to vote. She travelled to the county seat with seventeen others to register, failed the deliberately impossible literacy test, and returned home to be told by the plantation owner that she must withdraw or leave. She left that night. Shots were later fired into the house where she was staying.

In June 1963, returning from a training session, she was arrested in Winona, Mississippi, and beaten in her cell by two Black prisoners ordered to do it by police. She was left with permanent kidney damage and a limp. In 1964 she helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and described the beating, live on television, to the credentials committee of the Democratic National Convention. President Johnson called a press conference to push her off the air; the networks ran her testimony in full that evening anyway.

She spent the rest of her life on the practical side of freedom, founding a farm cooperative so that poor families could feed themselves. She died in 1977, aged 59.