On Aug. 22, 1964, 47-year-old Fannie Lou Hamer sat before the Credentials Committee at the Democratic National Convention and told the harrowing account of her attempt two years earlier to ...

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.