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Fannie Lou Hamer Research Paper

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The word unwavering is defined as something that is firm, fixed, and unshakable. Wavering faith is not faith at all. True faith is firm and consistent. When I think of a woman with unwavering faith, I think of a fearless civil rights activist whose courage helped people gain the right to vote. Her name was Fannie Lou Hamer.
The Faith of Fannie Lou Hamer
Fannie Lou Hamer was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi, in 1917. She was the granddaughter of a slave and the youngest of twenty children. Her parents were poor sharecroppers and at age six, Fannie began helping them pick cotton. Fannie Lou met her husband, Perry Hamer, on the plantation where she worked. In 1962, she underwent surgery to remove a small uterine tumor. Without her knowledge …show more content…

She listened to the civil rights activists speak out against the racists who denied southern African-Americans their legal right to vote. Like other sharecroppers, Hamer never even knew that she had the right to vote. She was inspired, and became the first to volunteer as a SNCC organizer, helping local African-Americans register to vote.
At the time, African-American who dared register to vote in the South faced the threat of being lynched, physically beaten, or losing their job. After registering African-Americans to vote, she and other civil rights activists were threatened and arrested. Upon being released from jail, the plantation owner informed Fannie Lou Hamer that she had to leave his land. She left the plantation and a week later, the Ku Klux Klan shot up the home of the family she was living with.
Forced off the plantation and into poverty, Hamer began to challenge the racist system even more directly. She later said, “There was nothing they could do to me. They couldn’t fire me, because I didn’t have a job. They couldn’t put me out of my house, because I didn’t have one. There was nothing they could take from me any

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