Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer's first forty-five years were mostly cotton. She was born in Montgomery County in 1917, the youngest of twenty children of sharecroppers James Lee and Lou Ella Townsend, who moved to the E. W. Brandon Plantation in Sunflower County in 1919. She picked cotton from the age of six and left school after the sixth grade. After marrying Perry Hamer in 1944 she worked the W. D. Marlow plantation as a field hand, domestic worker and timekeeper. In 1961 a white doctor performed a hysterectomy on her without her knowledge or permission.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Winona: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Montgomery County Jail — 9.9 mi
  Two Freedom Trail stops in Winona for 9 June 1963, when Fannie Lou Hamer and other voting-rights workers were arrested at the bus depot and beaten in the Montgomery County Jail.
• Carroll County Courthouse — 21 mi
  The courthouse in Carrollton where, on 17 March 1886, armed white men fired into a courtroom and killed about two dozen Black people, and no one was ever charged.
• Grenada Freedom Movement Marker — 27 mi
  The Mississippi Freedom Trail marker at Line and Green streets for the 1966 Grenada movement, when Black children entering white schools were beaten by a mob and 13 white men were arrested.

More markers nearby

• George A. McLean — 9.6 mi
• Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway — 10 mi
• Pops Staples — 10 mi
• Ensign William Devotie Billingsley — 11 mi