Doctors involuntarily sterilized Fannie Lou Hamer in 1961 under the pretense of removing tumors in a procedure known as the “Mississippi appendectomy.” This was a frequent occurrence for Black women without their consent. This injustice led her to fight for Black rights, mainly to vote. In the summer of 1962, angry about her disenfranchisement as a Black woman, Hamer became an SNCC organizer.
On August 31, 1962, she led seventeen volunteers to register to vote at the Indianola, Mississippi Courthouse. An unfair literacy test assured failure. On their way home, police stopped their bus and fined them $100 because the bus was too yellow. That night, the Marlow Plantation dismissed Hamer because she attempted to vote and compelled her husband to work the harvest. Marlow also confiscated much of their property.
The Mississippi Registration and Literacy Test was based on the 1890 Mississippi Constitution, declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, but not amended until 1975. Disenfranchisement tools included poll taxes, literacy tests, and the “grandfather clause.” Blacks could vote without taking the literacy tests if their grandfathers were eligible to vote before Reconstruction (1867). However, none of them were free until 1865. By the late 1870s, Jim Crow was in full effect, and Black male voters dropped from 130,000 to 1,300.
Aside from the questions you would expect, the clencher was the applicant must hand write a selection handed out by the officials from the 1890 Mississippi Constitution. The next question asked the applicants to explain what the words meant in their own words. The relevant question would be how many whites could pass.
On June 9, 1963, police in Winona, Mississippi, stopped Hamer and several fellow activists’ bus as they returned from a citizenship training program in Charleston, SC. When several members of the group sat at the bus station’s whites-only lunch counter in protest, the police arrested six people. In jail, the police and other Black inmates forced to use blackjacks beat several of the activists. Hamer suffered severe injuries, including a blood clot in her eye, kidney damage, and leg damage, which left her with lifelong health issues.
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