Over the years, Hamer traveled through the state teaching black people to read and write in order to pass dubious literacy tests that prevented them from voting. She was arrested, beaten, and shot at throughout the course of her activist work. In June 1963, she was beaten so badly in a Winona, Mississippi jail that she suffered permanent kidney damage and was nearly blinded.
In the summer of 1964, she spoke to the Credentials Committee of the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. There, she represented the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a group challenging an all-white delegation from Mississippi filled with fervent segregationists. Upon telling her story about trying to vote in Mississippi, President Lyndon B. Johnson himself called an impromptu press conference to force her to stop speaking during the televised hearing. The effort backfired spectacularly; Major networks would later play her testimony from the previously-preempted newscast. Hamer could not be silenced.
She spent the rest of her life fighting for voting rights and to close the gap of economic disparity in Mississippi. The political oppression of the time was not the only system Hamer struggled against in her lifetime, though. She was also a victim of the healthcare system.
In 1961, Hamer went to a Sunflower County hospital so doctors could remove a uterine tumor. She left without her reproductive organs. The procedure–which she dubbed a “Mississippi appendectomy”–was part of a concerted effort within the state to reduce the local black population by sterilizing men and women of African descent without their knowledge or consent when the opportunity medically presented itself.
Unable to have children, Hamer was devastated. To be a poor, black woman in the rural south, there wasn’t much outside of the ability to reproduce that she could claim as her own without the threat of having it taken away, according to Chana Kai Lee in For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer.
“The impact of this [tragedy] found its way into her political thoughts,” Lee writes. “During the hearings, Hamer raised this issue as if it was an afterthought. However, she may have raised it last because it was something that bothered her most out of all the other horrible experiences that typified her life. Nevertheless it stands out amidst the rest of her testimony, for not everyone in the movement regarded sterilization as a political concern of their work in Mississippi. Clearly Hamer did, and she spoke about it.”