r Fannie gave no thought that she would continue to pick cotton day after day. By the time Hamer was six she began to work in the fields. When asked about her childhood later in life, Fannie Lou stated that: “Life was very hard; we never hardly had enough to eat; we didn’t have clothes to wear. We had to work real hard, because I started working when I was six years old. I didn’t have a chance to go to school too much, because school would only last about four months at the time when I was a kid going to school. Most of the time we didn’t have clothes to wear to that (school); and then if any work would come up that we would have to do, the parents would take us out of the school to cut stalks and burn stalks or work in dead lands or things like that. It was just really tough as a kid when I was a child”. By the time Hamer was twelve, her parent had saved up enough money to rest some land and buy a tractor of their own. It was this difficult childhood, which lead Hamer to fight for the rights of the black people.Up until 1962 Fannie was like many black people ignorant of voting knowledge. She did not even know how to register. However, one changed her life. She attended a mass meeting at the Williams Chapel Church in Ruleville, Mississippi. This meeting was lead by workers from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They were sharing information of voter registration. It was here where her eyes were opened to the opportunity of voting, and taking part in decisions that affect her. Realizing the dangers of such an action, Fannie was unafraid. Fannie’s real adventure in the civil rights movement began on August 31, 1962 when she and 17 others took a bus to the courthouse in Indianola, the county seat, to register to vote. Fannie explained about this experience, they drove to Indianola to register, “there were pe...
