ople there with guns and just a lot of strange—looking people to us.” They walked into the office where they needed to register. The person behind the desk would only allow two of the eighteen members to attempt to register. Fannie and one other member from her group were allowed to take the literacy test. “So the registrar gave me the 16th section of the Constitution of Mississippi. He pointed it out in the book and told me to look at it and then copy it down just like I saw it in the book: Put a period where a period was supposed to be, a comma and all of that. After I copied it down he told me right below that to give a real reasonable interpretation then, interpret what I had read. That was impossible. I had tried to give it, but I didn’t even know what it meant, much less to interpret it”. “I had never heard, until 1962, that black people could register and vote”. Fannie remarks about what happened when she returned from trying to register, “Well, when we got back I went on out to where I had been staying for eighteen years, and the landowner had talked to my husband and told him I had to leave the place…He said, ‘you’ll have to go down and withdraw your registration, or you’ll have to leave this place.’ I answered the only way I could and I told him that I didn’t go down there to register for him; I went down there to register for myself. This seemed like it made him madder”. So Fannie left that same night, however her husband stayed to help harvest the crop so the plantation owner would give them the rest of there belongings.After Hamer’s first attempt to register to vote in Indianola her participation in politics began increasing as well as the harassment. Here involvement in attempting to register made her susceptible to many unsuccessful attempts to destroy her life and her job. These attempts did not discourage H...
