Fannie Lou Hamer decided she had enough of sharecropping and took a bus to the courthouse to register to vote. She was of course arrested and suffered the consequences just because she wanted to register to vote and be considered a first-class citizen. Fannie Lou Hamer began working on voter registration programs for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). But the highlight of her political activism occurred when she and others formulated the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), in an effort to focus greater national attention on voting discrimination in the South. (Crawford, Rouse and Woods, p. 29). This new party included Fannie Lou Hamer as a delegate, and their purpose was to challenge the all-white Mississippi delegation on the grounds that not all people, mainly black people, because most were not allowed to vote, weren’t represented fairly. She eventually got her chance to speak to the Committee at the convention about the injustices allowed if an all-white delegation were to be seated from the State of Mississippi. Her live testimony was interrupted by a presidential press conference, but was televised later that evening, so that all of America heard of the struggle for blacks in Mississippi. (Crawford, Rouse and Woods, p. 32). A compromise was reached which gave voting and speaking rights to two delegates from MFDP.Fannie Lou Hamer was a courageous woman whose lifelong crusade to empower the poor through collective action and the personal costs of her ongoing struggle to win a political voice and economic self-efficiency for blacks in the segregated South constitutes her as a leader in her own right. (University of Illinois Press). ConclusionAlthough women played extremely important roles within the Civil Rights Movement and were involved in every conceivable level of the movement, they often had to struggle to gain the respect of thei...
