Fannie Lou Hamer’s reproductive rights were violated by White doctors who stole her opportunity to ever give birth, driving the relentless activist to fight tirelessly for civil and voting rights for Black Americans.
Hamer—born on Oct. 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi—married Perry Hamerin 1944, but the couple wouldn’t go on to have biological children because white doctors stole that option from them and many other Black women.
According to Anthony Milian, a photographer and influencer who teaches the internet about history and socio-economic issues, Hamer went to a doctor to get a uterine tumor removed in 1961. But the doctor performed a “complete hysterectomy,” a surgical procedure that removes the uterus, hindering women from menstruating and getting pregnant.
But it was common for Mississippi women, especially poor Black women, to have these procedures done to them unwillingly, and it was dubbed the “Mississippi appendectomy.”
“Hamer eventually found out that three-fifths of all the women living in her community, Sunflower County, Mississippi, underwent four sterilizations or unwanted sterilization,” Milian explained. “But this wasn’t the first time this happened in the South. In North Carolina, over 7,000 people were sterilized.”
Milian further explained that sterilization was a method used to “stop welfare dependency.” The National Women’s History Museum’s website said the sterilization of Black women was a method to reduce the Black population.
“One file of a 12-year-old girl said that she was sterilized because she talked about boyfriends too much,” Milian continued.
Hamer and her husband would adopt two daughters. But the mistreatment of Black individuals (particularly the efforts barring them from voting), and her experience fueled her to join the civil and voting rights movements.
After attending a meeting led by activists James Forman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Hamer became an SNCC organizer.
Most of Hamer’s efforts aimed at Blacks receiving the right to vote, but she was met with opposition from many, including law enforcement and B.D. Marlowe, a plantation owner she and her husband worked for. Marlowe fired her, and she was forced to leave (without her husband, who was required to stay until the harvest).
She successfully completed a voter registration program in June 1963, only to get arrested at a “whites-only” bus station restaurant in Winona, Mississippi. In the jail cells, police beat her and several women for no reason. Police officers had two Black prisoners beat on Hamer, leaving her with lifelong injuries to her eyes, kidneys and legs.
In 1964, she co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and shared her story in her moving speech that was televised after President Lyndon Johnson tried to block her televised speech from being seen by the nation with his raggedy broadcast press conference.
“And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” Hamer said in her speech. “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave? Where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily? Because we want to live as decent human beings in America?”
