#BlackHistoryNow is about lifting as we climb. 🗳️ Fannie Lou Hamer was one of the most powerful voices of the civil and voting rights movements. She led voting drives, helped organize Freedom Summer, and co-founded both the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the National Women’s Political Caucus. To learn more about Hamer's harrowing fight for voting rights, check out this clip from She the People: Votes for Women. http://bit.ly/31Mo3bR #BlackHistoryMatters | Smithsonian Channel

Fannie Lou Hamer gripped the nation with her televised testimony of being forced from her home and brutally beaten (suffering permanent kidney damage) for attempting to exercise her constitutional right to vote. “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings?” she asked the credentials committee at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Hamer had arrived in Atlantic Ci

Civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony before Congress was so powerful that Lyndon Johnson called an impromptu press conference to get her off the air. His plan backfired. | American Experience | PBS

On this day in 1977, Fannie Lou Hamer, civil rights and voting activist, passed away. After experiencing extreme threats and violence in 1962, simply for trying to register to vote, she became a vocal activist and a leader in the Civil Rights movement. #BecauseOfHerStory Fannie Lou Hamer was known for using her gift of song to soothe and inspire her fellow activists. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings has her music here: https://s.si.edu/2VikchA | Smithsonian Channel

Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony at the 1964 Democratic National Convention was so powerful that President Lyndon B. Johnson called an impromptu press conference to get her off the air. Watch the full "Freedom Summer" doc streaming free: http://to.pbs.org/1oKMmwS | American Experience | PBS