Fannie Lou Hamer was an American voting and women's rights activist, community organizer, and a leader of the civil rights movement. She was the co-founder and vice-chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and represented it at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. She also founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC) and co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus. She led the civil rights activism during the early 1960s and became a registered voter in the State of Mississippi in 1963, because of which she was harassed, extorted, shot at, and assaulted by white supremacists and the police. She organized the 1963 Freedom Ballot along with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the 1964 'Freedom Summer' initiative. Her attempts at running for the U.S. Senate in 1964 and the Mississippi State Senate in 1971 were unsuccessful, but she was elected delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1972. She was posthumously inducted into the 'National Women's Hall of Fame' in 1993.
