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Fannie Lou Hamer, born on this day in 1917, grew up in post-Reconstruction Mississippi in a time of extreme racial oppression and terror.

From joining the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), to registering her neighbors to vote in a time when Black people were threatened with violence, to participating in the lunch counter sit-ins and being brutally beaten and permanently injured for life in jail, she was unshakable.

She was also a gifted orator and singer, moving people into action. She helped organize the Freedom Summer Project in 1964 to challenge Mississippi’s Democratic Party, which was dominated by white segregationists.

At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, she argued that because Black people were not allowed to vote in Mississippi, the state’s Democratic delegates were not legally elected.