Through Ida Harris
October 21, 2025
She died on March 14, 1977 at the age of 59
On October 6, 1917, Fannie Lou Hamer was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi. She died on March 14, 1977, at the age of 59, after an aggressive battle with breast cancer. Very different from 2025, where advanced technology is used to successfully treat breast cancer, and the current five years breast cancer survival rate is 91%According to the American Cancer Society, survival was dismal in the 1970s.
The survival rate was a terrible 55% to 68% for women diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer and only 16% to 19% for advanced metastatic cancer. Hamer, a freedom fighter for black rights, fought fiercely against white supremacy and failing health.
Hamer is heralded as one of the famous Mississippi activists to come out of Mississippi and the civil rights movement. The civil rights leader took a down-home, grassroots approach to the fight for equality in the Deep South and was very vocal about voting rights for African Americans. Hamer, a woman of few resources but great determination, mobilized hundreds of black Mississippians to register to vote at a time when Jim Crow had a stranglehold on the region. Hamer was harassed, threatened, jailed and severely abused in her attempt to fight racism. She was even the target of an assassination attempt on September 10, 1962, after racists fired sixteen shots into a room where she was sleeping. In 1963, at the behest of racist police officers, she was arrested and brutally beaten with batons by two black prisoners.
Even then, Hamer’s civil rights activism and leadership were undeterred. She subsequently served in various positions for civil rights and political organizations, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the National Women’s Political Caucus, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Freedom Democratic Party. Hamer appeared in Harlem on December 20, 1964 with the Honorable El-Hajj Malik El-Habazz (Malcolm Hamer stated:
“Some of the things I have to say today may be a little sickening. People say year after year, ‘Those people in Mississippi can’t think.’ But after working ten to eleven hours a day for three measly dollars and not being able to sleep, we couldn’t do anything but think. And we’ve been thinking for a long time. And we’re tired of what’s going on. And now we want to see what this will bring here on January 4th. We want to see if democracy is real?
Hamer returned to Mississippi after that powerful speech and continued to fight for civil rights. In 1968, she purchased more than 600 acres of land in Ruleville launches the “Pig Bank,” a community farm and affordable housing initiative for low-income families. Hamer even helped establish a Head Start program and continued activism in the mid-1970s until her health became serious.
Hamer wasn’t just tired of being sick and tired; she was literally sick and dying. In 1976, she was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer, which put her activism on hold. She died shortly afterwards from complications of breast cancer.
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