It was the power of Fannie Lou Hamer’s amazing singing voice that first brought her to the attention of SNCC in 1962.  On August 31st of that year, Hamer and 18 other residents from Sunflower County traveled by bus from Ruleville to the courthouse in Indianola, Mississippi in an attempt to register to vote. When they arrived, Hamer said she saw more policemen than she had ever seen in her life. They were armed, and milling around the courthouse - waiting for the group. Lawrence Guyot, a field secretary for SNCC, said “there was a hesitancy” of the people “to get off the bus – until Mrs. Hamer stood up and began to sing.” One by one, they filed off the bus and entered the courthouse, with Hamer leading the way.

Seeing the level of Hamer’s influence, she was soon recruited by SNCC as a field secretary. This allowed her to initiate voter registration projects throughout the Mississippi Delta and other Black Belt areas in the most oppressed communities in the Deep South. Hamer remained in this capacity until her death in March of 1977.

Dr. King hoped that a student wing of the SCLC would emerge from the gathering. But Baker was emphatic in the call: “Adult Freedom Fighters will be present for counsel and guidance, but the meeting will be youth centered.”

Baker encouraged the budding activists to form their own organization and dedicate themselves fully to the Black Freedom Struggle. They embraced her suggestion and formed the temporary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC quickly dropped the “temporary” from its name, as some student activists began to drop out of school to become full-time organizers. SNCC soon became the major channel of student participation in the civil rights movement as they sought to encourage voter registration among Black communities all over the South. At its height, SNCC had more field secretaries in the South than any other civil rights organization, an indication of its dedication to grassroots community organizing and efforts to help local Black people in their own struggle for freedom.

On August 22, 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer addressed the credentials committee at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. In what was probably her most famous speech, she said in part: “If the Mississippi Freedom Democrat Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America? The ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’? Where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hook because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in America.”

 Through intense backroom negotiations to get a quorum of "yes" votes to seat the MFDP, they ultimately fell apart because of pressure that came directly from President Lyndon B. Johnson. (The pressure was in many forms, but he delegated the task of sidelining the MFDP to Herbert Humphrey with a veiled threat that he wouldn't get the Vice President spot unless he could marginalize them).

A compromise of two seats was suggested because Johnson felt that it would pacify the MFDP while still holding on to his “Dixiecrat” coalition. The institutional types like Aaron Henry, Dr. King and Roy Wilkins insisted they take the two seats at-large as a political victory that they could build from.

In April 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was founded by Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Bob Moses, Lawrence Guyot, and others for the purpose of encouraging Black political participation while challenging the validity of Mississippi’s all-white Democratic Party.

The MFDP, which was open to every individual - regardless of race - was created because the official Democratic Party of Mississippi didn't allow Black people to participate. The founders of the MFDP decided they would create a parallel political structure that adhered to all the rules and guidelines of the national Democratic Party, with the goal of unseating the representatives from the official Party.

One of the founding members, Lawrence Guyot said in 2010: “You must remember at that time, there was no Republican Party anywhere in the South. The real political power in the South was in the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party, by seniority, controlled all of the major committees in the House and in the Senate. So, our attempt at dealing with the impact of the Democratic Party had real, national, state and southern sectional ramifications.”

The argument of the MFDP was that the official State Party violated the rules by not allowing equal representation, so the MFDP would be organized to the letter of the bylaws and make the case that they were the only legitimate Democratic Party in Mississippi.

But the radicals like Fannie Lou Hamer, Stokely Carmichael, Bob Moses and others said that two seats at large was an insult if the regular Mississippi delegation still kept their seats. Fannie Lou Hamer’s perspective was along the lines of, "If I've been owed something for 100 years, don't come around offering me just two of it today. I'd rather have the whole thing or nothing. You can keep that two."

It was a battle of political pragmatism versus moral principle, and the principled radicals won the argument and refused to compromise.

(Listen to LBJ, Hubert Humphrey and Walter Reuther speak against the legitimacy of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party on Aug. 25, 1964.)

The dramatic elements of the MFDP and its convention challenge, coupled with the experiences of Aaron Henry and Ed King and the support of Roy Wilkins, Dr. King and others, eventually helped gain congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The direct actions of Fannie Lou Hamer and the MFDP resulted in the national Democratic party adopting a new policy: The credentials committee would no longer seat delegates based on their race.

Organized in Greenville, MS in 1967, MACE was organized by 15 trailblazing men and women – veterans of the Civil Rights Movement – with the goal of helping poor Blacks gain the benefits they so rightly deserved. Founded by Fannie Lou Hamer, Unita Blackwell, Amzie Moore, Annie Devine and Rev. J.C. Killingworth, their first order of business was to train qualified local leaders who could fan out into the Mississippi Delta and stimulate physical, social and economic development in the rural and isolated pockets of the Mississippi Delta.

MACE's leaders had their work cut out for them. Structural racism and inequities were deeply entrenched. Many Mississippians lived without indoor plumbing or electricity; literacy rates were low, and jobs were extremely scarce. But in just a few years, MACE’s leaders had spearheaded the incorporation of four rural communities, bringing basic municipal services like sewage systems, power and paved roads to places that had never had them before.  

“The founders felt there needed to be a grassroots organization to hold leaders accountable and to make sure opportunities were available to the people,” said Mable Starks, president and CEO of MACE, who returned to her Delta roots and got involved with the organization after nearly 20 years working in services for the homeless and education in New York State.

For its part, MACE has worked continuously to link people with tools that improve lives, and to celebrate, promote and preserve the history and culture of Black people in the Delta. 

Founded in 1971, the National Women’s Political Caucus is the only national organization dedicated exclusively to increasing women’s participation in all areas of political and public life — as elected and appointed officials, as delegates to national party conventions, as judges in the state and federal courts, and as lobbyists, voters, and campaign organizers. With state and local affiliates, their membership today spans across the nation.

Their founders include several prominent women such as civil rights activist and humanitarian Fannie Lou Hamer; former Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm; author, lecturer and founding editor of Ms. Magazine, Gloria Steinem; activist and author of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan; former Congresswoman and former president of Women USA, Bella Azbug, and 300 of their best friends from across the county.

Spurred by Congress’ failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment in 1970, these women believed legal, economic, and social equity would come about only when women were equally represented among the nation’s political decision-makers.

Their faith that women’s interests would best be served by women lawmakers has been confirmed time and time again, as women in Congress, state legislatures and city halls across the country have introduced, fought for, and won legislation to eliminate sex discrimination and meet women’s changing needs.

Significant increases in the numbers of women elected officials since the Caucus’ founding speaks to their success. In 1971, women numbered just 363, or 4.7 percent, of state legislators; today, they are 2,274, or 30.8 percent. In 1971, there were only 7 women mayors of cities over 30,000 or 1 percent of the total; today, there are 378 women mayors or 23.3 percent. And while there were only 15 women members of Congress in 1971, there are now 142, or 26.5 percent (CAWP).

Equally important has been the Caucus’ role in moving women and women’s concerns to the forefront of American politics — an achievement best marked in terms of the low priority status accorded these issues at the time of their founding.