As a civil rights activist in the 1960s, Fannie Lou Hamer helped focus attention on the plight of African Americans. She came into the national spotlight at the Democratic National Convention in 1964. Attending as a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, she was part of an integrated group at the convention, vehemently challenging Mississippi’s all-white delegation. Just a year previously, Fannie Lou Hamer was jailed along with other activists and was brutally beaten. While in jail, she encountered the wife of one of those jailers, and Hamer encouraged her to read Acts 17:26, which says that God “hath made of one blood all nations.”
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