PRINTER'S NO. 1187
THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF PENNSYLVANIA
SENATE RESOLUTION
No.
201
Session of
2017
INTRODUCED BY HAYWOOD, TARTAGLIONE, FARNESE, HUGHES, SABATINA,
STREET, WILLIAMS, BREWSTER, FONTANA, LEACH AND GREENLEAF,
SEPTEMBER 20, 2017
INTRODUCED AND ADOPTED, SEPTEMBER 20, 2017
A RESOLUTION
Honoring Fannie Lou Hamer on the 100th anniversary of her birth,
October 6, 2017, in recognition of her vast and valiant
efforts to ensure the civil rights of minorities, women and
low-income families.
WHEREAS, Fannie Lou Hamer, née Townsend, was born on October
6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the youngest of 20
children in a family of cotton sharecroppers; and
WHEREAS, When she was two years of age, Ms. Hamer moved with
her family to Sunflower County, Mississippi, where she began
working the fields at six years of age; and
WHEREAS, In 1961, during surgery to remove a tumor, Ms. Hamer
was given a hysterectomy without her consent as part of
Mississippi's plan at the time to reduce the number of poor
African Americans in the state; and
WHEREAS, Ms. Hamer is credited with coining the term
"Mississippi appendectomy" for the disturbingly common practice
of involuntary sterilization imposed mainly on African-American
women in the South between the 1920s and 1970s; and
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WHEREAS, In 1962, Ms. Hamer began to attend nonviolent
protests for civil rights and actively help with African-
American voter registration efforts in the Jim Crow South,
seeing civil rights as not just a political issue but also a
religious and moral issue; and
WHEREAS, Ms. Hamer dedicated her life to fight for civil
rights, first working through the Regional Council of Negro
Leadership in her town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, and later
working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to
participate in and organize acts of civil disobedience to fight
racial segregation and injustice; and
WHEREAS, Ms. Hamer was threatened, arrested, beaten and even
shot at in violent response to her work, though this never
deterred her, as evidenced in her response to being among the 18
African Americans who attempted to register to vote at the
county seat in Indianola: "... what was the point of being
scared? The only thing [they] could do was kill me, and it
seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time
since I could remember"; and
WHEREAS, Ms. Hamer was fired from her sharecropping
plantation in 1962 for participating in civil rights
demonstrations and trying to register to vote; and
WHEREAS, On June 9, 1963, Ms. Hamer was at a bus stop in
Winona, Mississippi, returning from a Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee conference in South Carolina when she and
other voter registration volunteers were violently arrested for
attempting to enter a whites-only restaurant and restroom; and
WHEREAS, Once in police custody, Ms. Hamer was brutally
beaten in a jail cell by police and other prisoners at the
command of the officers and denied medical attention for more
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than two days until her release, causing permanent health
damage; and
WHEREAS, In 1964, Ms. Hamer helped to found the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party, which registered 60,000 new African-
American voters in Mississippi that year and which opposed
Mississippi's exclusively white delegation at the Democratic
National Convention; and
WHEREAS, The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party sent Ms.
Hamer, who served as vice chair, to the 1964 Democratic National
Convention, where on December 22 she gave an emotional televised
testimony recounting her June 9, 1963, arrest and subsequent
beatings; and
WHEREAS, Ms. Hamer remained politically active after the
Voting Rights Act passed, attempting to run for the Congress of
the United States in 1965, as well as helping poor and needy
families in her Mississippi community; and
WHEREAS, In 1971, Ms. Hamer helped establish the National
Women's Political Caucus, which was created to aid women seeking
government positions of all kinds, citing a similar struggle
shared by women of different backgrounds as a need to help their
advancement; and
WHEREAS, Ms. Hamer died on March 14, 1977, in Mound Bayou,
Mississippi; and
WHEREAS, The organizations that Ms. Hamer established to
increase business opportunities for minorities and to provide
child care and family services in her community continued after
her death; and
WHEREAS, Ms. Hamer's tombstone in Ruleville, Mississippi, is
engraved with her famous words taken from a speech she delivered
alongside Malcolm X at a 1964 Mississippi Freedom Democratic
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Party rally in Harlem, New York: "I am sick and tired of being
sick and tired"; therefore be it
RESOLVED, That the Senate honor Fannie Lou Hamer on the 100th
anniversary of her birth, October 6, 2017, in recognition of her
vast and valiant efforts to ensure the civil rights of
minorities, women and low-income families.
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