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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