Latest / Sankofa Chronicles: A Black History Podcast
August 31, 1962: Fannie Lou Hamer Tries to Vote
This Day in History: On August 31, 1962, Fannie Lou Hamer and seventeen neighbors boarded a bus in Ruleville, Mississippi, and rode to the Sunflower County Courthouse in Indianola to register to vote. What happened next — eviction, economic retaliation, and a hail of gunfire — did not stop her. It started her. This episode traces the moment a sharecropper became a movement leader, and why that courthouse trip changed the course of American democracy.
Sources: PBS American Experience; Mississippi Department of Archives and History (Mississippi History Now); Fannie Lou Hamer, sworn testimony…
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