Marilyn Mays was 9 years old when her aunt, Fannie Lou Hamer, testified to the 1964 Democratic National Convention about the violence she and other Black Freedom Democratic Party members faced when attempting to register to vote in Mississippi.
At the time, Mays had not fully realized how impactful her aunt was in the Civil Rights Movement; the 9-year-old knew her as an excellent cook and loving aunt.
“I knew her as a woman who made the best turnip greens, the best fried chicken and the best pecan pie,” Hamer’s niece said at a Feb. 10 press conference at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. “… And then I grew up and I learned more, and I’m so happy to see that new generations are learning. We don’t need to wipe this history clean. I know there are a lot of efforts underway right now to rewrite the stories, but we need to keep telling the stories.”
Mays was the first Black person from Ruleville, Mississippi, to attend Mississippi State University. It was while she was in college in the mid-1970s when she began to realize the significance of the momentous actions her aunt had taken to help Black people have a voice in the political process.
Hamer’s nephew, Eddie Fair, said most of his childhood memories with his aunt also involved food because he did not quite understand what she was doing until he was also in college.
Just before President Joe Biden left office in January 2025, he honored Fannie Lou Hamer, who died in 1977, with a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom. That medal now sits in a glass display case at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum next to the section of the museum that showcases Hamer’s work in the state, the “I Question America” gallery. Hamer’s family donated the medal to the museum last October.
Mays and Fair—who also serves as the Hinds County Tax Collector—spoke to reporters on Feb. 10 at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum’s new display of Hamer’s Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“Her testimony, the work that she was able to do with the Democratic National Convention, the work that she did to integrate the Democratic Party here in Mississippi,” Two Mississippi Museums Director Michael Morris said at the press conference, “we make an argument that it not only changed Mississippi but it changed the country.”
If Hamer had been alive to receive her Presidential Medal of Freedom, Fair said his aunt would encourage people to “get out and vote.”
“We need to respect each other because as hard as she fought to see it like it is today. You know, she said one time, ‘The hands that picked the cotton will one day pick the president,’” using former President Barack Obama as an example, he told reporters on Feb. 10.
From the Cotton Fields to the Democratic National Convention
Fannie Lou Hamer grew up in cotton fields in the Mississippi Delta’s Montgomery County and worked as a sharecropper. She joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and helped organize Freedom Summer to educate Black people and register them to vote.
The civil-rights activist had helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as an alternative to the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party in 1964. Black and white Freedom Party members traveled to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to protest the all-white Mississippi primary elections.
Hamer told her story to the DNC credentials committee. She talked about how she had gotten fired from her plantation job in 1962 because she was trying to register to vote.
“If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” Hamer told the credentials committee. “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 hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”
In 1963, police arrested her and other Freedom Party members in Winona, Mississippi, when they were traveling home after attending a voter registration workshop in Charleston, South Carolina. Law enforcement officers jailed her and beat her, which permanently damaged her eyes, legs and kidneys.
Hamer told the DNC about the racist poll tests that white officials had put into place to prevent Black people from voting.
“All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens,” Hamer told the DNC credentials committee in 1964.
President Lyndon B. Johnson called a last minute press conference during Hamer’s testimony in an attempt to distract the media and the public, but TV networks showed her speech later that night.
White Democrats did not want Black delegates to join them. White Democrats tried to compromise by offering the Freedom Party two delegate seats, but that did not satisfy Hamer.
The white Mississippi Democratic delegation ended up fleeing the DNC without pledging loyalty to President Johnson and many white Democrats, which included segregationists, left the party to become Republicans.
Hamer Was ‘Ostracized’ for Her Work
Fannie Lou Hamer’s nephew, Eddie Fair, remembers his aunt weighing cotton that their other relatives had picked in the fields each day. Hamer frequently traveled to Indianola, Mississippi, to help Black people register to vote, Fair said.
The civil rights activist was “ostracized” by others for her work and many people tried to tell her to stop helping Black people vote and register to vote—but a number of Black and white people secretly helped Hamer continue her activism, her nephew said.
“I’m very proud of all of the people that have fought, that have made a difference,” Fair told reporters on Feb. 10. “She was the voice behind it, she was the face behind it, (but) there was a lot of other people who made a difference as well.”
He said former Mississippi Gov. William Winter told him that he would not have been elected governor if not for Hamer getting people to talk about the election and go out to vote. Fair said his aunt’s activism also provided a foundation for Mississippi to have the most Black elected officials in the country.
“All that happened because of Fannie Lou Hamer getting out and taking a stand, getting people ready to vote,” her nephew said.