Martin Luther King Jr. to help organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) but parted ways with the group in 1960 over their leadership model. SCLC, like many civil rights organizations of the period, built the organization around one central (male) leader, mirroring the leadership structure of Black churches. Moreover, the

Similar to police officers, many white doctors functioned as agents of the state—maintaining white supremacy and utilizing violence to control Black people’s lives. Hamer’s

Hamer later pointed out that she had seen the officer earlier in the day while attempting to register.39 Yet he used his power as an agent of the state to remind the activists they were living in the Jim Crow South, with all of its insulting indignities that could quickly escalate to state-sanctioned violence. After forcing Hamer and her colleagues

landowners in the South relied on cotton production—and the exploited labor of Black people—to maintain their economic power.

Born in Mississippi on October 6,

1917, Hamer was the youngest of twenty children.

America is divided against itself because they don’t want us [Black people] to have even the ballot here in Mississippi. If we had been treated right all these years, they wouldn’t be afraid for us to get the ballot.”75

in 1971, while speaking at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Institute in New York City: “But you see now, baby, whether you have a Ph.D., D.D., or no D, we’re in this bag together. And whether you’re

According to Hamer, “They beat me till my body was hard, till I couldn’t bend my fingers or get up when they told me to. That’s how I got this blood clot in my left eye—the sight’s nearly gone now. And my kidney was injured from the blows they gave me in the back.”50 Unlike so many others, Hamer lived to tell her story. And she certainly told that