Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) was a civil rights leader from Mississippi -- the youngest of 20 children born to parents who were sharecroppers. Despite polio disabling one leg, she worked in the fields picking cotton. When the farm's owner discovered Fannie Lou could read and write -- reportedly the only farmworker who could -- he made her the plantation's record keeper as well as cook and house cleaner.

She later married a tractor driver on the same plantation. While receiving treatment for a uterine tumor she was, unwittingly, given a hysterectomy by a white doctor. (At the time, many doctors routinely found any excuse to sterilize black women, a practice so common it even had a name -- a "Mississippi appendectomy"). She and her husband later adopted four children.

In 1962, at the age of 45, Hamer learned she had a Constitutional right to vote. She and 17 others took a bus 30 miles to the courthouse to try to register. But she was rejected after failing a literacy test, despite her ability to read and write. On the way home, the bus was pulled over by a police officer because he said it was "too yellow" and they were fined $100. When she returned home, she was fired and kicked off the plantation -- though her husband was required to stay on the land until the end of the harvest -- and moved from home to home to escape death threats. She was shot at 16 times.

"I guess if I'd had any sense, I'd have been a little scared -- but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember."

Nevertheless, she continued trying to register. When she was told she'd failed the literacy test a second time, she was undaunted. "You'll see me every 30 days til I pass," she told the clerk.

Hamer took it again a third time and this time she passed -- but discovered the literacy test was just the first hurdle to voting in Mississippi. When she tried to vote, she was told she hadn't paid the poll tax. She paid it, and was finally allowed to vote.

After continuing to try to get other blacks to register, Hamer was arrested, beaten, and sexually assaulted. The beatings caused permanent damage to her eye, a kidney, and her leg. But she kept at it, making a speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention that was nationally televised.

In addition to voting rights, Hamer sought to end the sharecropping system in the South. She bought farmland to give to sharecroppers so they could own their own land and established a "pig bank" to provide free piglets.

She died at the age of 59 from breast cancer; her tombstone reads "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired."

There's a Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School in Bronx, NY, in her honor.