Voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer died on March 14, 1977, in Mound Bayou, Mississippi.
By: Natelege Whaley
2/7 Fannie Lou Hamer, an activist who spent her career encouraging African-Americans to register to vote and to fight racial segregation, died of cancer in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, on March 14, 1977.
3/7 Hamer was born on Oct. 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, and was the youngest of 20 children. Her parents were sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta area. At the age of 12, she dropped out of school & helped her family on a plantation where they worked full time.
4/7 In the summer of 1962, Hamer registered herself to vote and joined a group of civil rights activists to travel to a county courthouse in Indianola to encourage others to vote.
5/7 The act led to her getting fired from her job, but it only gave her the freedom to make the fight for voting rights her commitment for the rest of her life.
6/7 Hamer went on to help found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964. She ran for Congress in Mississippi but did not win a seat. She also helped established the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971.
7/7 Even after she was diagnosed with cancer in 1976, she continued to advocate for civil rights until her death in 1977.
Listen to the audio below of Fannie Lou Hamer's famous speech at the Democratic National Convention on August 22, 1964.
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Eleanor Roosevelt:
The woman who set the standard for modern first ladies to help their fellow citizens
BY: JOHNNA RIZZO
2/14
Even though Eleanor Roosevelt was born into a well-to-do New York family on October 11, 1884, she did not have a happy childhood. By the time she was 10 years old, she had lost both her parents and a younger brother.
3/14
Her grandmother, whose care she was under, was a stern woman and kept her away from almost everyone except a few family members.
#WomensHistoryMonth
Rosa Parks:
How her refusal to give up her seat sparked a movement
BY: C.M. TOMLIN
2/9 Rosa Parks stood up for African Americans—by sitting down.
Although Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation granted slaves their freedom, for many years Black people were discriminated against in much of the United States.
3/9 In southern states, for instance, most Black children were forced to attend separate schools from white kids in classrooms that were often rundown, with outdated books.
#WomensHistoryMonth
Florence Nightingale
The nurse who changed hospitals for the better
BY: JOHNNA RIZZO
2/14
Florence Nightingale just wanted to help. As a young woman in England in the 1840s, she saw how hard it was for poor people to get help when they were sick.
3/14
She wanted to be a nurse, but her rich parents thought that the job was beneath her, that she should instead marry a wealthy man. Defying what most women of her time would do, she went to Germany to study nursing.
The first Black Girl Scouts troop was formed on March 12, 1917.
By: Dominique Zonyéé
2/5 Although the Girl Scouts began as an all-white organization in 1912, a Black Girl Scouts Group emerged not long after on March 12, 1917, most likely in the New York area.
3/5 The formation of the Black troops well before the civil rights movement solidified the Girl Scouts place in the desegregation movement as it also pushed to unify girls of all colors. In 1956, Martin Luther King Jr. described the Girl Scouts as "a force for desegregation."
The computer programmer who had ideas long before there were computers
BY: ELIZABETH HILFRANK
2/13
Most wealthy women of the 1800s did not study math and science. Ada Lovelace excelled at them—and became what some say is the world’s first computer programmer.
3/13
Born in England on December 10, 1815, Ada was the daughter of the famous poet Lord George Byron and his wife, Lady Anne Byron. Her father left the family just weeks after Ada’s birth, but her mother insisted that her daughter have expert tutors to teach her math and science.