Who was Fannie Lou Hamer? Here’s why DNC speakers keep mentioning her

Multiple speakers at the Democratic National Convention have mentioned Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist who gave a landmark speech at the convention in 1964.
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Hamer was a former sharecropper and a leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a racially integrated group that challenged the seating of an all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 DNC.
Her televised testimony to the credentials committee in Atlantic City, New Jersey, mesmerized the nation and shone light on the violence inflicted on Hamer and others as they worked to secure rights that were supposed to be guaranteed by the Constitution.
Rev. Edwin King, Fannie Lou Hamer and Annie Devine, co-founders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, are seated with the Michigan Delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention. Photo via Getty images
Hamer spoke on Aug. 22, 1964 — exactly 60 years before Kamala Harris is scheduled to accept the Democratic nomination and become the first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent to be the presidential nominee of a major party.