Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

She walked with a limp. She had a blood clot behind her eye from being severely beaten in a Mississippi jail.

Her name was Fannie Lou Hamer.

She was the youngest of 20 children born to black sharecroppers in Mississippi.

And in late 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson was absolutely terrified of her.

Why? She was about to make an appeal before the credentials panel at the Democratic National Convention. The potential implications were profound. Hamer

represented the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a racially integrated coalition

of delegates. Hamer wanted to challenge the seats of the current all-white democratic

delegation from their state, saying that they were in violation of the party's rules because

they had systematically excluded black citizens.

According to Time magazine, Johnson was worried that Hamer's speech could offend the Southern

Democrats whose votes he needed for re-election. He wanted her silenced.

But Hamer had a following that rivaled that of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

And she would not go unheard.

Hamer was born in 1917 in the Mississippi Delta.

The sharecropping system kept her parents in debt

and without enough food to feed their 20 children.

In the winter, Hamer tied rags on her feet

because she often didn't have shoes.

She started picking cotton when she was six years old.

Hamer started her civil rights work in 1961, after she was sterilized without consent

during what should have been a minor surgery.

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