Guest Commentary
Women’s History Month – Civil Rights Leader Fannie Lou Hamer: Her Unstoppable War Against Jim Crow
Guest Commentator
Hamer went to a hospital in 1961 for a minor tumor removal and was secretly sterilized. She was enraged and exposed it very publicly, calling it the “Mississippi Appendectomy,” a common outrage to many poor Black and white Southern women, women with disabilities, or those deemed by physicians as “unfit to reproduce.” That outrage was Fannie Lou Hamer’s declaration of war as a lifetime warrior against a racist, segregated USA.
“I guess if I’d had any sense I’d a been a little scared, but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could…
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