Fannie Lou Hamer: Speak on It! at Merrimack Repertory Theatre

The daughter of a sharecropper and the last of 20 siblings, Hamer did not enter the world of activism and politics until she was 44 in 1962 when she discovered for the first time that Black people had the right to vote. Any joy in that discovery was short lived as she was subjected to poll taxes, literacy tests, and harassment just for attempting to register to vote. She lost her job of two decades at a plantation for simply announcing she wanted to vote. During this period, she became actively involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and she began to blossom as an activist.