BLACK HISTORY MONTH: FANNIE LOU HAMER
By Alaa Elassar, CNN Most of the civil rights movement’s leaders were Black male preachers with impressive degrees and big churches. Fannie Lou Hamer was a poor, uneducated Black woman who showed that a person didn’t need fancy credentials to inspire others. She was so charismatic that even the President of the United States took notice. Hamer was the youngest of 20 children born to a sharecropping family in Mississippi. She had a powerful speaking and gospel singing voice, and when activists launched voter registration drives in the mid-1960s, they recruited her to help out. She paid a price for