Fannie Lou Hamer: Sharecropper Poverty and Involuntary Sterilization in Mississippi

Through the 1940s and into the 1960s, Fannie Lou Hamer works as a sharecropper on a Sunflower County, Mississippi plantation, earning poverty wages in a system designed to maintain debt bondage. In 1961, she is given a hysterectomy without her consent during a minor operation — a practice so common in Mississippi that it is called a 'Mississippi appendectomy.' Involuntary sterilization of Black women is documented across Southern states as part of eugenic policies. Hamer's experiences shape her 1964 Democratic National Convention testimony and her lifelong economic justice advocacy.