Fannie Lou Hamer entered a Mississippi hospital expecting treatment. She left sterilized—without consent, without explanation, and without justice.
In 1961, Hamer, a sharecropper and civil rights activist, was admitted for what was supposed to be a routine surgery to remove a uterine tumor. Instead, a white doctor performed a hysterectomy, robbing her of the ability to bear children.
She was never informed beforehand, never given a choice. This was not a mistake. It was part of a deliberate and systemic effort to control Black women’s reproduction, a practice so common it was called a “Mississippi appendectomy.”
Hamer’s forced sterilization was just one of many injustices she faced in her fight for racial and reproductive justice.
Born into poverty in 1917 in Mississippi, she spent her early years picking cotton and later became a leader in the civil rights movement, fearlessly challenging voter suppression and economic oppression.
Despite the trauma inflicted upon her, Hamer refused to be silenced. She and her husband, Perry Hamer, adopted two daughters and channeled her pain into activism.
She became a powerful voice against both racial discrimination and the forced sterilization of Black women, exposing a system designed to strip them of autonomy and dignity.
Hamer’s courage extended beyond reproductive rights.
As a co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, she challenged the all-white Democratic delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, delivering a speech so powerful that President Lyndon B. Johnson interrupted national coverage to silence her. But the world heard her anyway.
Her legacy endures, not only in her fight for voting rights but in the ongoing struggle against the forced sterilization of marginalized communities.
Nearly 50 years after her death, former President Joe Biden posthumously awarded Hamer the Presidential Medal of Freedom, recognizing a woman whose voice, though often suppressed, could never truly be silenced.
