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This year, we celebrate the League of Women Voters 100th anniversary and the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote. White women, that is. The suffragist movement was rooted in white women seeking power to rival their husbands. However, black suffragists wanted the vote to improve their lot. The movement is seen as progressive; however, suffragists left their black counterparts behind.
Shortly before the Nineteenth Amendment became a reality, in October 1917, Fannie Lou Hamer (nee Townsend) was born into a Mississippi sharecropper family. The youngest of 20, she was picking cotton at six and left school at 12 p.m. each day to work. In the early 1940s, she met and married Perry (Pap) Hamer, and they continued plantation work. Her ability to read and write...