Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, Civil Rights Leader

Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, Civil Rights Leader Known for her civil rights activism, Fannie Lou Hamer was called the spirit of the civil rights movement. Born a sharecropper, she worked from the age of six as a timekeeper on a cotton plantation. Later, she became involved in the Black Freedom Struggle and eventually moved on to become a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).   Dates:  October 6, 1917 - March 14, 1977Also known as:  Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer About Fannie Lou Hamer Fannie Lou Hamer, born in Mississippi, was working in the fields when she was six and was only educated through the sixth grade. She married in 1942 and adopted two children. She went to work on the plantation where her husband drove a tractor, first as a field worker and then as the plantations timekeeper. She also attended meetings of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, where speakers addressed self-help, civil rights, and voting rights. Field Secretary With the SNCC In 1962, Fannie Lou Hamer volunteered to work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) registering black voters in the South. She and the rest of her family lost their jobs for her involvement, and SNCC hired her as a field secretary. She was able to register to vote for the first time in her life in 1963 and then taught others what theyd need to know to pass the then-required literacy test. In her organizing work, she often led the activists in singing Christian hymns about freedom: This Little Light of Mine and others. She helped organize the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi, a campaign sponsored by SNCC, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the NAACP. In 1963, after being charged with disorderly conduct for refusing to go along with a restaurants whites only policy, Hamer was beaten so badly in jail, and refused medical treatment, that she was permanently disabled. Founding Member and VP of the MFDP Because African Americans were excluded from the Mississippi Democratic Party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was formed, with Fannie Lou Hamer as a founding member and vice president. The MFDP sent an alternate delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention, with 64 black and 4 white delegates. Fannie Lou Hamer testified to the conventions Credentials Committee about violence and discrimination faced by black voters trying to register to vote, and her testimony was televised nationally. The MFDP refused a compromise offered to seat two of their delegates and returned to further political organizing in Mississippi, and in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. Delegate to the Democratic National Convention of 1972 From 1968 to 1971, Fannie Lou Hamer was a member of the Democratic National Committee for Mississippi. Her 1970 lawsuit, Hamer v. Sunflower County, demanded school desegregation. She ran unsuccessfully for the Mississippi state Senate in 1971, and successfully for delegate to the Democratic National Convention of 1972. Other Accomplishments She also lectured extensively, and was known for a signature line she often used, Im sick and tired of being sick and tired. She was known as a powerful speaker, and her singing voice lent another power to civil rights meetings. Fannie Lou Hamer brought a Head Start program to her local community, to form a local Pig Bank cooperative (1968) with the help of the National Council of Negro Women, and later to found the Freedom Farm Cooperative (1969). She helped found the National Womens Political Caucus in 1971, speaking for the inclusion of racial issues in the feminist agenda. In 1972 the Mississippi House of Representatives passed a resolution honoring her national and state activism, passing 116 to 0. Suffering from breast cancer, diabetes, and heart problems, Fannie Lou Hamer died in Mississippi in 1977. She had published To Praise Our Bridges: An Autobiography in 1967. June Jordan published a biography of Fannie Lou Hamer in 1972, and Kay Mills published This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer in 1993. Background, Family Father: Jim TownsendMother: Ella Townsendyoungest of 20 childrenborn in Montgomery County, Mississippi; family moved when she was two to Sunflower County, Mississippi Education Hamer attended the segregated school system in Mississippi, with a short school year to accommodate fieldwork as a child of a sharecropping family. She dropped out by 6th grade.   Marriage, Children Husband: Perry Pap Hamer (married 1942; tractor driver)Children (adopted): Dorothy Jean, Vergie Ree Religion Baptist Organizations Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), National Womens Political Caucus (NWPC), others

John Dillinger - Public Enemy No. 1

John Dillinger - Public Enemy No. 1 During the eleven months spanning from September 1933 through July 1934, John Herbert Dillinger and his gang robbed numerous Midwest banks, killed ten people and wounded at least seven others, and staged three jailbreaks. The Start of the Spree After serving a little more than eight years in prison, Dillinger was paroled on May 10, 1933, for his part in a 1924 robbery of a grocery store. Dillinger came out of prison as a very bitter man who had become a hardened criminal. His bitterness stemmed from the fact that he was given concurrent sentences of 2 to 14 years and 10 to 20 years while the man who committed the robbery with him served only two years. Dillinger immediately returned to a life of crime by robbing a Bluffton, Ohio bank. On September 22, 1933, Dillinger was arrested and jailed in Lima, Ohio as he was awaiting trial on the bank robbery charge. Four days after his arrest, several of Dillinger’s former fellow inmates escaped from prison shooting two guards in the process. On October 12, 1933, three of the escapees along with a fourth man went to the Lima county jail posing as prison agents who were there to pick up Dillinger on a parole violation and return him to prison. This ruse didn’t work, and the escapees ended up shooting the sheriff, who lived at the facility with his wife. They locked the sheriff’s wife and a deputy in a cell to free Dillinger from incarceration.   Dillinger and the four men who had freed him – Russell Clark, Harry Copeland, Charles Makley, and Harry Pierpont immediately went on a spree robbing a number of banks. In addition, they also looted two Indiana police arsenals where they took various firearms, ammunition and some bulletproof vests.   Ã‚   On December 14, 1933, a member of Dillinger’s gang killed a Chicago police detective. On January 15, 1934, Dillinger killed a police officer during a bank robbery in East Chicago, Indiana. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began posting photos of Dillinger and the members of his gang in the hope that the public would recognize them and turn them into local police departments.   The Manhunt Escalates Dillinger and his gang left the Chicago area and went to Florida for a short break before heading to Tucson, Arizona. On January 23, 1934, firemen, who responded to a blaze a Tucson hotel, recognized two hotel guests as being members of Dillinger’s gang from the photos that had been published by the FBI. Dillinger and three of his gang members were arrested, and police confiscated a cache of weapons that included three Thompson submachine guns, as well as five bulletproof vests, and more than $25,000 in cash. Dillinger was transported to the Crown Point, Indiana county jail which local authorities claimed was â€Å"escape proof† a claim which Dillinger proved wrong on March 3, 1934. Dillinger used a wooden gun that he had whittled in his cell and used it force the guards to open his. Then Dillinger locked up the guards and stole the Sheriff’s car, which he drove to and abandoned in Chicago, Illinois. This act allowed the FBI to finally join the Dillinger manhunt since driving a stolen car across state lines constitutes a federal offense. In Chicago, Dillinger picked up his girlfriend, Evelyn Frechette and they then drove to St. Paul, Minnesota where they met up with several of his gang members and Lester Gillis, who was known as â€Å"Baby Face Nelson.†Ã‚   Public Enemy No. 1 On March 30, 1934, the FBI learned that Dillinger may be in the St. Paul area and agents began speaking with managers of rentals and motels in the area and learned that there was a suspicious â€Å"husband and wife†   with the last name of Hellman at the Lincoln Court Apartments. The following day, an FBI agent knocked on the Hellman’s door, and Frechette answered but immediately closed the door. While waiting for reinforcements to arrive a member of Dillinger’s gang, Homer Van Meter, walked towards the apartment and upon being questioned shots were fired, and Van Meter was able to escape. Then Dillinger opened the door and opened fire with a ​machine gun allowing him and Frechette to escape, but Dillinger was injured in the process.​ A wounded Dillinger returned to his father’s home in Mooresville, Indiana with Frechette. Shortly after they arrived, Frechette returned to Chicago where she was promptly arrested by the FBI and was charged with harboring a fugitive. Dillinger would remain in Mooresville until his wound healed.After holding up a Warsaw, Indiana police station where Dillinger and Van Meter stole guns and bulletproof vests, Dillinger and his gang went to a summer resort called the Little Bohemia Lodge in northern Wisconsin. Due to the influx of gangsters, someone at the lodge phoned the FBI, who immediately set out for the lodge. On a cold April night, the agents arrived at the resort with their car lights turned off, but dogs immediately began barking. Machine gunfire broke out from the lodge, and a gun battle ensued.   Once the gunfire stopped, the agents learned that Dillinger and five others had been able to escape once again.    By the summer of 1934, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover  named John Dillinger as America’s very first â€Å"Public Enemy No. 1.†

HISTORY OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

HISTORY OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM - Assignment Example Because of the American culture; our teaching methods and the fact, the winner holds the reins few if any one realizes that the South is still under reconstruction; is still at war and still at the mercy of the North. A very famous Southerner before he died said, â€Å"Surrender means the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy that our youths will be taught by Northern School teachers learn from Northern school books THEIR version of the war†. 3. What was the background to the creation of the 2nd Bank of the United States? What was the main responsibility of the bank? What role did Nicolas Biddle play? What were his main policies? What was Andrew Jackson’s policy concerning the bank? In the early 1800s, the United States government did not print paper money but instead minted gold and silver coins called specie. The value of these coins was determined by the value of the metal in the coins themselves. People wanted a safe place to keep their savings of gold and silver coins, so they stored them in banks, which had strong vaults and other measures of security. One area of particular concern among bankers, businessmen, and government leaders was banking on the frontier. Frontier land was cheap, and speculators would buy large tracts expecting the price to go up as settlers entered the region. In order to finance their investments, speculators borrowed as much as they could from â€Å"wildcat† bank that sprang up to cater to this demand (Mansel and Kerr, 17-26). Jackson’s presidential term ended in 1836. Popular with the people to the end, his immediate economic legacy was fiscal instability for the country, which resulted in the Panic of 1837 during his successor, Martin Van Buren’s, presidency. His unshakable opinion remained, however, that over the long term an immensely powerful national bank held in private hands was a danger to democracy. Revenue Tariff for revenue pays interest on debts and funds within the government while