Fannie Lou Hamer — Ruleville, Mississippi

Fannie Lou Hamer was born on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, and grew up and lived most of her life in Ruleville in Sunflower County. She was not primarily a musician, but music was inseparable from her civil rights work — she sang freedom songs at SNCC meetings, at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, and in jail cells after beatings. Her rendition of 'This Little Light of Mine' and 'Go Tell It on the Mountain' in those contexts gave the songs new meaning and made her one of the great voices of the civil rights movement, in both the literal and figurative sense.

Hamer's testimony before the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention — in which she described being beaten in a Mississippi jail for attempting to register to vote — was so powerful that President Lyndon Johnson called an emergency press conference to pre-empt its live television broadcast. It ran in full on the evening news anyway. She co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and spent the rest of her life organising in the Delta for voting rights, healthcare, and economic justice.

Ruleville has a memorial to Hamer, and she is buried in the city. Her home on the outskirts of town and the Williams Chapel Missionary Baptist Church where she organised are part of a civil rights heritage trail through the Delta. The broader Sunflower County — also B.B. King's birthplace territory — is one of the most historically significant counties in American history.