Fannie Lou Hamer’s Presidential Medal of Freedom has found a permanent home at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, where museum officials and relatives unveiled the medal on Tuesday in the “I Question America” gallery.
Hamer’s niece, Marilyn Mays, and her cousin, Hinds County Tax Collector Eddie Fair, unveiled the medal, which Hamer received posthumously in 2025 from then-President Joe Biden, according to the family and the museum. The family said it donated the medal to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History last October, setting up Tuesday’s display, with the museum placing it in a gallery named for Hamer’s most famous speech.
Mays said she believed there was “no better place for the medal to be than where Hamer lived and worked for equality,” describing Mississippi as the source of what she said gave Hamer her motivation. “She got national acclaim, but the roots of everything she did, and the motivation for what she did, was Mississippi,” Mays said.
Michael Morris, director of the Two Mississippi Museums, said Hamer was “a figure of international significance.” He said he hoped the museum’s visitors—including “school kids, as well as visitors from around the world”—would learn from Hamer “this notion of dignity, this notion that every human being is entitled to respect,” and that young people would also learn “the power of their voices and the importance of political participation.”
Morris said that even with Hamer’s impact, she did not fit expectations about who could drive major change. “On paper, she doesn’t look like the kind of person that could change the world, but she defies our notions about who superheroes are,” Morris said.
Eddie Fair said he and Mays did not understand how significant Hamer was until they became adults. Fair said her influence helped guide his own decision to enter public service, saying it was “a big influence because I wanted to do something to represent her, to represent the people back in Ruleville, to represent what each and every one of them did to fight to get us to the place that we are today,” in remarks at the unveiling.
Mays said Hamer inspired her to take part in changing her hometown’s high school, attend Mississippi State University, and enter corporate America. “Neither Fair nor Mays realized how significant Hamer was until they became adults, but she became a key inspiration in both of their lives,” the report said.
The museum’s display also frames Hamer’s life in Mississippi as the foundation for her national recognition. Hamer was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi, in 1917, and the report said she was the youngest of 20 children whose parents were sharecroppers. In 1962, after attending a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee meeting focused on voting rights, Hamer and neighbors traveled to Indianola to register to vote, and Hamer was among only two in her group who were able to fill out an application and take the literacy test.
The report said Hamer refused to retract her application even after her landlord and employer learned about it, a refusal that cost her her job and home. It also said Hamer became a field secretary for SNCC in 1963, when she and other activists were beaten in a jail in Winona; the assault left her partially blind and with permanent kidney damage, according to the report.
Hamer continued her organizing work, including in 1964 as a key part of the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, where she helped co-found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and even ran for Congress as the party’s candidate, losing the primary to the incumbent Democrat. The MFDP later challenged at the 1964 Democratic National Convention the seating of Mississippi’s all-white Democratic delegation, and the report said Hamer testified to the credentials committee about racism she faced in Mississippi—an episode that became known as her “I Question America” speech.
The report said that while President Lyndon B. Johnson called a press conference at the same time to prevent networks from broadcasting her testimony, Hamer’s entire statement aired on the evening news nationwide. It said the Democratic Party offered the MFDP two at-large seats and a promise the next convention would not allow segregated delegations, with Johnson and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. backing the compromise, while Hamer did not.
The report said Hamer also co-founded the Freedom Farms Corporation in 1969 and continued working as an activist and public speaker until her death in 1977. In 2022, her great niece, Monica Land, produced a documentary about her life, “Fannie Lou Hamer’s America,” and Land said the family chose to donate the medal so it could be shared publicly.
“I am so happy we were able to gift this award to the museum and to the people of Mississippi,” Land said. “Aunt Fannie Lou loved Mississippi and, hopefully, this donation will spark or further interest in her life and all that she fought so hard to accomplish for all people – not just Black people.”