";s:4:"text";s:5603:"And nothing did. She continued to work as a sharecropper after her 1944 marriage to Perry "Pap" Hamer. She was fired from her job and driven from the plantation she had called home for nearly two decades — just for registering to vote. She led hundreds of enslaved people to freedom along the route of the Underground Railroad.Mary Lou Retton is a retired American gymnast who won gold, silver and bronze medals at the 1984 Olympics.Rosa Parks was a civil rights activist who refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Fannie Lou Hamer, known for being “sick and tired of being sick and tired,” was born October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi. If you see something that doesn't look right, Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives.Civil rights activist Medgar Evers served as the first state field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi until his assassination in 1963.Hall of Fame first baseman Lou Gehrig played for the New York Yankees in the 1920s and 1930s, setting the mark for consecutive games played. So she's only in fourth grade now.They kicked me off the plantation, they set me free. She spearheaded voter registration drives and relief efforts, but her involvement in the In 1964, Hamer helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), established in opposition to her state's all-white delegation to that year's Democratic Convention and announced her bid for Congress. Hamer began civil rights activism in 1962, continuing until her health declined nine years later. While having surgery in 1961 to remove a tumor, 44-year-old Hamer was also given a hysterectomy without consent by a white doctor; this was a frequent occurrence under Mississippi's compulsory sterilization plan to reduce the number of poor blacks in the state. Her family was sharecroppers – a position not different from slavery. She came out of an extended period in hospital for nervous …