William Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, established in 1922, was a longtime meeting place for civil rights activists before the modern civil rights movement and for decades served as a place where disenfranchised people gathered to affirm their worth through their faith. In 1962, when the Reverend J. D. Story was pastor, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members came to Ruleville to begin a voter registration drive, and at a mass meeting there in August, Fannie Lou Hamer was inspired to try to register to vote for the first time after hearing workers from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, including James Bevel and James Forman, speak about the right of African Americans to vote. Isolated from national news for most of her life, Hamer and others at the meeting had never heard that they could register, and this knowledge moved her to join the fight for freedom. She later became an organizer of Mississippi Freedom Summer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and vice-chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, attending the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in that role. During this turbulent era, the Reverend J. D. Story encouraged civil rights organizations to meet there when other churches feared being firebombed and was revered for saying, "The doors of the church are open." Mass meetings were held every Friday at 7:30 p.m. for a number of years, and the church was firebombed after a civil rights rally in June 1964. Mrs. Mary Tucker, a prominent figure in the Sunflower Freedom Movement, was one of the founding trustees. After Fannie Lou Hamer died at age fifty-nine, her funeral was held there in April 1977, attended by more than five thousand people, and she was eulogized by Vernon Jordan, Hodding Carter the Third, and Congressman Andrew Young. Today it stands as a symbol of the freedom struggles of the Mississippi Delta.