Born the twentieth child of sharecropper parents, Fannie Lou Hamer attended a Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee mass meeting in 1962 at age 44 and, inspired by what she learned about voting rights, decided to register. She and her husband Perry were fired from the Sunflower County, Mississippi, plantation where they had lived and worked for 18 years after the owner was informed of her activity. Hamer then worked as a field organizer for SNCC and became a founding member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964. The party was formed to expose the Jim Crow laws embraced by the Mississippi State Democratic Committee. In August 1964, she and fellow party members went to Atlantic City for the Democratic National Convention to unseat the all-white, all-male Mississippi delegation. Hamer appeared before the Credentials Committee on August 22, 1954, and gave historic testimony recounting the beatings and intimidation she and others suffered at the hands of Mississippi law enforcement while trying to register to vote. Concerned about televised exposure of these revelations, President Lyndon Johnson preempted her testimony with an impromptu news conference, but national television networks broadcast it later that night and for days afterward. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was not seated at the Atlantic City convention, but less than one year later Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which dismantled Jim Crow laws throughout the South. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Hamer became the first Black delegate since Reconstruction and the first woman ever seated in the Mississippi delegation, receiving thunderous applause and a standing ovation.