As hundreds of thousands of people continue to protest against police brutality against black Americans in the country, many have turned to our original civil rights activists for inspiration.

Fannie Lou Hamer fought for the right to vote in the 1960s, resisting brutal violence and imprisonment for years in Mississippi, where Jim Crow laws threatened the lives and franchise of African Americans well into the 20th century. Hamer’s civil disobedience was part of a movement that eventually restored the right to vote for hundreds of thousands of people in the south through the Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law by Lyndon B Johnson.

Today, on the anniversary of the day Hamer was released from jail in 1963, we’re featuring an excerpt on her life from Drawing the Vote: An Illustrated Guide to Voting in America, a graphic novel that looks at the history of voting rights, by author Tommy Jenkins and illustrator Kati Lacker.

Credit: Drawing the Vote: An Illustrated Guide to Voting in America, by Tommy Jenkins and illustrated by Kati Lacker, © Abrams ComicArts, 2020.