Fannie Lou Hamer forged a new path for rural Black people to escape poverty and hunger. In 1960 she set aside her years of voting rights activism to build an innovative new system — cooperative farming. Her Freedom Farm Cooperative, which enabled Black families to own and cultivate land communally, trading work on the farm for a share of the crops they produced, fed 1,600 families by 1972 and became the prototype for the modern food banking system.