Fannie Lou Hamer had viewed economic independence as an important goal of the civil rights movement. Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC) had been her response to a lifelong struggle with poverty and an alternative to state run antipoverty programs that she learned not to trust. Funds from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty programs never made it to her community despite the need because of the obstructionist strategies of the local white power structure. They withheld aid to push poor Blacks in order to drive them out of Mississippi. These experiences made her pursue grassroots versus top-down solutions to poverty where she lived. Hamer’s goal had been self-sufficiency and she chose a cooperative as her method. Beginning during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, cooperatives empowered grassroots with an economic alternative to US capitalism. Hamer viewed FFC as political leverage against land owning wealthy white racist that had kept poor people under their boots. She hoped that the FFC would provide protection against political retaliation. The nearby North Bolivar County Cooperative (NBCC) served as a model for Hamer..