Fannie Lou Hamer: Sick and Tired

Fannie Lou Hamer was a timekeeper on a Sunflower County cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta. She was making eighteen dollars a week. She had worked that land and others like it since she was six years old, picking cotton. In August nineteen sixty-two, she attended her first Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee meeting, heard that Black Mississippians had the legal right to vote, and decided she would try to register. She had not known she had that right. She was forty-four years old.

The day she went to the Sunflower County courthouse in Indianola to register, she was turned away for failing a literacy test that she later described as impossible to pass by design. That evening, her plantation owner called her in. He told her she would have to withdraw her registration attempt or leave the plantation. She left. She had lived and worked on that land for eighteen years. She was evicted within the month, and nightriders shot up the home she had moved to.

She kept organizing. In June nineteen sixty-three, returning by bus from a voter registration workshop in South Carolina, she and a group of fellow activists were arrested in Winona, Mississippi, on a pretext. In the Winona jail, she was beaten so severely that she sustained permanent damage to her kidneys and a blood clot behind one eye. She was forty-five years old.

By August nineteen sixty-four, she was a central figure in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the all-white regular Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The Freedom Democrats argued, accurately, that Black Mississippians had been systematically excluded from the political process that produced that delegation. Fannie Lou Hamer testified before the Credentials Committee on national television. President Lyndon Johnson, watching his Southern coalition fracture, called a hastily arranged presidential press conference to draw cameras away from her testimony.

His instinct was right. The testimony aired anyway, in full, that evening. In it she described the Winona beating. She described the plantation eviction. She said, "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."

The Mississippi delegation was not seated. Hamer called the compromise that was offered, two non-voting at-large seats, insufficient. "We didn't come all this way for no two seats," she said. She went home to Ruleville. She is buried there.