Fannie Lou Hamer, Sick and Tired
Mississippi
Fannie Lou Hamer was born October sixth, nineteen seventeen, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the twentieth child of sharecropper parents. She picked cotton before she could read. She taught herself to read from a Bible by lamplight. She had never heard that the Constitution of the United States theoretically entitled her to vote, until Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizers, including Bob Moses, held a meeting at Williams Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in Ruleville in the summer of nineteen sixty-two.
On August thirty-first, nineteen sixty-two, Hamer walked into the Sunflower County courthouse in Indianola to register to vote. She was forty-four years old. She failed the literacy test, which was designed to be failed. On the bus ride home, she and her fellow registrants were stopped by police and fined for riding in a bus of the wrong color. That evening, her landlord told her to withdraw her application or leave the plantation where her family had sharecropped for eighteen years. She left.
In June nineteen sixty-three, returning from a voter registration training workshop in South Carolina, Hamer and fellow travelers were arrested in Winona, Mississippi. In the Winona jail, she was beaten with a blackjack by two Black prisoners forced to do so under the supervision of white officers. The beating caused permanent kidney damage and a blood clot behind one eye. She testified about it, in precise and unflinching detail, before the credentials committee of the Democratic National Convention in August nineteen sixty-four, a speech that was carried live on national television until President Johnson held a surprise press conference to pull cameras away.
She became co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, ran for Congress from Mississippi's second district in nineteen sixty-four, and spent the rest of her life building political power from the ground of Ruleville. She died in nineteen seventy-seven. Her gravestone in Ruleville reads: I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired.
