![]() In the summer of 1964, she spoke to the Credentials Committee of the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. In June 1963, she was beaten so badly in a Winona, Mississippi jail that she suffered permanent kidney damage and was nearly blinded. She was arrested, beaten, and shot at throughout the course of her activist work. Over the years, Hamer traveled through the state teaching black people to read and write in order to pass dubious literacy tests that prevented them from voting. “The only thing they could do was kill me and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.” ![]() “The only thing they could do was kill me and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember,” she wrote. Although there were violent efforts in Mississippi at the time to oppress the black vote, Hamer wasn’t afraid. When they’d asked for volunteers to register the next day, she raised her hand. That meeting, she said, was conducted by leaders of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). “Until then, I’d never heard of no mass meeting and I didn’t know that a Negro could register and vote.” In 1962, she joined 17 others at an Indianola courthouse to register to vote.“That happened because I went to a mass meeting one night,” she writes in her autobiography, To Praise Our Bridges. Hamer is most noted for her valiant fight against Mississippi’s oppressive power structure. ![]() Her life was a testament to how society, including the healthcare system, have failed black people.Īmerican civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer testifying before the Credentials Committee at Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, August 22, 1964. ![]() At the age of 59, she eventually succumbed to complications of heart disease and breast cancer, but not before helping move race relations in America forward. Fannie Lou Hamer was sick, and she was tired. While the quote originally referred to the centuries-long fight for black Americans to be treated with respect and dignity, it could very well have been a literal acknowledgment of her health struggles. It also features her most famous quote–“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired”– a phrase she coined during a speech made alongside Malcolm X, before an audience at Williams Institutional CME Church in Harlem on Dec. Bordered on each side by urns overflowing with flowers, the Civil Rights icon’s gravestone doesn’t just include the date of her birth (October 16, 1917), or the date of her death (March 14th, 1977). Located in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, a town founded by former slaves, the tombstone of Fannie Lou Hamer features an unusual inscription. ![]()
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