Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Townsend was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi, on the sixth of October 1917, the youngest of twenty children of sharecropping parents. She left school at twelve to pick cotton. She was forty-four when, in August 1962, she attended her first civil-rights meeting and learned she had the right to vote.

She tried to register. The Sunflower County registrar gave her a literacy test she could not pass — almost no Black Mississippian could. The owner of the plantation where her family had sharecropped for eighteen years told her: if you go back and try to register again, you have to leave. She left. She tried to register again. She passed on the third attempt, in January 1963.

The following year she went to Atlantic City as a delegate of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party — the parallel party she helped found because the regular Mississippi Democratic Party was a whites-only organization. Her television testimony before the credentials committee of the 1964 Democratic National Convention — describing the beating she had received from Mississippi police a year earlier in Winona for attempting to use a whites-only bus-station waiting room — was so politically powerful that President Lyndon Johnson called an emergency press conference to drive her off the airwaves.

She founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative in 1969 to provide land for displaced Black sharecroppers. She ran for Mississippi State Senate, organized the Delta Ministry, and remained the unsentimental conscience of the movement until her death from breast cancer at the Mound Bayou Community Hospital on the fourteenth of March 1977.

Her saying — "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired" — has remained the political slogan of every voter-suppression resistance movement since.

She is honored here as the sharecropper whose voice the President of the United States feared.