"I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired"

Fannie Lou Hamer was born into a sharecropping Mississippi family (some accounts say she was the yougnest of 20 children) in 1917. When a SNCC representative first came to her town for a voter registration drive, she was surprised to learn that African-Americans' right to vote was protected by the Constitution. She was immediately drawn into the civil rights movement, organizing voting drives and becoming a field representative for SNCC. During a voters' registration drive at the Montgomery County courthouse she was arrested and taken to the cuonty jail where she was beaten nearly to death, sustaining lifelong injuries. She later said of that time, "The only thing they could do to me was to 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 continued with the voter registration drives, as one of they key organizers of Freedom Summer in 1964.

Fannie Lou Hamer was also famous as a songleader. She considered the civil rights struggle a deeply spiritual one and saw singing as a way to endure hardships and persist in the fight for civil rights. Two of her favorite songs were "Go Tell It on the Mountain" and "This Little Light of Mine."

Fannie Lou Hamer's introduction to the national stage came during the Democratic National Convention of 1964. As a delegate for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, she protested the all-white delegation there. She insisted the MFDP delegation be seated: "All of this is on account we want to register.To become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, The Star-Spangled Banner, the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings - in America?" Her group was eventually seated.

Fannie Lou Hamer continued working on other projects, including HeadStart and the Freedom Farm Cooperative, until cancer brought her death in 1977. The epitaph on her tombstone reads one of her favorite sayings, "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."