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

Fannie Lou Hamer Biography

Sharecropper, Civil Rights Activist1917 - 1977

Fannie Lou TownsendBorn in Montgomery County, Mississippi, in 1917Youngest of 20 childrenParents were sharecroppers.

By the age of six she was working in the cotton fields.

She dropped out of school at age twelveAt twelve, her parents bought two mules and some tools needed to farm A white neighbor poisoned their mules

Fannie met and married Parry Hamer in 1942, He drove a tractor on the same plantation

She and her husband continued share cropping.

A white doctor sterilized her without her permission and she was unable to have children of her own.

They adopted two little girls

She began attending meetings of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership Speakers addressed self-help, civil rights, and voting rights. Her boss disallowed her to talk about it, ever!

She and 17 others took a bus to the courthouse in Indianola, the county seat, to register to vote. On their return home, police stopped their bus. They were told that their bus was the wrong color. Fannie Lou and the others were arrested, horribly beaten, disfigured, and jailed.

After being released from jail, the plantation owner told Fannie Lou that if she insisted on voting, she would have to get off his plantation

She left the plantation that same day. Ten days later, night riders fired 16 bullets into the home of the family with whom she had gone to stay.

Hamer dedicated her life to the fight for civil rights, Joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Comprised mostly of African American students Engaged in acts of civil disobedience to fight racial segregation and injustice in the South

She became active in helping with voter registration

She also began to receive constant death threats

Today, Mississippi still discriminates with their laws of high taxes and strict regulations, which do not allow African Americans to own guns. Fanny Lou Hamer and her husband were never allowed to protect themselves.

“Is this America, the land of the free and 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?”

Still, Hamer would not be discouraged. She became a SNCC Field Secretary Traveled around the country speaking and registering people to vote

In 1964, Hamer helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, MFDPEstablished in opposition to her state’s all-white delegation to that year’s Democratic convention. She brought the civil rights struggle in Mississippi to the attention of the entire nation during the Democratic presidential convention

Hamer spoke in front of the Credentials Committee in a proceeding that reached millions of viewers. She told the committee how African-Americans were prevented from voting through illegal tests, taxes and intimidation. As a result two delegates of the MFDP spoke at the convention and the others were honorable guests.

The Democrats agreed that in the future no delegation would be seated from a state where anyone was illegally denied the right to vote.

A year later, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.

"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."