“We been waitin' all our lives, and still gettin' killed, still gettin' hung, still gettin' beat to death. Now we're tired waitin'!”
“I guess if I'd had any sense, I'd have been a little scared—but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.”
— Fannie Lou Hamer
In June 1963, Fanny Lou Hamer and fellow co-activists were on a bus ride in Mississippi traveling the state to help register Black people for voting. While stopping for a meal in Winona, Mississippi, the state police arrested them for attempting to integrate a café. Hamer who was still on the bus, came out and asked the law enforcement officials if they could continue their journey to Greenwood.
The officers arrested her. Once in county jail, Hamer's colleagues were beaten by the police in the booking room (including 15-year-old June Johnson, for not addressing officers as "sir"). Hamer was then taken to a cell where two inmates were ordered, by the state trooper, to beat her using a baton. The police ensured she was held down during the almost fatal beating, and when she started to scream, beat her further. Hamer was also groped repeatedly by officers during the assault. When she attempted to resist, she stated an officer, "walked over, took my dress, pulled it up over my shoulders, leaving my body exposed to five men".
Hamer was released on June 12, 1963. She needed more than a month to recuperate from the beatings and never fully recovered. The incident left profound physical and psychological effects, including a blood clot over her left eye and permanent damage to one of her kidneys. However, she immediately returned to Mississippi to organize voter registration drives, including the 1963 Freedom Ballot, a mock election, and the Freedom Summer initiative the following year.
This was just one of many brutal and humiliating situations Fanny Lou Hamer faced as a Civil Rights Activist in Mississippi during the Movement. But she was never defeated or cowed, she continued her work for equal justice until she died in 1976.
Hamer was born Fannie Lou Townsend on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi. She was the last of the 20 children of Lou Ella and James Lee Townsend. From age six, Hamer picked cotton with her family. During the winters of 1924 through 1930, she attended the one-room school provided for the sharecroppers' children, open between picking seasons. Hamer loved reading and excelled in spelling bees and reciting poetry, but at age 12 she had to leave school to help support her aging parents. By age 13, she would pick 200–300 pounds of cotton daily while living with polio.
In 1944, after the plantation owner discovered she could read, she was selected as its time and record keeper. The following year she married Perry "Pap" Hamer, a tractor driver on a nearby plantation, and they remained there for the next 18 years.
Fanny Lou and her husband wanted very much to start a family but in 1961, a white doctor subjected Hamer to a hysterectomy without her consent while she was undergoing surgery to remove a uterine tumor. Forced sterilization was a common method of population control in Mississippi that targeted poor, African American women. The Hamers later raised two girls they adopted, eventually adopting two more.
On August 31, 1962, Hamer and 17 others attempted to vote but failed a literacy test, so they were denied this right. On December 4, just after returning to her hometown, she went to the courthouse in Indianola to take the test again but failed and was turned away. Hamer told the registrar, "You'll see me every 30 days till I pass".
On January 10, 1963, she took the test a third time and was successful and was informed that she was now a registered voter in Mississippi. But when she attempted to vote that fall, she discovered her registration gave her no actual power to vote as her county also required voters to have two poll tax receipts. These were common methods used to prevent Blacks from voting since the Post-Reconstruction period in the 1870s.
Her anger prompted her to act. She became involved with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She traveled to gather signatures for petitions to attempt to be granted federal resources for impoverished black families across the South. In early 1963, she became a SNCC field secretary for voter registration and welfare programs. Many of these first attempts to register more black voters in Mississippi were met with the same problems Hamer had found in trying to register herself.
Because Hamer tried to vote and was working to register others, she was fired from her job by her boss, but her husband was required to stay on the land until the end of the harvest. Hamer moved between homes over the next several days for protection. On September 10, 1962, while staying with friend Mary Tucker, Hamer was shot at 15 times in a drive-by shooting by white supremacists.
Then in 1963 came the arrest and beating in Winona that gave her permanent injuries. Undeterred, Fanny Lou Hamer helped co-found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), to prevent the regional all-white Democratic party's attempts to stifle African American voices and to ensure there was a party for all people that did not stand for any form of exploitation and discrimination. In the early 1960s, the Democratic party in the South was run by racists and bigots.
She and her partners traveled to the 1964 Democratic National Convention that summer to stand as the official delegation from the state of Mississippi. Hamer's televised testimony was interrupted because of a scheduled speech that President Lyndon B. Johnson gave to 30 governors in the White House East Room, but most major news networks broadcast her testimony later that evening to the nation, giving Hamer and the MFDP much exposure.
Senator Hubert Humphrey tried to propose a compromise on Johnson's behalf that would give the Freedom Democratic Party two seats. He said this would lead to a reformed convention in 1968. The MFDP rejected the compromise, with Hamer saying, "We didn't come all the way up here to compromise for no more than we'd gotten here. We didn't come all this way for no two seats when all of us is tired." The white delegation from Mississippi walked out of the convention at word of the compromise.
In 1968, the MFDP was finally seated after the Democratic Party adopted a clause that demanded equality of representation from their states' delegations. In 1972, Hamer was elected as a national party delegate.
Hamer traveled frequently throughout the South giving speeches on Civil Rights, voting rights, and other justice issues. She was a rural Black woman who spoke a rural Mississippi dialect which caused many people, including some Black leaders, to look down on her efforts. She didn’t have nice clothes and because of her injuries, there were physical impairments on her body. But when she did speak she evoked a level of emotional response from people, both white and Black, that couldn’t be denied.
One of Hamer's most famous speeches was at Williams Institutional Church in Harlem on December 20, 1964, along with Malcolm X. In the speech, "Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired", Hamer chronicled the violence and injustices she experienced while trying to register to vote. While highlighting the various acts of brutality she experienced in the South, she was careful to also tie in the fact that Blacks in the North and all over the country were suffering the same oppression. The audience was one-third white and gave Hamer a warm reception.
Hamer sought equality across all aspects of society. In Hamer's view, African Americans were not technically free if they were not afforded the same opportunities as whites, including those in the agricultural industry. She pioneered the Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC) in 1969, to redistribute economic power across groups and to solidify an economic standing among African Americans. In the same vein as the Freedom Farm Collective, Hamer partnered with the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) to establish an interracial and interregional support program called The Pig Project to provide protein for people who previously could not afford meat.
She also advocated for the rights of women, white and Black. In 1971, Hamer co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus. She emphasized the power women could hold by acting as a voting majority in the country regardless of race or ethnicity, saying "A white mother is no different from a black mother. The only thing is they haven't had as many problems. But we cry the same tears."
You could say that Fanny Lou Hamer worked herself to death. In 1972, she was hospitalized for “nervous exhaustion” and again in 1974 for a nervous breakdown. Hamer died of complications from hypertension and breast cancer on March 14, 1977, aged 59, at Taborian Hospital, Mound Bayou, Mississippi. She was buried in her hometown of Ruleville, Mississippi. Her tombstone is engraved with one of her famous quotes, "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired."
Over the years since her death, Hamer has received recognition and honor after honor for her work in the Civil Rights movement. Recently Cheryl L. West wrote the play Fannie: The Music and Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, which premiered at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2022.
Fanny Lou Hamer is remembered today as a fearless and powerful voice for the rights of people of color. She is an icon of the Civil Rights Movement.