We don't often associate gratitude with being sick and tired. And yet bone-weary exhaustion was exactly what inspired Fannie Lou Hamer to risk her life and well-being to help bring an end to sharecropping and segregation. In later years her unflagging efforts grew beyond civil rights as she tackled grave problems of poverty and war. "Sometimes it seems to tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed," she admitted. "But if I fall, I’ll fall five-feet four-inches forward in the fight for freedom." - Patricia Carlson

“I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Fannie Lou Hamer was born the daughter of sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, a poor black woman in the poorest region of America. And yet she rose up from obscurity to challenge the mighty rulers of her day, a towering prophet whose eloquence and courage helped guide and inspire the struggle for freedom.

Until 1962 her life was little different from other poor black women in rural Mississippi. One of twenty children in her family, she was educated to the fourth grade and, like her parents before her, fell into the life of sharecropping. This system allowed poor farmers to work a piece of the plantation owner's land in exchange for payment of a share of their crop. In practice, it was a system of debt slavery that combined with segregation and brute force to keep the black population poor and powerless. Looking back on her own twenty years of sharecropping, Hamer later said, "Sometimes I be working in the fields and I get so tired, I say to the people picking cotton with us, 'Hard as we have to work for nothing, there must be some way we can change this.'"

The way opened up for Hamer when she attended a civil rights rally in 1962 and heard a preacher issue a call for blacks to register to vote. At the age of forty-five Hamer answered the call, though it meant overcoming numerous threats and obstacles and resulted in the eviction of her family from their plantation home. Hamer took this as a sign to commit herself to full-time work for the freedom movement, serving as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and quickly rising to a position of leadership.

For a black person in 1963 to challenge the system of segregation in Mississippi was literally to court death. Hamer, like other activists in the movement faced this reality on a daily basis. In the summer of 1963 she was part of a group arrested in Charleston, South Carolina, after they illegally entered the side of a bus terminal reserved for whites. While in jail she was savagely beaten, emerging with a damaged kidney and her eyesight permanently impaired.

In 1964 Hamer led a "Freedom Delegation" from Mississippi to the National Convention of the Democratic Party in Atlantic City. There they tried unsuccessfully to challenge the credentials of the official white delegation. President Lyndon Johnson would tolerate no such embarrassment to the party bosses of the South, and the Freedom Delegation was evicted. But Hamer touched the conscience of the nation with her eloquent account of the oppression of blacks in the segregated South and their nonviolent struggle to affirm their dignity and their rights.

“Christ was a revolutionary person. That's what God is all about, and that's where I get my strength.”

In later years, Hamer's concerns grew beyond civil rights to include early opposition to the Vietnam War and efforts to forge a coalition among all poor and working people in America -- the Poor People's Campaign that Martin Luther King left uncompleted. In all these endeavors, Hamer was sustained by her deep biblical faith in the God of the oppressed. "We have to realize," she once observed, "just how grave the problem is in the United States today, and I think the sixth chapter of Ephesians, the eleventh and twelfth verses help us to know...what it is we are up against. It says, 'Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.' This is what I think about when I think of my own work in the fight for freedom."

In the nonviolent freedom struggle of the 1960s ordinary people -- men, women, and children -- became saints and prophets. Inspired by a vision of justice and freedom, sustained by faith, they found the struggle to confront their fears and stand up to dogs, fire hoses, clubs, and bombs. In the ranks of this extraordinary movement Hamer was a rock who did as much as anyone of her time to redeem the promise of the gospel and the ideals of America. She said, "Christianity is being concerned about your fellow man, not building a million-dollar church while people are starving right around the corner. Christ was a revolutionary person. That's what God is all about, and that's where I get my strength."

Hamer died of breast cancer on March 14, 1977.

Additional Resources
See: Danny Collum et al., "Fannie Lou Hamer: Prophet of Freedom," Sojourners (December 1982).

Also see An Oral History with Fannie Lou Hamer.