Why civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer was ‘sick and tired of being sick and tired’
(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)
Marlee Bunch, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
(THE CONVERSATION) It wasn’t called voter suppression back then, but civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer knew exactly how white authorities in Mississippi felt about Black people voting in the 1960s.
At a rally with Malcolm X in Harlem, New York, on Dec. 20, 1964, Hamer described the brutal beatings she and other Black people endured in Mississippi in their fight for civil and voting rights.
A year earlier, in June 1963, Hamer and several of her friends attended a voter education training workshop in Charleston, South Carolina. On their way back to Mississippi, the bus driver called the police to remove Hamer and her colleagues from the whites-only section of the bus where they had been sitting.
When they stopped in Winona, Mississippi, local police were waiting and promptly arrested them for disorderly conduct.
While in jail, Hamer told the Harlem rally, “I began to hear the sounds of licks and I began to hear screams. I couldn’t see the people, but I could hear them. … They would call her awful names. And I would hear when she would hit the floor again.”
After a while, Hamer said, she saw a friend pass her cell.
“Her clothes had been ripped off from the...