By Meredith W. | December 20, 2008 at 7:00 AM
Fannie Lou Hamer was one of twenty (!) children born to a family of sharecroppers. A sharecropper is a tenant farmer given credit for seed, tools, living quarters, and food, who works the land, and receives a share of the value of the crop. Hamer grew up picking cotton and cutting corn and attended school through the sixth grade. She married a fellow sharecropper and the two scratched out a living doing hard, menial work on a plantation in Mississippi. She also began to attend civil rights meetings. Before long, Fannie Lou was a leader in the civil rights movement, known for rallying others by singing songs like, “Go Tell it on the Mountain.”
During this time, African-Americans were deterred from voting in the South. When Hamer went to register to vote, she was asked to interpret the state's constitution. Huh? Could any of us do that on the spot like that? NOPE. So, naturally, Hamer flunked and was not allowed to register to vote. On the return trip home, the bus she was riding was stopped for being "the wrong color." She and the others were jailed and later released. This sort of harassment was a typical experience for blacks in the South but Fannie Lou didn’t stop trying to improve the lives of African-Americans.
In 1969, she founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative in which 5,000 people were able to grow their own food and own 680 acres of land. She liked to say, "If you give a hungry man food, he will eat it. If you give him land, he will grow his own food." That's precisely what more than five thousand people did on the Freedom Farm. This was her most cherished project. How great to be able to give people land on which they can grow their very own food….THAT is freedom!
During the last years of her life, she worked on issues such as school desegregation, child day-care, and low-income housing. She lectured extensively, and was known for a signature line she often used, "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired." Fannie Lou changed our idea of freedom, and changed the world by being herself.
