Fannie Lou Hamer was a sharecropper in Mississippi. In 1962, she went to register to vote, and in her own account, the man who owned the plantation was angry that she had gone down to try.
On June 9, 1963, she was arrested in Winona, Mississippi, during a voter registration event, and she was beaten in custody.
On August 22, 1964, she testified before the Credentials Committee at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Two sentences from that testimony have outlived almost everything else said at any convention.
“All my life I’ve been sick and tired,” she said. “Now I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Then the question she left on the record:
“Is this America, the land of the free and the 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?”
That same year she ran for Congress against the incumbent, Jamie Whitten. In 1965, one year after the convention, the Voting Rights Act was signed into law.
She was not a lawyer and held no office. She had no title the room was obliged to respect. She had an account of what trying to register had cost her, and she refused to soften it.
More than 60 years later, Hamer’s fight still matters. With the 2026 midterms approaching, her story is a reminder that voting rights can never be treated as automatic. Black women fought, suffered and spoke up to make sure their voices counted. The least we can do is use them.
