HARLINGEN — Fannie Lou Hamer was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
She stated that mantra regularly as she continued a pitched battle for voting rights.
Hamer joined the civil rights movement in 1962 when she traveled with several other African-Americans to Indianola, Mississippi, to register to vote.
They met heated opposition from law enforcement and Hamer was fired from her job. The termina-tion made her even more determined to fight for voting rights. The New York Times quoted her as saying, “They kicked me off the plantation, they set me free. It’s the best thing that could happen. Now I can work for my people.”
And so she did. She worked for a number of organizations, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which fought racial injustice in the South, says the www.biography.com/people/fannie-lou-hamer.
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