by Ida Harris
October 21, 2025
She died March 14, 1977 at age 59
On Oct. 6, 1917, Fannie Lou Hamer was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi. She died March 14, 1977, at age 59, after aggressively combating breast most cancers. Starkly totally different from 2025, the place superior expertise is used to efficiently deal with breast most cancers and the present five-year survival price for breast most cancers is 91%, in accordance with the American Most cancers Society, survival within the Seventies was bleak.
The speed of survival was an abysmal 55% to 68% for ladies identified with stage 2 breast most cancers and a mere 16% to 19% for superior metastatic most cancers. Hamer, a freedom fighter for Black rights, fought fiercely towards white supremacy and failing well being.
Hamer is heralded as one of many famed Mississippi activists popping out of Mississippi and the civil rights motion. The civil rights chief had a down-home, grassroots method to combating for equality within the Deep South and was very vocal about voting rights for African People. A lady of little means however nice willpower, Hamer mobilized lots of of Black Mississippians to register to vote at a time when Jim Crow had the area in a chokehold. Hamer was harassed, threatened, jailed, and severely assaulted in her try to struggle racism. She was even the goal of an assassination try on Sept. 10, 1962, after racists fired 16 pictures right into a room the place she slept. In 1963, she was arrested and brutally overwhelmed with batons by two Black prisoners on the behest of racist cops.
Even then, Hamer’s civil rights activism and management weren’t deterred. She went on to serve in a number of roles for civil rights and political organizations, together with the Scholar Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Nationwide Ladies’s Political Caucus, the Southern Christian Management Convention (SCLC), and the Freedom Democratic Celebration. Hamer appeared in Harlem with the honorable El-Hajj Malik El-Habazz (Malcolm X) on Dec. 20, 1964, the place she offered her notable speech “Sick and Uninterested in Being Sick Drained,” the place she gave a uncooked account of the racism, voter suppression, and police brutality she endured. Hamer acknowledged:
“A number of the issues I’ve received to say as we speak could also be just a little sickening. Folks have stated 12 months after 12 months, “These folks in Mississippi can’t suppose.” However after we might work ten and eleven hours a day for 3 awful {dollars} and couldn’t sleep we couldn’t do anything however suppose. And we’ve got been considering a very long time. And we’re bored with what’s happening. And we wish to see now, what this right here will end up for the 4th of January. We wish to see is democracy actual?”
Hamer returned to Mississippi after that highly effective speech and continued to struggle for civil rights. In 1968, she bought over 600 acres of land in Ruleville to begin the “Pig Financial institution,” a group farm and reasonably priced housing initiative for low-income households. Hamer even helped begin a Head Begin program and pressed on with activism by the mid-to late Seventies till her well being turned grave.
Hamer was not simply sick and uninterested in being sick and drained—she was actually sick and dying. She was identified with late-stage breast most cancers in 1976, which halted her activism. She died of breast most cancers problems shortly thereafter.
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