On Oct. 6, 1917, Fannie Lou Hamer was born in Montgomery County, Mississippi. She died March 14, 1977, at age 59, after aggressively fighting breast cancer. Starkly different from 2025, where advanced technology is used to successfully treat breast cancer and the current five-year survival rate for breast cancer is 91%, according to the American Cancer Society, survival in the 1970s was bleak.
The rate of survival was an abysmal 55% to 68% for women diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer and a mere 16% to 19% for advanced metastatic cancer. Hamer, a freedom fighter for Black rights, fought fiercely against white supremacy and failing health.
Hamer is heralded as one of the famed Mississippi activists coming out of Mississippi and the civil rights movement. The civil rights leader had a down-home, grassroots approach to fighting for equality in the Deep South and was very vocal about voting rights for African Americans. A woman of little means but great determination, Hamer mobilized hundreds of Black Mississippians to register to vote at a time when Jim Crow had the region in a chokehold. Hamer was harassed, threatened, jailed, and severely assaulted in her attempt to fight racism. She was even the target of an assassination attempt on Sept. 10, 1962, after racists fired 16 shots into a room where she slept. In 1963, she was arrested and brutally beaten with batons by two Black prisoners at the behest of racist police officers.
Even then, Hamer’s civil rights activism and leadership were not deterred. She went on to serve in several roles for civil rights and political organizations, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the National Women’s Political Caucus, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Freedom Democratic Party. Hamer appeared in Harlem with the honorable El-Hajj Malik El-Habazz (Malcolm X) on Dec. 20, 1964, where she presented her notable speech “Sick and Tired of Being Sick Tired,” where she gave a raw account of the racism, voter suppression, and police brutality she endured. Hamer stated:
“Some of the things I’ve got to say today may be a little sickening. People have said year after year, “Those people in Mississippi can’t think.” But after we would work ten and eleven hours a day for three lousy dollars and couldn’t sleep we couldn’t do anything else but think. And we have been thinking a long time. And we are tired of what’s going on. And we want to see now, what this here will turn out for the 4th of January. We want to see is democracy real?”
Hamer returned to Mississippi after that powerful speech and continued to fight for civil rights. In 1968, she purchased over 600 acres of land in Ruleville to start the “Pig Bank,” a community farm and affordable housing initiative for low-income families. Hamer even helped start a Head Start program and pressed on with activism through the mid-to late 1970s until her health became grave.
Hamer was not just sick and tired of being sick and tired—she was literally sick and dying. She was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer in 1976, which halted her activism. She died of breast cancer complications shortly thereafter.
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