Entry to two Mississippi history museums is free Wednesday to mark the birthday of the late civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer, known for saying she was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
She was born Oct. 6, 1917, in Montgomery County and worked most of her life as a sharecropper. In 1962, Hamer joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and worked to register Black people to vote. Hamer was a founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the seating of the regular party’s all-white delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
Hamer died of cancer March 14, 1977.