Title: Voices of the Delta: The Story of Fannie Lou Hamer Mississippi, 1917–1977. The Delta was a place of hard earth and harder lives. Born in 1917, the youngest of 20 children, Fannie Lou Hamer knew what hunger sounded like—the hollow growl of a stomach that never seemed full. By six, she picked cotton. By thirteen, she could drag 200 pounds in a day for barely a dollar. Poverty clung to her like the Delta dust. And still, she endured. In 1962, at age 44, Fannie Lou attended a meeting about voting rights. She had never imagined she could have a voice in her own country. But when SNCC workers asked, “Who wants to register?” she raised her calloused hand. That single gesture changed everything. For daring to register, she was fired from the plantation she had called home for decades. Then came the jailhouse beating—a brutality so savage she would limp for life. But they couldn’t break her voice. It was steel wrapped in song. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, she faced a wall of white men and told America the truth about Mississippi: the terror, the beatings, the murders. > “All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens.” They tried to silence her. They failed. Her testimony made headlines. She co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, ran for Congress, and created community farms so Black families could feed themselves when white stores cut off credit. “Freedom,” she said, “is more than the ballot. It’s a full belly, a safe home, and the power to live without fear.” When she passed away in 1977, thousands came to honor her in the Mississippi soil she fought to free. Her tombstone carries the words that captured her spirit and the fight of a generation: “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.” But Fannie Lou Hamer was more than those words. She was the voice of the poor, the backbone of the movement, and the proof that a single, unshakable voice can change a nation. #blacklifematters #historical #blackwomen