
Fannie Lou Hamer's famous declaration — "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired" — was not a statement of personal burnout. It was a structural indictment. Hamer, a sharecropper from Ruleville, Mississippi, was forcibly sterilized without her knowledge or consent in 1961 — a practice so common among Black women in the South that it was called a "Mississippi appendectomy."
She was beaten nearly to death in a Winona, Mississippi jail in 1963 for attempting to register to vote. Her exhaustion …

















