The words on Fannie Lou Hamer’s headstone in Ruleville, Mississippi, read “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Posters, mugs and protest signs usually shorten it to “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Both versions trace back to something she really said, out loud, to a packed church in New York City.
The clearest recorded source is a speech Hamer gave in Harlem on December 20, 1964, at Williams Institutional CME Church, on the same bill as Malcolm X. The full sentence is longer than the slogan, and it lands harder.
The exact words
Hamer had been talking about being told, again and again, that change takes time. Then she said:
“For three hundred years, we’ve given them time. And I’ve been tired so long, now I am sick and tired of being sick and tired, and we want a change.”
That wording comes from the transcript published in “The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is”, edited by Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck, and reproduced online by the Civil Rights Movement Archive, a site run by movement veterans. Read in context, the line is not a sigh. It is the hinge of the speech: the moment she stops describing what happened to her and starts demanding something.
So the famous quote is genuine. What the slogan drops is the setup (“I’ve been tired so long”) and the payoff (“and we want a change”). The contraction “I’m” is a later smoothing; the transcript has “I am,” which is also what was carved on her grave.
Who she was
Hamer was born in 1917, the youngest of 20 children in a sharecropping family, and picked cotton from the age of six. In August 1962 she rode a bus with 17 others to the courthouse in Indianola to try to register to vote. She was thrown off the plantation where she had worked for 18 years that same night. In June 1963 she was beaten in a jail cell in Winona, Mississippi, after a voter workshop, injuries she carried for the rest of her life.
By 1964 she was a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Her televised testimony at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City that August, with its question “Is this America?”, made her a national figure.
Why she was in Harlem
The December rally was organized to back the Freedom Democrats’ challenge to Mississippi’s five congressmen, who had been elected while most Black residents of the state could not vote. Hamer told the crowd the challenge would come to a head on January 4, 1965, and asked Harlem for support “morally, politically, and financially, too.”
She also refused to let Northerners feel comfortable. “You’re not free here in Harlem,” she said, adding that some of the big cities she had visited were “a Mississippi in disguise.”
A timeline of the phrase
Here is the short timeline of how one sentence became her epitaph:
- June 1964: A magazine profile of Hamer runs under the headline “Tired of Being Sick and Tired,” according to the source list kept by the SNCC Digital Gateway. The idea was already attached to her before the Harlem speech.
- December 20, 1964: She says the full sentence in Harlem, the version preserved in the published transcript.
- 1965: The line appears in print in the journal Freedomways, according to the sourced entries on Wikiquote.
- Later: Historian Howard Zinn, in A People’s History of the United States, renders it in dialect as “I’m sick an’ tired o’ bein’ sick an’ tired!” and recalls her rousing mass meetings with it.
- March 1977: Hamer dies at 59 in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. The sentence is engraved on her tombstone in Ruleville.
Where to read it yourself
The Harlem speech is short enough to read in ten minutes, and it is worth reading whole: it moves from the literacy test she was handed in Indianola to the jail in Winona to the convention, and only then to the line everyone knows. The Brooks and Houck collection gathers it with her other speeches, and the SNCC Digital Gateway, built by the SNCC Legacy Project with Duke University, lists the interviews and papers where her voice survives.
In 2025 Hamer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, nearly half a century after her death. The Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden in Ruleville, where her grave carries the line, is the place to see the words in stone.
Further reading
Image: Steve Bott, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
