​Fannie Lou Hamer - Myron L Stokes

She was the youngest of twenty.
Polio strangled her sinew but not her will.
By thirteen, she could pick 300-pounds of cotton.
Forced sterilization rendered her wombless,
gutting her dream of birthing her own soldiers
to battle Mississippi’s racist forces.
 
The Civil Rights Movement was her North Star.
Conviction burned in her veins.
She was strong as a rose-cut diamond,
endured misfortune’s rugged tides,
clawed beyond dangers seen and unseen,
climbed through toils and snares
to make her voice known.
 
Fannie sang in jailhouse cells,
savagely beaten, bloodied, and broken.
When hope grew dim, withheld its cheerful beam,
she sang harder, louder, lifted her choir-filled voice
above burning crosses, white robes,
and billy-club beatings.
 
Waves of tyranny rose above her,
threatened to annihilate, but Fannie kept singing,
girded by her vision for justice,
trudging forward in the muck and mire of disenfranchisement,
with her tell-it-like-it-is, Mississippified authenticity.
 
She was a sledgehammer surrounded
by concrete walls solidified with hate.
She struck them over and over,
unwearied, undaunted, her chiseled, crystallized purpose
held high in her Black Woman’s Fist!
With each courageous blow, her determined eyes,
like rubies polished worn to perfection, told America,
“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired!”