Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden

Fannie Lou Hamer asked her friend Charles McLaurin not to let them bury her on a plantation, and she lies instead in a small park on Byron Street in Ruleville, beside her husband, Perry "Pap" Hamer. She was the youngest of twenty children of sharecroppers and had been picking cotton since she was six. In 1962 she tried to register to vote in Sunflower County, and the owner of the plantation where the Hamers lived and worked evicted them.

From there she became one of the movement's strongest voices: a field worker for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a survivor of a beating in the Winona jail in 1963, a founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and the speaker whose challenge to the all-white delegation at the 1964 Democratic convention reached the whole country. Later she started the Pig Bank and the Freedom Farm Cooperative so her neighbors could eat. Within three years of her death in 1977 her tombstone and plaque were stolen, and the park was not dedicated until 2002.

Today the garden holds her grave, a Mississippi Freedom Trail marker and a bronze statue unveiled in 2012. It stands five feet four inches tall, the height she named when she said she would fall that far forward for freedom. Her headstone carries her line about being sick and tired of being sick and tired. A small museum at 660 Floyce Street opens by appointment. Treat the garden as the cemetery it is.