Shining City Audio, a John Meacham and C-13 original studio.

March 14, 1977, Fanny Lou Hamer dies in Mississippi.

I'm John Meacham and this is Reflections of History.

I'm John Meacham and I'm John Meacham and C-13 original studio.

She was a voice for the ages.

Fanny Lou Hamer's testimony before officials of the Democratic Party and Atlantic City in the summer of 1964

detailed the harrowing struggle of black Americans to exercise the most fundamental of liberties, the right to vote.

And on this date in 1977 in Ruleville, Mississippi, Ms. Hamer died at the age of 60.

Eulogized by Andrew Young, then the ambassador to the United Nations, she was buried in the delta after a funeral that was an essence of pageant of the civil rights movement.

Andy Young, John Lewis, Vernon Jordan, Stokeley Carmichael, and H.Rat Brown were among the mourners.

At one point, Ambassador Young led the congregation in song.

This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine. Let it shine. Let it shine. Let it shine.

In Harlem in the fall of 1964, Ms. Hamer spoke at an event with Malcolm X. She said this.

You can always hear this long sob story. You know it takes time. For 300 years, we've given them time.

And I've been tired so long now, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired, and we want to change.

We want to change in this society in America because you see, we can no longer ignore the facts and getting our children to sing,

oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light, what so proudly we hailed.

What do we have to hail here? The truth is the only thing going to free us. And you know this whole society is sick.

And to prove just how sick it was when we were in Atlantic City challenging the national convention, when I was testifying before the credentials committee,

I was cut off because they hate to see what they had been knowing all the time. And that's the truth.

Yes, a lot of people will roll their eyes at me today, but I'm going to tell you just like it is.

There's so much hypocrisy in this society, and if we want America to be a free society, we have to stop telling lies. That's all.

...