Who is Fannie Lou Hamer
Fannie Lou Hamer was an African American civil rights activist who led voting drives and co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
Born into a Mississippi sharecropping family, Fannie Lou Hamer spent much of her early life in the cotton fields. She became involved with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in 1962, through which she led voting drives and relief efforts. In 1964, she co-founded and ran for Congress as a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, drawing national attention to their cause at that year’s Democratic Convention. Hamer continued her activism through declining health, until her death in 1977.
Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes
1. One day, I know the struggle will change. There’s got to be a change – not only for Mississippi, not only for the people in the United States, but people all over the world.
2. White Americans today don’t know what in the world to do because when they put us behind them, that’s where they made their mistake… they put us behind them, and we watched every move they made.
3. It was the 31st of August in 1962 that eighteen of us traveled twenty-six miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to become first-class citizens. We was met in Indianola by policemen, Highway Patrolmen, and they only allowed two of us in to take the literacy test at the time.
4. I know lots of people in Mississippi who have lost their jobs trying to register to vote.
5. Why should I leave Ruleville, and why should I leave Mississippi? I go to the big city, and with the kind of education they give us in Mississippi, I got problems. I’d wind up in a soup line there.
6. I had to leave, and my husband was forced to stay on this plantation until after the harvest season was over. And then the man that we had worked for, he’d taken the car, and the most of the few things we had had been stolen.
7. I feel sorry for anybody that could let hate wrap them up. Ain’t no such thing as I can hate anybody and hope to see God’s face.
8. People have got to get together and work together. I’m tired of the kind of oppression that white people have inflicted on us and are still trying to inflict.
9. I’m showing the people that a Negro can run for office.
10. White Americans today don’t know what in the world to do because when they put us behind them, that’s where they made their mistake… they put us behind them, and we watched every move they made.
11. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in America?
12. It was the 31st of August in 1962 that eighteen of us traveled twenty-six miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to become first-class citizens. We was met in Indianola by policemen, Highway Patrolmen, and they only allowed two of us in to take the literacy test at the time.
13. What I really feel is necessary is that the black people in this country wil have to upset this apple cart. We can no longer ignore the fact that America is not the… land of the free and the home of the brave.
14. They talked about how it was our rights as human beings to register and vote. I never knew we could vote before. Nobody ever told us.
15. I’d been in jail, and I’d been beat. I had been to a voter registration workshop, you know, to – they were just training and teaching us how to register, to pass the literacy test.
16. If I fall, I’ll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom. I’m not backing off.
17. We hadn’t heard anything about registering to vote because when you see this flat land in here, when the people would get out of the fields, if they had a radio, they’d be too tired to play it. So we didn’t know what was going on in the rest of the state, even, much less in other places.
18. What I really feel is necessary is that the black people in this country wil have to upset this apple cart. We can no longer ignore the fact that America is not the… land of the free and the home of the brave.
19. If the white man gives you anything – just remember when he gets ready he will take it right back. We have to take for ourselves.
20. With the people, for the people, by the people. I crack up when I hear it; I say, with the handful, for the handful, by the handful, cause that’s what really happens.
