Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes

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.

On the 10th of September 1962, sixteen bullets was fired into the home of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Tucker for me.

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.

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.

Never to forget where we came from and always praise the bridges that carried us over.

Sometimes it seem like to tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I’ll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom. I’m not backing off.

I was forced away from the plantation because I wouldn’t go back and withdraw, you know, my literacy test after I had tried to take it. I wouldn’t go back.

I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.

You don’t have to like everybody, but you have to love everybody.

I know lots of people in Mississippi who have lost their jobs trying to register to vote.

Christianity is being concerned about [others], not building a million-dollar church while people are starving right around the corner. Christ was a revolutionary person, out there where it was happening. That’s what God is all about, and that’s where I get my strength.

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.

If I am truly free, who can tell me how much of my freedom I can have today?

It’s time for America to get right.

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.

I’m showing the people that a Negro can run for office.

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.