Fannie Lou Hamer

Activist

1917-10-06 – 1977-03-14

Fannie Lou Hamer was an American civil rights organizer and voting rights activist.

Quotes by Fannie Lou Hamer

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.
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Every red stripe in that flag represents the black man's blood that has been shed.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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