Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes

I Met One Child There Eleven Years Old, Speaking Three Languages [in Guinea]. He Could Speak English, French And Malinke. Speaking My Language Actually Better Than I Could. And This Hypocrisy - They Tell Us Here In America [ That Black People Can't Be Intelligent].

This Problem Is Not Only In Mississippi. During The Time I Was In The Convention In Atlantic City, I Didn't Get Any Threats From Mississippi. The Threatening Letters Were From Philadelphia, Chicago And Other Big Cities.

I Would Like To Talk About Some Of The Things That Happened That Made Me Know That There Was Something Wrong In The South From A Child.

You Know I'm Not Hung Up On This Liberating Myself From The "black" Man - I'm Not Going To Try That Thing.

The Mississippi Is Not The Only River. There's The Tallahatchie And The Big Black. People Have Been Put In The River Year After Year, These Things Been Happening.

I Went Almost Naked To See That My Mother Was Kept Decent And Treated As A Human Being For The First Time In All Of Her Life.

The Only Thing We Took Out Was The Constitution Of The State Of Mississippi And The Interpretation Of The Constitution. We Had 63,000 People Registered On The Freedom Registration Form. And We Tried From Every Level To Go Into The Regular Democratic Party Medium. We Tried From The Precinct Level. The 16th Of June When They Were Holding Precinct Meetings All Across The State, I Was There And There Was Eight Of Us There To Attend The Meeting, And They Had The Door Locked At 10 O'clock In The Morning. This Is What's Happening In The State Of Mississippi.

The People At Home Will Work Hard And Actually All Of Them Think It Was Important That We Hade The Decision That We Did Make Not To Compromise; Because We Didn't Have Anything To Compromise For.

In Coming To Atlantic City, We Believed Strongly That We Were Right. In Fact, It Was Just Right For Us To Come To Challenge The Seating Of The Regular Democratic Party From Mississippi. But We Didn't Think When We Got There That We Would Meet People, That Actually The Other Leaders Of The Movement Would Differ With What We Felt Was Right.

I See So Many Ways America Uses To Rob Negroes And It Is Sinful And America Can't Keep Holding On, And Doing These Things.

When I Got On That Plane, It Was Loaded With White People Going To Africa For The Peace Corps. I Got There And Met A Lot Of Them, And Actually They Had More Peace There In Guinea Than I Have Here. I Talked To Some Of Them. I Told Them Before They Would Be Able To Clean Up Somebody Else's House You Would Have To Clean Up Yours; Before They Can Tell Somebody Else How To Run Their Country, Why Don't They Do Something Here.

... Some Of My People Could Have Been Left [in Africa] And Are Living There. And I Can't Understand Them And They Don't Know Me And I Don't Know Them Because All We Had Was Taken Away From Us. And I Became Kind Of Angry; I Felt The Anger Of Why This Had To Happen To Us. We Were So Stripped And Robbed Of Our Background, We Wind Up With Nothing.