Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes

American - Activist October 6, 1917 - March 14, 1977

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

Fannie Lou Hamer

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.

Fannie Lou Hamer

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.

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.

Fannie Lou Hamer

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?

Fannie Lou Hamer

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.

Fannie Lou Hamer

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

Fannie Lou Hamer

They - you know, when we walked in - when I walked in with the two white men that had carried me down - and they cursed me all the way down. They would ask me questions, and when I would try to answer, they would tell me to hush.

Fannie Lou Hamer