82 Quotes by Fannie Lou Hamer
Fannie Lou Hamer, a towering figure in the American Civil Rights Movement, rose from humble beginnings to become an indomitable voice for racial equality and justice. Born into the hardship of Mississippi sharecropping, Hamer's life took a radical turn when she attended a civil rights meeting in 1962. Despite facing severe police brutality and life-threatening adversity, Hamer's determination remained unshaken. Her resounding testimony at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, where she spoke of the systematic oppression and violence against Black citizens, thrust her onto the national stage. Her activism, grounded in her belief that "nobody's free until everybody's free," centered on voting rights for African Americans and economic empowerment. Fannie Lou Hamer's legacy endures as a symbol of unyielding courage and unwavering commitment to justice, a testament to the power of one person's voice to ignite widespread change.
Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes
I'm showing the people that a Negro can run for office. (Meaning)
It is time for America to get right. (Quote Meaning)
I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. (Meaning)
You can pray until you faint, but unless you get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap.
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.
When I liberate myself, I liberate others. If you don't speak out ain't nobody going to speak out for you.
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.
Never to forget where we came from and always praise the bridges that carried us over. (Quote Meaning)
Whether you have a Ph.D., or no D, we're in this bag together. And whether you're from Morehouse or Nohouse, we're still in this bag together. Not to fight to try to liberate ourselves from the men - this is another trick to get us fighting among ourselves - but to work together with the black man, then we will have a better chance to just act as human beings, and to be treated as human beings in our sick society.
Nobody's free until everybody's free. (Meaning)
Black people know what white people mean when they say “law and order”.
We have to build our own power. We have to win every single political office we can, where we have a majority of black people. (Quote Meaning)
I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. (Meaning)
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.
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.
I guess if I'd had any sense, I'd have been a little scared [to register to vote] - but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.
Righteousness exalts a nation. Hate just makes people miserable.
It's time for America to get right.
There is one thing you have got to learn about our movement. Three people are better than no people.
If I am truly free, who can tell me how much of my freedom I can have today?
You don't have to like everybody, but you have to love everybody.
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.
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.
Hate won't only destroy us. (Quote Meaning)
When I liberate others, I liberate myself. (Meaning)
This white man who is saying "it takes time." For three hundred and more years they have had "time," and now it is time for them to listen.
If this is a Great Society, I'd hate to see a bad one.
Some things I found out in the National Convention I wasn't too glad I did find out. But we will work hard, and it was important to actually really bring this out to the open, the things I will say some people knew about and some people didn't; this stuff that has been kept under the cover for so many years. Actually, the world and America is upset and the only way to bring about a change is to upset it more.
Just because people are fat, it doesn't mean they are well fed. The cheapest foods are the fattening ones, not the most nourishing.
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.
A black woman's body was never hers alone.
We did nott come all this way for no two seats when all of us is tired.
It is only when we speak what is right that we stand a chance at night of being blown to bits in our homes. Can we call this a free country, when I am afraid to go to sleep in my own home in Mississippi?... I might not live two hours after I get back home, but I want to be a part of setting the Negro free in Mississippi.
To support whatever is right, and to bring in justice where we've had so much injustice.
America that is divided against itself cannot stand, and we cannot say we have all of this unity they say we have when black people are being discriminated against in every city in America I have visited.
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.
If I fall, I will fall five-feet four-inches forward in the fight for freedom.
We have been listening year after year to [white people] and what have we got? We are not even allowed to think for ourselves. "I know what is best for you," but they don't know what is best for us! It is time now to let them know what they owe us, and they owe us a great deal.
Actually, the world and America is upset and the only way to bring about a change is to upset it more.
[On her Freedom Farm Cooperative:] If you give a hungry man food, he will eat it. [But] if you give him land, he will grow his own food.
It is our right to stay here and we will stay and stand up for what belongs to us as American citizens, because they can't say that we haven't had patience.
We didn't come all the way up here to compromise for no more than we’d gotten here. We didn't come all this way for no two seats, 'cause all of us is tired.
I do remember, one time, a man came to me after the students began to work in Mississippi and he said the white people were getting tired and they were getting tense and anything might happen. Well, I asked him "how long he thinks we had been getting tired"? I have been tired for 46 years and my parents was tired before me and their parents were tired, and I have always wanted to do something that would help some of the things I would see going on among Negroes that I didn't like and I don't like now.
I remember, and I will never forget, one day - I was six years old and I was playing beside the road and this plantation owner drove up to me and stopped and asked me "could I pick some cotton." I told him I didn't know and he said, "Yes, you can. I will give you things that you want from the commissary store," and he named a huge list that he called off. I picked the 30 pounds of cotton that week, but I found out what actually happened was he was trapping me into beginning the work I was to keep doing and I never did get out of his debt again.
[My father] did get enough money to buy mules. We didn't have tractors, but he bought mules, wagons, cultivators and some farming equipment. As soon as he bought that and decided to rent some land, because it was always better if you rent the land, but as soon as he got the mules and wagons and everything, somebody went to our trough - a white man who didn't live very far from us - and he fed the mules Paris Green, put it in their food and it killed the mules and our cows.
I always said if I lived to get grown and had a chance, I was going to try to get something for my mother and I was going to do something for the black man of the South if it would cost my life; I was determined to see that things were changed.
My mother was a great woman. To look at her from the suffering she had gone through to bring us up - 20 children: 6 girls and 14 boys, but still she taught us to be decent and to respect ourselves, and that is one of the things that has kept me going, even after she passed.
It would bring tears in your eyes to make you think of all those years, the type of brain-washing that this man will use in America to keep us separated from our own people.
All of this is on account we want to register [sic], to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. 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?
Now many things are beginning to come out and it was truly a reality to me when I went to Africa, to Guinea. The little things that had been taught to me about the African people, that they were "heathens," "savages," and they were just downright stupid people. But when I got to Guinea, we were greeted by the Government of Guinea, which is Black People - and we stayed at a place that was the government building, because we were the guests of the Government.
The only thing I really feel is necessary is that the black people, not only in Mississippi, will have to actually upset this applecart. What I mean by that is, so many things are under the cover that will have to be swept out and shown to this whole world, not just to America. This thing they say of "the land of the free and the home of the brave" is all on paper.
I am determined to get every Negro in the state of Mississippi registered.
I used to question this for years - what did our kids actually fight for? They would go in the service and go through all of that and come right out to be drowned in a river in Mississippi. I found this hypocrisy is all over America.
Actually since the Convention I have gotten so many letters that I have tried to answer but every letter said they thought this decision, not to accept the compromise, was so important. There wasn't one letter I have gotten so far that said we should have accepted the compromise - not one.
In fact, one day I was going to Jackson and I saw a huge sign that U.S. Senator John Stennis was speaking that night for the White Citizens Council in Yazoo City and they also have a State Charter that they may set up for "private schools." It is no secret.
You know what really made me sick? I was in Washington, D.C. at another time reading in a paper where the U.S. gives Byron de la Beckwith - the man who is charged with murdering Medgar Evers - they were giving him so much money for some land and I ask "Is this America?" We can no longer ignore the fact that America is NOT the "land of the free and the home of the brave."
No. What would I look like fighting for equality with the white man? I don't want to go down that low. I want the true democracy that'll raise me and that white man up raise America up.
My parents would make huge crops of sometimes 55 to 60 bales of cotton. Being from a big family where there were 20 children, it wasn't too hard to pick that much cotton. But my father, year after year, didn't get too much money and I remember he just kept going.
Actually, some of the things I experienced as a child still linger on; what the white man has done to the black people in the south!
The methods used to take human lives, such as abortion, the pill, the ring, etc., amounts to genocide. I believe that legal abortion is legal murder.
You know the Scripture says "be not deceived for God is not mocked; whatsoever a man sow that shall he also reap." And one day, I don't know how they're going to get it, but they're going to get some of it back. They are scared to death and are more afraid now than we are.
My parents tried so hard to do what they could to keep us in school, but school didn't last but four months out of the year and most of the time we didn't have clothes to wear.
You can tell this by the program the federal government had to train 2,400 tractor drivers. They would have trained Negro and white together, but this man, Congressman Jamie Whitten, voted against it and everything that was decent. So, we've got to have somebody in Washington who is concerned about the people of Mississippi.
We are here to work side-by-side with this "black" man in trying to bring liberation to all our people!
My mother got down sick in 53 and she lived with me, an invalid, until she passed away in 1961. And during the time she was staying with me sometime I would be worked so hard I couldn't sleep at night.
I don't know about the press, but I know in the town where I live everybody was aware that I was in Africa, because I remember after I got back some of the people told me that Mayor Dura of our town said he just wished they would boil me in tar.
I was in jail when Medgar Evers was murdered and nothing, I mean nothing has been done about that.
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.
You know I'm not hung up on this liberating myself from the "black" man - I'm not going to try that thing.
I was treated much better in Africa than I was treated in America. And you see, often I get letters like this: "Go back to Africa."
After we testified before the Credentials Committee in Atlantic City, their Mississippi representative testified also. He said I got 600 votes but when they made the count in Mississippi, I was told I had 388 votes. So actually it is no telling how many votes I actually got.
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.
We serve God by serving our fellow man. (Quote Meaning)
These people in Mississippi State, they are not "down"; all they need is a chance. And I am determined to give my part not for what the Movement can do for me, but what I can do for the Movement to bring about a change in the State of Mississippi.
A white man killed the mules and our cows that knocked us right back down. And things got so tough then I began to wish I was white.
I think there will be great leaders emerging from the State of Mississippi. The people that have the experience to know and the people not interested in letting somebody pat you on the back and tell us "I think it is right." And it is very important for us not to accept a compromise and after I got back to Mississippi, people there said it was the most important step that had been taken.
That's why I believe in Christianity because the Scriptures said: "The things that have been done in the dark will be known on the house tops."
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.
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.
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.
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.
I believe in Christianity because the Scriptures said: "The things that have been done in the dark will be known on the house tops."
― Fannie Lou Hamer Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
