My mother got down sick in 53 and she lived with me, an invalid, until she passed away in 1961. And during… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share Image
My parents tried so hard to do what they could to keep us in school, but school didn't last but four months… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share Image
I went almost naked to see that my mother was kept decent and treated as a human being for the first time… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share Image
I always said if I lived to get grown and had a chance, I was going to try to get something for… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share Image
[My mother] tried so hard to make life easy for us. Those are the things that forced me to try to do… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share Image
My mother was a great woman. To look at her from the suffering she had gone through to bring us up -… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share Image
My parents would make huge crops of sometimes 55 to 60 bales of cotton. Being from a big family where there were… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share Image
[My father] did get enough money to buy mules. We didn't have tractors, but he bought mules, wagons, cultivators and some farming… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share Image
We worked all the time, just worked and then we would be hungry and my mother was clearing up a new ground… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share Image
I have just as much right to stay in America - in fact, the black people have contributed more to America than… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share Image
We have to build our own power. We have to win every single political office we can, where we have a majority of black… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share
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… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share
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… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share
I met one child there eleven years old, speaking three languages [in Guinea]. He could speak English, French and Malinke. Speaking my language actually… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share
... 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… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share
I saw in Chicago, on the street where I was visiting my sister-in-law, this "Urban Renewal" and it means one thing: "Negro removal." But… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share
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,… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share
I was in jail when Medgar Evers was murdered and nothing, I mean nothing has been done about that. — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share
What I really feel is necessary is that the black people in this country wil have to upset this apple cart. We can no… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share
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… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share
With the people, for the people, by the people. I crack up when I hear it; I say, with the handful, for the handful,… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share