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… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share
Black people know what white people mean when they say “law and order”. — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share Image
We have been listening year after year to [white people] and what have we got? We are not even allowed to think… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share Image
People have got to get together and work together. I'm tired of the kind of oppression that white people have inflicted on… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share Image
Our foreparents were mostly brought from West Africa. We were brought to America and our foreparents were sold; white people bo ught… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share Image
When I got on that plane, it was loaded with white people going to Africa for the Peace Corps. I got there… — 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 people... The question for black people is not, when is the white man going to give us our rights, or when is he going to give us good education for our children, or when is he… — 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 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… — 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 Image
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 Image
... 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 Image
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 they want to tear the homes down and put a parking lot there. Where are those people going? Where will they go? And as soon as Negroes take to the street demonstrating, one hears people say,… — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share
We didnt come all this way for no two seats when all of us is tired, — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share Image
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 Image
I was in jail when Medgar Evers was murdered and nothing, I mean nothing has been done about that. — Fannie Lou Hamer Copy Share Image
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 Image